The Mythcreant Podcast

Sometimes you immediately fall in love with a character and want them to succeed. Other times, you want nothing more than to fire that character into a passing sun. It’s the second category we’re talking about today. What is it that makes characters unlikable, and how do you fix it? Assuming you want to fix it, of course. If not, then just do the opposite of everything we talk about in today’s episode. Show Notes Save That Cat Do Characters Need to Be Likable?  Eleanor Shellstrop  Quentin Coldwater  Wednesday  Lisa Frankenstein Outfits Candy and Spinach  Understanding Character Karma Kvothe  The Sleepless The Bone Shard Daughter  House on the Cerulean Sea Leap Year Neelix  The Last Halloween  Skin of the Sea John Wick The Ghoul/Cooper Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song] This is a Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is: Bunny: Bunny! Chris: and… Oren: Oren!  Chris: You know, you two are both such pathetic losers who are so uncool. I’m so much better than you. But hey look, I just saved a cat, so you have to love me now. Even though I said that to you. Oren: Chris, you didn’t have to save that cat. You were already a cool, truth-talking rebel [laughter from Chris], who doesn’t let society censor what you have to say. Bunny: Now that I see you holding that cat, I realize I disliked you and whined over here in the corner. It’s just because you’re just so cool and nice.  Chris: Obviously, you were jealous of me. Bunny: I was jealous. It’s true.  Chris: Yeah. Everybody who hates me is really jealous. That’s how this works.  Oren: Yeah, that’s just how it works. Bunny: I’m jealous and therefore weak, and everything you said was correct. Now, can I please touch the cat?  Chris: Okay, but only because I’m very gracious.  Bunny: Oh! Chris: But also this cat likes me better ’cause I’m the coolest. Bunny: [laughter] That’s only fair.  Oren: Wow. We just love this character.  Bunny: It has great taste, that cat. Oren: This character is just so great. Chris: Uh huh, am I not the most likable character?  Bunny: We all bow down to your supreme likability in the face of our whining, quivering inferiority. We’ve both got, like, unflattering haircuts, and we’re constantly kind of sweaty in a really sullen way.  Oren: Yeah, there’s a lot of descriptions of “moist” when people talk about us…? Bunny: Yeah, we’re like, mopping our forehead. Got damp handkerchiefs. Everyone’s like, oh, Chris is the only normal one in this podcast.  Chris: Yeah. So yeah, this time we’re talking about what makes protagonists unlikable, ’cause there are a lot of things that can get in the way and make people hate a character that generally the storyteller does not intend. Just to clarify, I do think, again, defining what we mean when we say “likable” can be important. This is a pretty contentious topic− Oren: Little bit. Chris: And to be clear, we are not talking about whether or not you would like somebody if you met them in real life. We are not talking about whether somebody is moral or immoral, although that does factor in. We’re specifically talking about whether this is a character that readers enjoy reading about. That’s it. That’s pretty self-evident, ’cause that kind of aligns with the storyteller’s goals, right? You have an immoral character where readers enjoy reading about them, enjoy having that person as a protagonist, then you don’t have a likability problem.  Oren: And it’s one of those things where it’s true that it isn’t a question of would you like them if you met them on the street? But there is more… overlap to that then is sometimes convenient for the way people want to talk about this question. Things that you can do that would make a character likable that wouldn’t work on a real person, but at the same time, a lot of the things that would make you dislike a person in real life will also apply to characters. Bunny: It is just technically true that you will be spending a lot of time with this character. You’re not going to be hanging out with them at a coffee shop per se, but you are gonna be with them a lot. So, I think it’s true that at some level you want to be… not actively turned off by them.  Chris: I think the biggest difference is that us storytellers, we have our tricks because whether something has emotional impact really matters. So, if you meet somebody and you find out they’re scamming seniors on the side, you might be like, “Ugh, I don’t think I should be this person’s friend.” But if you watch a show about The Good Place and you have a character, Eleanor Shellstrop, and you find out that she’s doing that, but the show is funny and the storyteller does their tricks to make sure that you never feel bad, you never meet any of those seniors, you never see them get scammed, you never have that emotional impact of the bad things that she’s done, they can get away with a lot more.  So, I think that’s the biggest difference, especially when it comes to people judging immoral actions. Part of that judgment is always the harm, and that is always judged at an emotional level. So, if you can keep people from feeling something emotionally, you can get away with a character that does more. Oren: There’s a certain taste question to it. I have a specific pet peeve that makes me instantly dislike a character, which is when they are “fake” outcasts. They act like outcasts, and the story treats them as one, but they have all the traits of a popular person. Or, at least, the thing that they are supposedly outcast for isn’t a thing that would actually happen with− Chris: −like, every magical high schooler is like, “Freak!” Looks like a really normal, cool high schooler. There’s nothing here.  Oren: Or Quentin in The Magicians, the TV show version. He’s supposed to be a nerd, ’cause he likes the Lord of the Rings, and people don’t like him for that. And, I don’t know, maybe in the 80s that was true. It’s definitely not true now. Or when the show came out, which was in the late aughts, early tens? Being a nerd was very cool by then. So, the idea that he was outcast ’cause he liked Narnia and Lord of the Rings is like, nah, no thank you.   Chris: I mean, it wasn’t cool when I went to high school, but I don’t think it counted against me either.  Bunny: Definitely nothing out of the ordinary now. Everyone likes Lord of the Rings.  Oren: Yeah, a more extreme version is Wednesday from the Netflix show where she’s like a social outcast who hates all of the things that it is socially acceptable to hate, like social media. Oh wow. What a trailblazer there. Hating social media. That’s certainly not a thing anyone does, but not everyone seems to care about that, so that might not be a broad spectrum thing.  Chris: There are a lot of big budget or popular bestselling stories that meet storytelling requirements or requirements for likability through some very serious contrivances, and it has definitely divided people on whether or not you buy it. Are you gonna buy that this super attractive, cool-looking teen is gonna be bullied because they have magic? I wouldn’t buy it. But obviously some people might want to buy that. So, that definitely gets divisive, I think.  Bunny: I will say, one thing that’s not necessarily in the writing of a character’s likability, but in the presentation in visual media−talking about the fake outcasts thing−when you have a very attractive actor and you dress them in baggy, unflattering clothes and then have everyone tease them about being ugly. That’s really obnoxious.  Oren: Yeah. I’m not a fan.  Chris: I do understand the appeal of the transformation movies. We just wanna see a character go from unstylish to stylish so that we can have that sequence where she’s gotten her hair straightened or something and she walks out in her new dress and people are like, [gasp]  understand the appeal. Bunny: Wow, you are hot all along! Holy crap, you’re played by Halle Berry! Chris: Makeovers can be fun. It reminds me of this trope that has now found new life−the 80s trope where we watch a character go try on a bunch of different clothes, and we have a montage of them just wearing different clothes.  Bunny: I think the Wonder Woman movie had that, of all things. Chris: Yeah, and I watched Lisa Frankenstein recently, another movie that had a sequence like that. It is very cheesy, but I can see that it’s in service to a specific trope that people enjoy seeing.  Oren: Yeah, okay, so moving away from that specific trope. Probably the most reliable thing that will make a character unlikeable is if you give them too much candy. Just tell everyone how cool they are, and they’re super cool, and they’ve never failed at anything, and they’re perfect and beautiful.  Bunny: Yep.  Chris: Candy characters have the opposite of sympathy. Because usually a lot of candied traits are very inherent traits to them, not things that they’ve earned. So, they just… are automatically good at everything. They’re just a genius who takes to every skill immediately. That’s not really something that they had to struggle for. So that puts them in karmic debt where we feel like they have more than they actually deserve.  Now, some audiences are just sweet tooths. They just do like these characters. I think kids are more likely to like candied characters. So, it’s not like nobody grabs onto them, but if you don’t immediately like them, then you start to resent them instead of the character winning the audience over, which is ideal.  Oren: And a lot of it has to do with, do you identify with the character or not? This is why Kvothe is able to be popular despite the fact that he’s the best at everything. He does all of the things that even basic writing advice says not to do, but he manages to be popular okay, because a significant number of the readership were like, “Oh man, what if I was Kvothe?” It’s also turning off everyone who didn’t think that. So, it’s a really major division of your audience. Chris: And this is the kind of ironic and unfair thing. We call it “candy”, but outside of us, what most people would recognize is the term Mary Sue.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Which blames this on women, but actually, if you look at popular stories, these are usually men because female characters are much less likely to be given that kind of budget if they have lots of candy.  Bunny: Yay. Chris: There’s a double standard where if it’s popular and has a budget, it’s probably a male character. Not that there are no popular stories with female candied characters, but they’re less likely because everything is still male-centric.  Oren: Yeah. On the bright side, I haven’t seen this that much in novels in the last five or six years. Bunny: I unfortunately just read a novel that had an over-candied main character.  Oren: Oh, really?  Bunny: The Sleepless. Oren: Oh.  Bunny: The story begins with several pages of him describing how many cool skills he has because he now has all this time to learn cool skills, which is everything from kung fu to cooking really good steaks, but then those never come up, really.  He gets in a really brief fight at one point, and then immediately gets his ass beat. I was like, where’s your kung fu? So it’s got the kind of weird situation where he’s got all this awesome, cool knowledge, and he tells you about it. He’s so empty inside, but he’s still got all this cool stuff, don’t worry. But then it’s just… it’s window dressing. So he is both candied and not, it was very weird, but I did dislike him at the beginning because I was like, stop bragging. Chris: Yeah. Characters also have a tendency to be hard on other characters. They tend to steal the spotlight from other characters and render those characters helpless so that the candied character can just get all the glory and save the day every time. They often are smug. A lot of times, the author gets joy of having them get one over on other characters and show other characters up. So these are all things that tend to make candied characters a lot less likable. Oren: I’ve actually recently been running into the opposite problem more often than I would’ve expected, which is when they have too much spinach because then they’re just unpleasant and downtrodden and dejected.  Mm-Hmm.  Oren: Like in the book that I had to stop, The Bone Shard series. Spoilers for the first second book. I really like Lin, the empress character, but in the second book, it’s just a series of her being told she’s wrong over and over and over again. And it didn’t help that me and the author were clearly not jiving on what the correct solution to these problems were because every time Lin would suggest a solution, I’m like, yeah, that’s probably the best solution in this circumstance. Then she would be told, “No, that’s the wrong solution. You have to do this other thing.” And I’d be sitting here being like, no. And then that other thing would work, and I would get so upset. Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating.  Chris: I recently read The House of the Cerulean Sea, and this one is a funny one because it’s clear that the author just loves all of the side characters, and so the main character just gets all the spinach and all of the other characters, they’re candied, and they’re constantly telling him that he’s wrong about things or being condescending to him or forcing him to do things. It’s like a character arc by telling, not showing, but like every other character other than the main character is the author’s mouthpiece. And so again, a lot of this comes with a difference between the storyteller and the audience, or a difference between different audience members, on which character is the character that you are emotionally attached to. So in this case, it felt like this author created a main character to just be the person who’s downtrodden and wrong about things, who then has to learn better because the author liked these other characters. And probably some audience members did too, because they’re the ones that are given cool stuff. The main character doesn’t get any cool stuff. Doesn’t get any magic powers, for instance. But I really liked the main character. And that’s always going to happen when you make somebody your main character, because if you open several chapters with this person and they have to like the main character to continue the book on some level. Which again, is just why if you have a candied character or favorite character, I always recommend making it your main character because that is the person you are basically telling your audience to like, and that’s the character you need them to like in order to want to continue the book. So, falling in love with a side character and giving that character all the candy, going to be a bad time for some of your readers.  Oren: I had that problem with my villain in The Abbess Rebellion. One of the things that I did several times when I was editing the book was adjust scenes so that the villain didn’t seem more right than I wanted him to be. I wanted him to not be cackle-y and mustache-twirly. I wanted him to seem like he believed he was doing the right thing, and I think I mostly succeeded by the end. But in the beginning I definitely gave some signals that some readers were picking up on that actually, he’s right the whole time, which is not what I wanted. So I had to balance that and I think I did okay. Buy my book! It’s okay!  Bunny: What an endorsement. I do wonder if comedies sometimes have more of that spinach problem. On St. Patrick’s Day, I watched Leap Year, which is a romcom set in Ireland, and the female lead in that, it goes out of its way to humiliate her. At one point, she’s driving with a love interest, who at this point is like really prickly and doesn’t like her, and they get stopped by a herd of cows, and she gets outta the car to move the cows out of the way, and then she steps in cow poop, and then the car rolls backwards into a ditch. They have to walk because the car is now busted. And then she thinks she’s about to get a ride from some guys who then steal their stuff, and the love interest this entire time is just making a smug “I told you so” face. The poor female character−the lead−doesn’t ever really get to use her actual skills in this. It’s just the cool one is the love interest, and he gets to be sad and somewhat snarky, and she’s always on the back foot. I just found it really frustrating.  Oren: Characters failing things is great comedy gold. That can be very funny. I have seen comedies that, at least for me, take it too far and make the character just unpleasant to watch, and it’s hard for me to say where that line is with comedies, especially filmed comedies, right? That’s two degrees of separation outside of what I normally work on.  Chris: I think there’s a couple things that happen. One, a joke can just become too repetitive if you overuse it. And also, this is what I would talk about with the spinach-candy balance. Its spinach becomes a lot more tolerable if they also have time to shine. If they also have some cool skills, if they also get to solve problems and make a difference−and those things should just balance each other out a little bit−you can have a character that tends to have more candy, but still has a little bit of spinach, or a character that tends to have more spinach but still has some candy, but gotta have both, or it’s just not gonna land well with a lot of people. Bunny: And I think it was also that this wasn’t just a straight comedy either, like it’s a romcom. We’ve also got the romance element and some more, like, serious tender moments in there because romance, right? The main female character supposedly does have skills. Her skills are, she’s an interior decorator, and I expected that to come up at some point because the love interest is kind of a rough man of the earth, I guess. He doesn’t have a lot of soft skills. So, I expected that she would have more of that or that her interior decorating skills would come in handy. At one point, they’re staying with an older couple, and they’re starting to connect, and they’ll make dinner, and that’s the only time that her skill comes up is she arranges some flowers on a table. I just wanted to see her doing things well.  Chris: Another thing that I think is really important in the context of characters being unlikable is character flaws. There’s so many other writing outlets out there that just emphasize flaws a lot. Literary genre types especially like to emphasize character flaws, I think, in rebellion to characters that they see are not flawed enough probably. And also, if we’re doing character arcs−and a lot of people put a lot of focus on character arcs−they don’t have to start with a flaw. A character who’s grieving doesn’t have a flaw. Chris: For instance, they often do start with a flaw, and writers tend to get very focused on flaws, but flaws−especially if they take over a character−really can push audiences away. So thinking about having a flaw there in a balanced way, because I’ve seen a lot of stories where it basically entirely defines the character, the writer’s hitting that flaw button so hard.  Yeah, I get it. There’s gonna be a character arc, but we don’t need it to be their main feature of their personality. That’s just unpleasant. And it does vary depending on what flaws they have. Some flaws are much more unlikable than others. Arrogance and selfishness are the two biggest ones. But for instance, when I did my retelling of Snow Queen, my character is meek to start out with, and some readers were just fine with it. There were a few readers who… they didn’t like how meek she was at the beginning. They wanted a character that was more empowered. And so, not sure that there’s any flaw that if you have it there strongly is entirely safe when it comes to likability. And maybe that’s okay. Sometimes we’re okay losing a couple people, but I do think it’s worth just thinking about that balance of having it present but not having it take over too much. And especially readers get really frustrated when they watch a character make a decision that they know is the wrong decision and watch that blow up in the character’s face.  Oren: Yeah, they’re not fans. Something that is very common, not quite in either the candy or spinach area, is a character who hinders the other characters in moving the plot forward. That kind of character is especially annoying. Probably the archetypal character for this on TV is Neelix ’cause Neelix is constantly messing things up and making it harder for the other characters to do their jobs. And so you’re just sitting there wondering, “Why is Neelix even here?” But you can have subtler versions of it. The superhero stories. The superhero’s love interest is often pushed into this role of the, “No, superhero, don’t go out and save the world!” Well, he’s obviously gonna. He has to do that for the plot to work. This doesn’t feel like anything other than delaying the story. Chris: Or the wife that’s like, “How dare you go save the world. You need to spend more time with your family!”  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Oh, why did we create this scenario? We really created a scenario where people are gonna die. Now, we’re putting them in a position where him taking care of his family is being made into a bad thing, and then his wife is being made into the bad guy for wanting him to spend time with the family. I don’t like it.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: I don’t like it at all.  Oren: It’s not great. I wish writers would stop doing that.  Bunny: There’s also−maybe this is just because of film media−I feel like child characters have a higher probability of being annoying or unlikable when they display these traits. The character I’m thinking of−this was from the webcomic The Last Halloween−is an obnoxious child, and the cast are children, but the author clearly loves this awful vampire kid who’s constantly being the worst. Chris: That sounds like a candied character. Anytime you’re like, oh, I know the author loves this character, that’s a huge sign of candy. And it can be hard to recognize because it’s not just that a character is objectively super cool. When you see a character is just getting a lot more energy from the author, the author makes them quirky and elaborates on the backstory and describes what they look like, seems to make the story revolve around them a little bit more, even though they’re not supposed to be the main character. Bunny: I think the author just found this guy fun, and I found him awful. It was clearly, “Oh, what a little rascal, ha ha!” But his being a rascal involved actually killing people or leaving them to burn alive while also being all of the worst things that a little boy can be. When he disappeared, everyone was sad about it, and I was like, thank God. Chris: Yeah, no, that’s so much candy.  Bunny: And then he reappeared!  Chris: Yeah, no, that’s another common candied character thing is a character’ll even die sometimes or whatever, just so everybody else can be like, “Oh no, I should have done what that character wanted. And I never appreciated how cool the character was. Oh, aren’t we all so sad? This character was the best.” Oren: When a character fake dies so that there is a funeral for the other characters to gush about them over, that’s too much candy. That’s too much.  Bunny: It’s pretty telling that that sort of thing would happen to my terrible self inserts when I was learning how to write and just sticking myself into every hero. They would always have a fake death, and then everyone would be like [crying noises].  Chris: But hilariously, I’ve also encountered a couple of annoying child characters that it wasn’t actually that the author wanted to give them candy. It was that the author didn’t know how to make them likable, and the child was just supposed to die. Not what I expected! So, Skin of the Sea, a book that has a lot of good traits, I have used it for word craft examples ’cause I do love the prose in that book, but it has this precocious child character that I’m just like, why are they bringing this character? He is obnoxious and he really shouldn’t be going on this dangerous mission, and it’s frustrating that they’re bringing a child along. Sometimes having undue emphasis on a character by the storyteller really does doom that character.  And maybe they’re doing it ’cause they want the audience to like that character. Maybe they’re trying to make you care about the child just to kill the child off, which is a bad idea. Don’t do that. Um, if you succeeded, you would make your readers real upset.  Oren: It feels like I’m being bludgeoned or almost like emotional blackmail. Chris: It feels manipulative. I didn’t feel natural.  Bunny: I think the only story I’ve seen do that sort of thing decently is also pretty brutal, which is John Wick. Where he’s just lost his wife. He’s having a really hard time. The wife as a parting gift gave him a dog, and then the villains come in and wreck his house and kill his dog. And that’s the impetus for sending him down a murder destruction pathway. And John Wick is an extremely violent movie, but I was listening to an interview with the directors and they were like, yeah, you only ever kill one dog in your career. We’re not doing that again.  Oren: John Wick does a lot to make it seem this character is doing his best with his dog. It’s not like he brings his dog with him into the den of the evil mafia, and then the dog gets killed. Yeah, which is what was happening in Skin to the Sea, which is one of the reasons that character was so obnoxious. It’s like, why are they still with this child? Why have they not returned this child to his house? They know where his house is.  Chris: Yeah. In fact, I feel like there was even an elder that was like, “Hey, after you show them to this village, come right back.” And then he just doesn’t, and it’s like, I don’t think you have permission from his elders to bring him with. Oren: Yeah. He stowed away on their boat, and they basically decided, “I guess we don’t have time to take him back.” And I was honestly thinking, I think you have time.  Bunny: Probably have time.  Oren: He is going to make your mission worse if you bring him. So, that was weird. A thing that is a little more subtle that I think might be worth mentioning before we end the episode is when your character has an unpaid karmic debt. This is a thing that authors struggle with a lot because sometimes they’ll have the character do something that to them just seems like either a fluff moment or establishing who the character is. But to the reader, it’s like, well, that was a bad thing he just did. He should pay for that. You have your character who is mean to a barista. In the first scene to establish that he’s gruff and having a bad day, but he was mean to a barista. Rude. He should pay for that! I don’t like him.  Bunny: He’s a meanie.  Chris: The character in Fallout−Cooper−he has a fair amount of candy, and he mostly gets away with it because he has a charismatic actor who is also a white guy. But even though he’s kind of immoral, I tolerated him for quite a while. Until he shot that young man. And it was the kind of thing where like, yeah, maybe the young man was gonna shoot him, but Cooper deliberately provoked him. Right? That was a situation− Oren: Yeah.  Chris: −that Cooper could have easily just not told the kid that he just killed his brother−And avoided any violence.−and the fact that he just does that and walks away and doesn’t have to pay for it at all. That was it for me. Now, I don’t like this character anymore. Sometimes it’s just one thing that they do that’s bad. Oren: For a villain, okay, sure, ’cause we’re hoping to see him get his comeuppance, but he’s clearly not a villain. He was clearly an anti-hero who was moving closer and closer to just being a protagonist by the end, but he still killed that kid for no reason. So, yeah, it’s obnoxious.  Chris: So if you do wanna have a character that’s a sympathetic villain that you want to be likable or who is selfish or does bad things, you really do have to carefully manage, okay, what are we gonna actually show them doing and make it so that they only kill people who the audience already hates? For instance, or we assume they’re supposed to be killing people, but we only ever see them knock somebody out or kidnap them.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: That careful management of emotions so it’s not too far. And Oren has a post on redemption arcs where you use the concept of, okay, but it’s about how far they go and having to be redeemed and the amount of time you have for the story to redeem them. If you’re not willing to spend tons of time making them grovel in order to stop the audience from feeling resentful about the bad things they did, then you really shouldn’t make them do things that are very bad.  Bunny: Yeah.  Oren: Okay. Well, on that note, I think we will call this episode to a close.  Chris: If you found us likable, please consider contributing on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And if you didn’t find us likable, contribute anyway so we can buy likability lessons.   Bunny: Yeah, maybe they’ll teach us how to clean off our foreheads. Stop being so moist.  Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [outro music] 

What does your protagonist do when they’re not righting wrongs and saving days? Main characters often have action-oriented jobs like mercenary or battlemage, but what about everyone else? Theoretically, a hero might be a teacher, custodian, hairdresser, or podcast editor, just to name a few possibilities. But we don’t usually see professions like that among our main characters, so this week, it’s time to talk about why. Show Notes Oddjob The Abbess Rebellion  Follow the Sound of Snow Cleric Class Dexter Morgan  Richard Castle  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Crime Opinion  The Truth The Sleepless Tintin Cate Randa Keiko O’Brien The Art of Prophecy  The Masquerade  Guinan Dr. Culber Transcript Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.  [opening song] Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…  Oren: Oren…  Bunny: and… Chris: Chris. Bunny:  And despite the title, as it turns out, looking at my notes, unfortunately we are not discussing the Bond villain Oddjob with his razor bowler hat – Oren: The best weapon! Bunny: Which seems so very effective and not at all cutting yourself when you take it off with your flesh hands. Chris: So did he have an odd job then? I don’t think I’ve seen this Bond villain before.  Oren: No. He just does odd jobs.  Bunny: He’s just called Oddjobs. Oren: His odd jobs are to kill James Bond all the time. [Chuckle]   Bunny: It’s a pretty odd job. It’s pretty specific, you gotta admit.  Oren: Yeah. There’s not a lot of growth potential in that sector, okay? [Laughter] Bunny: He could move on to something odder one day, but it’d be a hard market finding one. There’s only one James Bond.  Chris: The odd job industry is just laying off so many workers right now.  [Laughter] Oren: It used to be there was job security back when we all thought James Bond was a code name, but thanks to Skyfall, we know that that’s his actual name. His parents were Mr. And Mrs. Bond and they died and left him Alfred.  Bunny and Chris: [Laughter] Bunny: So although we aren’t talking about Oddjob–rest in peace–we are talking about unusual jobs in fiction. Jobs that characters have that aren’t super common or uncommon jobs that would make for cool jobs for protagonists that we’d like to see more of. Just to narrow it down a little bit, I’m mostly talking about jobs that are specifically relevant to a plot. If the character is a middle manager who then gets whisked away to Narnia and doesn’t do any middle management, they don’t file Aslan’s taxes or anything like that, then that doesn’t really count. Oren: So would an abbess count? Is that a weird job?  Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: Perhaps one who was in rebellion? Hmm? Chris: But does she do much abbess-ing?  Bunny: I guess she does some.  Oren: She does like a little abbess-ing, right? Just a little. As a treat. Bunny: Yeah. She talks religiously, I guess.  Oren: Look, I chose not to have any magic in this fantasy setting, so I need to scrape every drop of novelty I can out of any other aspect of the story. Bunny: I think whether the abbess is an unusual job depends on if you count D&D clerics? Although you’re right, there is no magic. Those are kind of defined… So maybe it is an odd job. Not Oddjob, but an odd job. Chris: An abbess leading a rebellion certainly is not a normal combination that you see a lot.  Oren: I’ve also never seen a D&D cleric perform religious services. D&D clerics just treat gods as their personal spell bang. Bunny and Chris: [Laughter]   Oren: It’s like the idea of them as religious leaders is [pitch rising] meh, meh. Chris: Eh, don’t think about it. Oren: Anyway, buy my book.  Bunny: Anyway, The Abbess Rebellion is now available on mythcreants.com or wherever you get your books.  Certainly we see a lot of rebels, but we don’t see a lot of abbess rebels, so I will count that. Oren: Yay.  Bunny: As a favor to a friend.  Oren: Ah, there’s a lot of nepotism going on in this podcast.   Everyone: [Laughter] Chris: It was interesting for me to look and see stories that had characters with unusual jobs and why. What was their purpose in doing that?  For instance, I found a couple stories that seemed to assign an usual job because they wanted a quirky but uptight protagonist that has to learn to let loose. Like the IRS agent in Stranger Than Fiction, for instance. And I have to say with some of these, like I’ve just read the House on the Cerulean Sea, where you’ve got a caseworker for magical orphanages. That’s what the main character does. And I dunno, some of these stories are kind of judgy. They like following rules. Why don’t you just let them follow the rules, right? Why do you have to try to fix them?  Bunny: So it’s like the job is the hairband on the love interest who takes off the hairband and lets her hair fall around her shoulders to become beautiful?  Chris: Yes [chuckle]. Honestly, I wanna see a badass IRS agent that goes after rich people.  Oren: It’s weird to me that that’s not already a movie. Chris: [Stern government agent voice] It’s like “Hey, those schools don’t fund themselves, billionaire”.  Oren: People are so turned on by the idea of billionaires paying their taxes, I’m amazed no one in Hollywood has grabbed that idea yet. Give us a movie or a TV show or something of the IRS auditing SpaceBezos, or whatever. Bunny: Again, if you made it a comedy, you can have an IRS agent that becomes an action hero. First, they audit the billionaire. The billionaire really doesn’t like that and sends goons after them.  Chris: But little do they know. Bunny: Little do they know this IRS agent is packing.  Chris: IRS really just stands for I am Really Super. Oren: [stern announcer voice]File under W9, as in you’ve been wasted nine times. Everyone: [Laughter] Oren: This dialogue practically writes itself.  Bunny: This is 10 out of 10 dialogue. I would read this. I know back in the day we had an article about undersung protagonists, something like that.  Chris: Yeah. I did write an article. Bunny: And I think the IRS agent was on there.  Chris: Yeah. I totally did. This is how many years I’ve wanted somebody to write more IRS agent protagonists. Bunny: You gotta do it, Chris. You’re done with the fairytales. Get onto the [gruffly, with emphasis] “Real Stuff” .  Chris: I don’t know. It’s kinda hard to fit in my other world fantasy setting.  Bunny: [Laughter] Well the snow queen needs to file her taxes too, I’m just saying. Chris: Or, another reason. This is funny. Police procedurals always need more novelty and they’re always desperate for novelty ’cause police procedurals always go the same. So they always come up with a weird job for the detective to have. Like Dexter is a blood spatter pathologist. He’s also a serial killer. That’s really where the novelty’s coming from. Or a bone analyzer, or a mortician- Oren: Or an author, like a mystery author. They like that one a lot. Bunny: Have there been multiple police procedurals where the main character was a mystery writer?  Oren: Maybe there’s only one. Isn’t that the premise of Castle?  Chris: Yeah, he’s a writer of some kind, right?  Bunny: What’s he doing there?  Oren: They call him because he is so good at writing murder mysteries that he knows how crimes work. Everyone: [Laughter] Bunny: [sarcastically] Yep. I’m sure.  Oren: That sounds ridiculous, but that was a thing with Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t know if the police ever actually called him, but he would give his opinions on famous crimes and people would pay attention to him. And think, oh, well, Arthur Conan Doyle thinks it was this, so it might have been this. Chris: Oh, wow.  Bunny: That’s just early podcasting though.  Chris: See, I would’ve just assumed that’s something a writer would write.  Bunny: That really does sound kind of self-aggrandizing. [pretentiously] “Oh, I could figure this out. I write political intrigue. And so the president calls me and asks me what to do in this situation. The president needs help with witty dialogue. I can do it.” Oren: There are definitely a lot of stories about writers to the point where, I don’t know if you can call that an unusual job.  Bunny: No, definitely not.  Oren: But it’s always funny to see how various storytellers portray different types of storytelling. With novels, it’s always very romanticized. But with TV writers, when they write about themselves, they’re very prosaic about the whole thing. I much prefer that approach.  Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think we can count writer as one of the uncommon jobs just because it shows up so much. And also it’s kind of meta. Whoop, whoop, whoop.  And another one that shows up I think less frequently, which is surprising, is reporter or journalist. I think that technically a lot of characters are journalists, but you don’t see them doing much journalism. Or is that just my impression? Oren: It’s not as common as something like detective, but it comes up a fair amount. Chris: I think when there’s a lot of stories about journalists, it often focuses on the research part of the job where they basically have to do detective work to get a story and not on other aspects of the job. So they basically become detectives.   Bunny: Well, it all arcs around back to detective.  Oren: Outside of the Discworld novel Truth, there aren’t that many specfic stories with newspapers in them. So it’s a little hard. My sample size is biased. I haven’t read very many stories about reporters, but that’s because most of the stories that I read don’t really feature the news.  Bunny: They’re common in the superhero genre, but superheroes aren’t as popular in books, so that’s a lot of comics and shows and movies.  Oren: Some of the noir detective stories that I’ve read have a reporter as a secondary character, usually as a romance interest. Bunny: Actually… The Sleepless, now that I’m thinking about it. The main character worked in a newsroom, I’m pretty sure. So I guess that counts. Also, when I was typing up notes for this episode, I remembered that Tintin is a reporter and man, he does no reporting.  Chris: [realization dawns] Oh yeah. Oren:  Really? I thought Tintin was a professional dog owner. Bunny: That would be a better job for him.  Oren: Wait, wait, is Tintin the guy or the dog?  Bunny and Chris chorus: The guy.  Oren: Okay. I couldn’t remember.  Bunny: Snowy is the dog. Snowy is a professional snark. Snowy could write the president’s witty commentary, I’ll say that.  Oren: You don’t see, at least in my experience, you don’t see a ton of teachers in speculative fiction. Bunny: At least not like professors.  Oren: Yeah. Despite magic schools being an entire genre, those are almost always from the point of view of the students. I can think of a number of non-specfic stories about teachers, but once you get into magic, it’s like, eh, no, we’re not gonna do teachers anymore.  Chris: The new Godzilla show had a teacher, but she wasn’t teaching anymore. Bunny: Yeah.I feel like they have teachers but they don’t have a lot of teaching.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: I guess Keiko on DS 9.   Bunny: You don’t see a lot of her though.  Chris: Yeah, I think if it’s about the adults and it’s for adults, they just don’t really wanna have a lot of kid characters necessarily.  If it’s a film, they have to hire all those child actors, and that’s a little tough to manage. And there’s a question of, okay, how high stakes is it appropriate to get while keeping this light if we have lots of children? And I think there might be some practical things in film that sort of limit that.  Oren: I liked the concept behind the novelThe Art of Prophecy, which is about the mentor of the chosen one. I thought that was an interesting idea.  Unfortunately, it turns out that’s a hard premise to maintain, and so spoilers for that novel, but after the first few chapters, she dumps him with a friend and then goes and has her own adventure. He then becomes a separate POV with nothing to do for the rest of the story. Chris: [disappointed] Oh.  Oren: But I liked that concept for a while. It was an interesting idea of her having to figure out how to solve problems and how to train this kid. I don’t know if a whole novel could support that idea, but for a short story? Sure. I think that could be interesting.  Bunny: I think all of these sorts of common jobs that we’ve been listing and when they use a less common job and make it work for the story point to the core components of what makes a job good for the story that the character is in. At the very least, in general a job needs to come with a conflict or conflict stemming from that job is possible, or be useful in solving problems.  Chris: Right. Bunny: And the protagonist has to have knowledge relevant to the conflict, whatever the conflict of the story is, or their job should let them acquire that knowledge if the job is relevant to the story. Chris: I looked at it and any type of travel plus research is really good. So you can study archeology or just biology. Or any person who has expertise and can go travel and use that expertise tends to work really well. Anything that responds to problems or emergencies, right?  And it can be something creative: Oh, I’m a person who enforces the masquerade by erasing evidence of magic after an incident. Or I stop time from unraveling. Or that’s why we have emergency workers that are often in stories. Or anything that puts the protagonist in the know before they’re targeted for that knowledge is another one that I’ve seen before.  Like in Paycheck, the protagonist has a kind of unusual job. What he does is he helps companies reverse engineer competitor products. The point is that he created something advanced doing that, which shouldn’t be let loose on the world. But now he has amnesia and et cetera, et cetera. But like his job put him in the middle of that situation. Bunny: And then the job should also place the protagonist somewhere that they have a hand in the resolution of the conflict as well. Obviously if you have the other components where they have the knowledge and stuff, the knowledge and the proximity, et cetera, et cetera, it does follow that they would therefore have a hand in the resolution. But it always bears repeating because we don’t want some guy swinging in and solving the story for you. And then I think it also bears mentioning that all of these factors also depend on the scale of the problem. So some jobs are more relevant to a globe trotting adventure or a thriller. That’s why we have spies. We have a lot of spies and security agents and hitmen and that sort of thing. But if the conflict is to figure out who stole the office candy dish, then you might have the middle manager there. They have to do some conflict resolution with their dastardly employees. I don’t know.  Chris: Or if it’s a drama or personal story, obviously we need a bartender. Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: Ah, fiction loves its bartenders.  Chris: Loves its bartenders. So many bartenders.  Bunny: Although I do feel like often there is a bartender in the story, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stories where the bartender isn’t the main character, but they’re there for the main character to vent to. Chris: That’s a good point. We could use more bartenders that are the minor characters in somebody else’s story and have heroes coming to them all the time and unloading all of their packages.  Oren: Yeah, bartenders are on the list of professions that are allowed to do therapy. But not therapists. Like that’s been getting better I think recently, but for a long time on TV, the moment a character went to talk to a therapist, it’s like, well, obviously this isn’t gonna help. Instead later they’ll go talk to a bartender and they’ll have a breakthrough.  Bunny: Guinan will be the author’s voice and say exactly what they should do.  Chris: As it turns out, the bartender is the shrink in disguise.  Oren: Yeah, Star Trek was really bad about that. I did appreciate that Discovery went out of its way to try to make the ship’s counselor actually be able to do counseling. It took a while, but they got there. I really appreciated it.  Bunny: Yeah, brownie points for that. I can’t think of more than one actual therapist main character right now, but maybe that’s more common in genres that I haven’t read as much of. I feel like crime and thriller might have more of those. I recently read a book — another meta mystery, which annoyed me — called The Silent Patient, which was a thriller mystery, and that had a therapist protagonist. So they’re out there.  Chris: Yeah. I do think that it’s a little tricky because they often don’t go anywhere and they spend all their time in conversation. You can only have so much dialogue. You want somebody who goes out and does things, and they also are required to keep all of the therapy confidential unless there are specific things that are revealed.  So, it’s not that you couldn’t necessarily do therapy, but I just think if you have a traditional therapist that’s licensed, that’s a lot trickier than having, for instance, a priest who talks to people but then also does other things and is more realistically proactive in, for instance, solving community problems. Bunny: For instance, leading a rebellion.  Everyone: [Chuckle] Oren: What I always tell my clients is, what you need for your protagonist is you need your protagonist to be equipped to interact with what the story is about. And since spec fic tends to err towards the action side of things–not always, but a lot–and the adventure side of things and the magic side of things, you will need a protagonist who can at some level interact with those things. If you have a long time, you can build up that stuff. This is why it’s hard to have something like: I’m a completely normal person with no special skills and I’m going to quest to save the world. Because you have to put in a lot of lead time if you want them to develop the skills necessary. And if that’s not what you wanna do, this is how you get characters who are thrown into a group of much more competent NPCs, who then just do everything. And that’s boring. No one wants to watch that.  So you really just need to ask, okay, what is my story about? And then what the character’s job is will have a lot to do with that.  Chris: I think one of my favorite examples of an interesting profession combined with a speculative fiction plot was the show Surreal Estate— Oren: [Laughter] Chris: Where they’re all real estate agents and they deal with houses, but then the houses end up being haunted and so they have to resolve the hunting before they sell the house. Main issue with that show is that honestly, it would be a great premise for a comedy, [trying to hold in laughter] but it actually takes itself a little too seriously for a premise like that.  Bunny: What?  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Which is really funny. But it’s still real campy, so you can still watch it and laugh at it. Not all is lost, but that’s just such a great concept for a comedy. Opportunity’s a little wasted.  Bunny: That’s such a good name too. I gotta say. Surreal Estate. Yes. Chris: Well, you can see how haunted houses and real estate just naturally go together really well, and how they would then have to deal with the supernatural just in doing their regular job. That’s a good one. That’s very complimentary. Bunny: Yeah. Another one that I think did a great job pairing the job of its protagonist with the conflict is Arrival. The entire movie Arrival is about communicating with these aliens which have touched down. The main character is a linguist, which makes a lot of sense. It’s about learning to speak another language. The linguist needs to figure out how to communicate with these creatures who, as it turns out, don’t even experience time the way that humans do.  Chris: One thing I really loved about Arrival is the fact that it showed interesting things about her job that you would not normally know. Because when the aliens arrive, people think that, oh, can you just translate it? That’s not how that works. We have to already know the language and have encountered it to just translate. So we have to go through a specific process to have a common language for the first time so that we can even start translating in the first place. So it actually showed that process and I just love that. I like to learn interesting things about what other people do and other skill sets and professions and then putting it in a speculative fiction context just adds more novelty to it. So that was really cool. That was a really neat part of the movie.  Bunny: Yeah, there’s not a lot of protagonists who, A) have a job that’s so deeply central to the plot, and B) have a job like linguists. And it’s also just a really good movie. So that helps too.  Oren: I also really like the approach of taking a fairly traditional fantasy/sci-fi job and putting a little twist on it. So for example, monster hunter. Pretty normal job for a protagonist to have, right? But I like the novel Trail of Lightning ’cause she’s not just a monster hunter, she’s a [with emphasis] freelance monster hunter.  She doesn’t do this for free. You gotta pay. You think bullets and monster healthcare are free? No, she has to pay for that stuff. She doesn’t have an employer. She’s not saving into social security. If you want a monster hunted? Pay up.  Chris: I think that’s another thing that people liked about the Witcher. I don’t know if Geralt feels like as a freelancer to me but- Bunny: Bounty hunters are all freelancers, but they don’t all act like it.  Oren: Geralt makes a lot of mention of coin. He says “coin” a lot. Coin, coin, coin. And in The Mandalorian, he talks about credits and uh… oh gosh what’s the name of that special metal they have?  Bunny: Unobtanium!  Oren: No, there’s real word for it. Beskar! Chris: Oh, beskar, oh yeah! Oren: Yeah. Yeah. And it talks about beskar and credits a lot, but for the most part it doesn’t really seem to matter if he gets paid. Whereas that was what made Trail of Lightning, at least the opening, really compelling was that her getting paid actually mattered. Spoiler. Later on, it doesn’t matter as much, but I liked that beginning. That felt like that really mattered to me.  Bunny: This character’s not a freelancer, but the book was making a lot of commentary on soulless work and in this case literally. It’s the novel Hench. The down on their luck henchmen, the henches who are doing their henching to pay the bills and the supervillains pay the bills. Again, that’s not the perspective we see often, which makes it interesting.  Oren: One that has potential but I think is also tricky is various gig jobs. Because that’s the thing a lot of people have personal experience with, so there’s a lot of identification there.  But at the same time, it’s also very dismal and bleak.The gig economy is not good, so I think you wanna be careful with that. But I think there’s potential there. You can imagine how that might work in a more novel setting with monsters or sci-fi problems or whatever.  Bunny: It reminds me of the beginning of Snow Crash.  Chris: Even though that was pre gig economy, but at the same time he starts by delivering pizza in the beginning and he’s trying to cut corners to deliver it on time because the company he works for keeps such close tabs on how fast he goes, which gig workers would probably identify with.  Oren: Yeah. And I’ve seen a few stories where characters are gig workers at some point. I haven’t really seen it be a huge plot point other than something like the Kaiju Preservation Society where the protagonist is doing food delivery at the beginning, but then he meets someone who offers him a more interesting job. Bunny: Yeah, I feel like food delivery is often the base point where the character starts. Didn’t the new Laura Croft movie start with her delivering a pizza or something? I could be totally misremembering that.  Chris: Yeah, there are some professions that are just put in there to emphasize how downtrodden the protagonist is, and that’s definitely one of them. Bunny: But some of them, like Space Sweepers, have them doing garbage collecting or space salvage, so it’s got the speculative fiction element, but they’re also doing a contracting job. It’s like gig work because they’re not technically employees. They’re technically a contractor, but of course they only have one client so it’s an uneven power dynamic that’s used against them.  Oren: Yeah, I mean Space Sweepers has a very cool premise. I like that a lot. One of my favorite weird ones is the Newsflesh series. I forget what the first one is called. That’s the one I read where the main characters are.  Bunny: [pained] No, they’re bloggers.  Oren: Yeah, they’re bloggers. Chris: No, that was so bad. I did not finish that book. I could not. It’s like “we wrote this political piece”– Here’s the thing. Running a website, I can tell how bad the titles are– Bunny: [Laughter] ChrisB: And it’s like “this was a hit post” and “this is what it was called” and I’m like, no, something with a title would never be a hit. That’s a terrible title. And your title really matters because that’s what people look at and decide whether to click on something. And of course, somebody who’s a novelist doesn’t necessarily have practice or expertise in making a title that will get clicks. So. Maybe it’s unfair for me to expect it, but I was just like, no, these titles are bad. [Laughter] And then they go “our site is now number three”, and it’s like number three according to what? What rank? That’s not a normal ranking in Google when you type it in Google.  Oren: But my favorite was that apparently in this world, every website publicly reports their traffic data in real time. So you can always see who has the most active users at any one time. There’s just a board for it. This does make me wonder. Has anyone who is a professional of some kind watched a movie or read a book about their profession and been like, yeah, that’s how it works. If that has happened to anybody who is listening, please comment and let us know.  Chris: I think you have to have a writer who’s also been in the profession, and then it can definitely work. I mean, a lot of military sci-fi is based on that. It’s all people who’ve been in the military writing for other people who’ve been in the military about that kind of military experience.  Bunny: Why didn’t they hire a blogger as a consultant? Get some SEO.  Chris and Oren: [Laughing in the background] Chris: Oh god, that would be kind of hilarious. The other thing is like the idea that any — ‘cause they were writing about politics; they were following a presidential candidate around and writing about him — the idea that a political website would be like number three or whatever it was. No, that’s gonna be cat videos or porn or something. Bunny: Well, they’re number three behind the porn and the cat videos.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, have we filtered out Taylor Swift in this setting?  Bunny: One job that I would love to see more of, and maybe this goes back to Arrival, but I feel like we don’t have a lot of just translators. You two have been watching Shogun, right? And the translator is not the main character, but I feel like that show has been demonstrating how ripe a role for that.  Chris: She’s real important. But we have talked about how difficult it is to make. It’s almost the same reason why there aren’t more therapists. It’s difficult to make that interesting because good translation involves a lot of, almost by rote, repeating of what people are saying. The reason it works in Shogun is ’cause she’s a real bad translator. She’s really bad at her job. And so by paraphrasing and changing what people are saying, which translators are not supposed to do, it makes it fresh, right? So we’re not just like listening to the same dialogue twice all the time. Bunny: That’s true. I guess it would also be hard in a prose medium. If your viewpoint character is a translator, they’d be hearing both languages in whatever language the story is written in, which would be weird to convey.  Chris: But I think Strange New Worlds does have some of the Star Trek characters do  advanced translations, and that’s supposed to take place earlier in Star Trek when Universal Translator doesn’t work as well. Or sometimes in Star Trek they encounter an alien species that can’t be translated. So there have been a few interesting storylines about translating in Star Trek, but I do think that’s a little difficult because at that point it can get really technical into linguistics.  Oren: [imitating Star Trek] Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Chris: We can’t translate idioms, we just can’t do it. The memes are untranslatable.  Oren: Shaka, when the walls fell.  Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: Okay. Well, with that amazingly smooth Star Trek reference, I think we are going to call this episode to a close. Chris: If you’d like to help us with our unusual jobs, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: Our very unusual jobs of blogging–  Bunny: and podcasting. Chris: Yeah, well maybe soon a speculative fiction element will enter and we’ll realize that in order to keep blogging, we have to deal with ghosts or time travel or something.  Bunny: [Spooky voice] Audacity is infected with ghosts.   Oren: All right. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

As of today, we’ve recorded five hundred of these episodes, which is kind of a lot. To celebrate, we’re gonna slack off and talk about ourselves. Okay, in fairness, we’re mostly answering questions about us. But wow, it’s still much easier than a normal topic. We’ll be back to business as usual next week, so for now, we hope you’ll enjoy getting to know us a little better. Show Notes The Alchemyst Apple Podcast Review  444 – Storytelling Education in School 445 – Interactive Fiction Sandwich Discourse  The Poetic Edda  Hunting Monsters  Mary Roach  Because Internet If Books Could Kill  Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead All Systems Red  Piranesi  Thud! A Spell for Chameleon Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. And with me today is… Chris: Chris Oren: …and… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Back in my day, we didn’t have none of this fancy voice chat and editing technology. We all gathered in a single room around an old gaming headset, and then we uploaded the raw footage. And we liked it! Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Bunny: Our footage had to go up the hill both ways when it was being uploaded. Oren: Yeah, there was a lot of snow on the internet back then. This is our 500th episode since 2013 or so. And to celebrate, we decided to do less work this time. Bunny: You do the work for us! Oren: Yeah. We decided to be really lazy for our 500th episode, and we’re just gonna talk about ourselves. Chris: We’re like the beginning of the Alchemist, when Nicolas Flamel has this journal entry where he just talks about how awesome he is. Bunny: [laughs] Dear diary, I’m very suave and quite a sexy girl, and I think everyone should listen to me and my life story. Oren: Death has no hold on me… or whatever it was he said Bunny: Even death cowers before the Mythcreants podcast. Oren: Before we get into that, we actually have a few questions from our lovely patrons who had wanted to know things about podcasts, so we’ll go ahead and go through those first. The first is from Emma, and she asked: What inspired / how did the meta intros come about?  And which are your top three? Chris: When we did our 10 year anniversary podcast, I actually tried to look into this and find out where the meta jokes came from. The thing is trying to find out where something comes from, requires listening to a lot of podcasts because our early ones don’t have any transcripts, so I found one as early as episode 53, which is really early. Oren: What? Bunny: Wow. Chris: But I didn’t wanna listen to the 50 episodes before that, but they certainly became more common. So that one was me. But what I noticed is a pattern of one of us introducing an episode and then Oren, cause of course it was Oren making a meta joke. Oren & Bunny: [laugh] Chris: …And so I think that we picked up on that. And of course we would always alternate who was introducing a topic. That’s a lot of pressure because you’re trying to introduce it in an interesting way. So I think coming up with a meta joke was a pretty reliable way to create an intro that was better than just, okay, and today we’re talking about blah, blah. So by the time that Wes became a host, in 2017 or end of 2016, that’s about the time when they became pretty constant. But I think before that they were just more and more frequent. Oren: And even once Wes joined, there are a few where we don’t have them. Wes took a little while to warm up to the idea, cause he had real things to say. Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Oren: At this point, honestly, starting an episode by telling you what the topic is feels really boring to me. We gotta spice it up a little bit. Not too much, though. I don’t wanna have too much shtick. I need the perfect amount, a mild amount of shtick. I hate starting a YouTube video and before it gets to the topic, it’s five minutes of the presenter just goofing off. That’s too much. That’s too long. Bunny: You don’t wanna get stuck in the shtick. You don’t wanna stick in the shtick. Stop sticking in the shticking! Oren: I’ll just leave that as a note on any YouTube video that I don’t like. From now on. I don’t know if I could pick a top three. We’ve done so many. Chris: It’s honestly hard to remember them. Oren: Yeah! Chris: The whole idea of a discussion podcast, it’s all ad hoc and very ephemeral. Comes in one ear out the other. So it’s hard because again, to pick a favorite, I would almost have to go through the mall. Some of them really cause a lot of banter and a lot of interactions. We go back and forth. Those are definitely the better ones. The ones that I remember. The few that I remember, there was one after we had that hilarious review on Apple podcasts talking about like the holistic cup of depression. There was one episode where instead of just opening with, you’re listening to Mythcreants podcast, I started with, you’re listening to the Mythcreant Kettle of Soulless Commentary with your hosts… Bunny: [laugh] And then Oren and Wes, they were supposed to answer me, but they just started laughing instead. And then I was like, so you’re not supposed to laugh. You’re supposed to be straight faced. And they’re like, you didn’t warn us so… There’s also the one where, as part of the joke, I told Wes that he was supposed to be the annoying character with the repetitive comedic gimmick, and then he made a weird noise that was genuinely funny, completely undermining my intro. So, I think those ones are the ones that I actually stuck in my memory. Oren: I looked back through some and I had the same problem, Chris. I just don’t remember them at all. But the one that I remembered is actually more recent ’cause my memory’s not as good and it was bad metaphors episode that we did a little while back. It’s only like a few weeks old at this point, but I just thought that our opening about oppressed podcasters, it was unintentionally very good. Bunny: [laughs] Well, gee, thank you. I was pulling from ample source material. Oren: I love podcasting, but I’m also just embarrassed about podcasting because some of the people who podcast are very weird about it. Bunny: Not familiar with that. Oren: It’s a whole thing because nowadays. Podcasting is unfortunately associated with very weird people on YouTube who do podcasting on the most unfortunate topics, and I don’t think that’s a hundred percent fair. There are a lot of other podcasts that don’t do that, but that kind of podcast is very prevalent. Bunny: It’s definitely found its cultural definition, and that stretches in some weird directions. It’s like when you go down to the fourth definition on Miriam Webster, that’s those special podcast people. Oren: And there’s also a group of those people who are known for doing nothing except podcasting. And so it creates this impression that they are sort of detached from reality and just going from podcast to podcast talking about a world they never experience. Bunny: [laughs] Oren: You could also tell they’re detached. cause most of these people are like men’s rights activists and they’re detached no matter how much they know about the world. But the fact that they don’t seem to do anything outside of podcasting also lends this very surreal bent to a lot of what they say. Chris: I have to say, I only started listening to some podcasts recently. Because usually my audio listing time was devoted to fiction because I gotta fit that in somehow. On top of everything else I’m doing. And so, it was interesting to hear what other people were doing after 10 years of podcasting and not listening to podcasts. Bunny: Wow. I’m surprised you avoided it. Chris: What I realized is that we are very high energy. We’re very hyper, apparently, in comparison to a lot of other podcasters who tend to be more laid back often, talk a little slower. It feels like most people have less banter than we do. That was my impression as to how our style differs from others. But I do get really impatient with other podcasts that are supposed to be on the topic, and I like personality, but I don’t really wanna listen for 10 minutes about what shirt they’re wearing today and other things like that. Oren: I tend to be the same way with my podcast listening. Like for example, I would hate this episode, that we’re recording right now. I would be like, what? This isn’t what I signed up for and I would just skip to the next one. I get really nervous whenever I listen to a super well produced podcast. Cause we do our best, but we don’t have the time or the budget to do that. Every time I listen to one, I kind of wonder, is this what people expect us to sound like? Bunny: Oh, they’ve gotta be used to this by now. Oren: Yeah, we’ve been here for a while. Does being 10 years old give you the right to slack off a bit? Cause you’ve been doing it for a long time. Chris: Well, I feel like if we were gonna drive people away it probably would’ve happened already. Bunny: Yeah. They’ve drunk their holistic cup of depression and left. Oren: Bunny, we never heard what your favorite meta intro is. Do you remember one? Bunny: Oh, it was actually the very first podcast we recorded with me, although I think it came out in a different order. The first one I appeared on the show was the Writing Instruction podcast. Oren: episode 444. Bunny: Oh yeah, that’s my special lucky number. This was then the first podcast that I led, which was the interactive fiction one. And I was able to keep the bit going. I remembered that I had said, skip ahead to the five-minute mark to hear me laugh maniacally. Oren: [laughs] Bunny: Um, and then I remembered to do that, which I was very proud of. Chris: [laughs] Bunny: I don’t know if anyone noticed that, but I also enjoy being the podcast villain. I think every podcast should have a villain. Chris: [laughs] Yeah. You think these are laughs but really they’re nervous laughs because Bunny has some weapons that are getting closer. Oren: Laughs of terror. Bunny: Yeah. My microphones double as cudgels. Chris: That is, I think the best part of having such a long running podcast. It’s how it builds on itself until new people come and listen and they’re like, I do not understand what you are talking about. What is a sandwich? Why are you talking about sandwiches so much? Bunny: That is good recurring guest Sandwich Discourse. Oren: Oh man, that is a struggle, right? I don’t want to make our podcast unlistenable to people who are not familiar with it, cause how far back are you supposed to go? We have too many episodes, you can’t listen to all of them. But at the same time, it’s unavoidable that we are gonna develop some recurring banter. Otherwise we would sound fake. You gotta do what you gotta do. I hope that sandwich discourse is a well-known enough term on the internet that most people have an idea of what I’m talking about, but maybe not. Bunny: It’s very easily Googleable and fall-down-rabbit-hole as well. Oren: There’s diagrams. Bunny: Oh, there are diagrams. There’s cube theory and alignment charts and all that. Oren: Okay, so our next question is from Julia. And Julia was sneaky and actually has two questions in one. Chris: Is this like more of a comment? Oren: No. Chris: I don’t have so much a comment. Question. Is a comment a question? Oren: Oh man. The worst I’ve been at multiple panels where people have lined up to ask a question, and I have been the only one with a question. Chris: Right after, somebody’s like, Really. We just want questions. No comments, please. Just questions. And then people line up. I get it now, after listening to more podcasts. People have told this before where they’re just itching to be part of the discussion and bring up something that we haven’t brought up. Sometimes people are like, why didn’t you bring up this story? Is, this story was an obvious example. Sorry, there’s so many stories out there. We can’t bring up every story in existence that’s relevant. Oren: Well, I mean, we can. We choose not to, just so you know. Chris: [laughs] Oren: We have actually read them all, and if there’s one we didn’t bring up, it was a personal affront to you. Bunny: Our brains are so full of stories that they just bulge out of our skulls and we have to drag them behind us. Oren: The actual questions are: First question is, do you guys have jobs outside of mythcreants? And will you ever sell a mug saying big holistic gulp of soulless commentary on them? Bunny: [laughs] I mean, I feel like we have to. Oren: The answer to the second one is, sadly, probably not. Because our best research suggests that most people don’t want merch. Chris: We’ve dabbled in merch a little bit, but the internet is just saturated with merch. There’s so many influencers doing merch, and that’s not really what our followers want. What they want is for us to help them with our story, because of course, that’s what we write about. Makes perfect sense. Oren: Really unreasonable of them. [laughs] Chris: So yeah, that’s what we’re focusing on. Bunny: We need to start including examples in our articles that are like T-shirt-centric… Oren: [laughs] Bunny: …So that slowly they’ll be inundated with a desire to buy a T-shirt. Chris: Start separate fashion content that’s very picky. Bunny: There once was a lonely T-shirt, wishing it had a wearer. It was purple. Oren: [laughs] Okay. But for the other one: Do you have jobs outside of Mythcreants? For me, that depends on whether or not you count my editing as outside of Mythcreants. Not really, if not, cause half of my time is creating stuff for the website or running the website or answering questions or all that stuff. And then the other half is editing client work. So that’s pretty much my entire day. Chris: I did, for the first nine years. I was a freelance web designer and developer, which honestly is why we can afford to have a big elaborate site that takes a lot of work. And if you hire an outside developer, that’s real expensive. In fact, just last year, LitReactor closed down, and a big reason they cited is that they had a founding member who was a web developer and that person was no longer involved and they couldn’t afford to redo the site. And the site had gotten old and wasn’t mobile compatible, all that stuff. So, yeah, pretty important skills, which I will hopefully maintain enough to continue working on the site. But what happened is that just doing Mythcreants on top of a day job, it’s too much long term. It’s not something that I can continue for the rest of my life. I would burn out. And I realized that I just can’t get Mythcreants to a place where it could be my primary income source unless I put my day work and use that time to develop revenue. So fingers crossed, that was just a couple years ago that I’ve wound down my day job to work on Mythcreants. So here’s hoping it works out and I won’t run out of savings. Bunny: Anyway, this episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Oren: [laughs] Chris: [laughs] No, no! No, no! Oren: I had a kind of basic warehouse job for the first couple years, and I was working there. It was at a gaming company, and I worked there basically in the hopes that I could move up to a creative position. But I had been there for a total of four years by the time I left because it just became clear that was never happening. And so it’s like, well, this place is not paying me enough for the time I’m spending here. To be clear, that was something I could do because I’m very fortunate to have a family that is both supportive and capable of supporting me. So that’s not something a lot of people could do, but in my position, it was the right choice. Bunny: Going off of that, because I am a youngin and a foolhardy youngin, I am currently looking to get into the game industry. Unfortunately, it’s a hot mess. Oren: Yeah, a little bit. Bunny: With tons and tons of layoffs, like over 10,000 people have been laid off in the past year across the industry, probably more. And suffice to say, there aren’t a lot of narrative design roles open, especially not for entry level people. It’s always like senior lead, lead senior five years. And then you’ll see an entry level job and it’s like three to five years experience, and I don’t have that. So I am looking for work in that area currently. But aside from that, I am working retail. I work at a big outdoor retailer that most people have probably heard of, so I get to interact with the public and all the special people that entails. Oren: You could start a podcast about that. Bunny: I could start a podcast about that. It would be called a Big Outdoor Retailer Special People. Rolls off the tongue. But yeah, I actually graduated college this last May and when I was in college, I majored in creative writing, minored in philosophy and computer science, two thirds of which are highly unemployable. One third of which I don’t think I’m good enough to get a job in. Chris: I will have to admit that Bunny and I had had a conversation and I was like, do you really wanna do creative writing as your major and  computer science as your minor? And I even went so far as to accidentally slip up and be like, yeah, that’s the wrong choice. Bunny: Look! Chris: But Bunny was like, excuse me. Don’t tell me what to major in. I’m like, okay, you’re right. That was a little far. Bunny: Look, you’re not wrong though, but I am certainly not gonna be finding any hot roles in philosophy, but that’s okay. I can argue ontology a little better now. Oren: That has made the podcast a lot better. So really, who are we to complain? Bunny: That’s true. Technically bringing in revenue. If anyone credits their subscription to me, which, wow, what are you doing? But yeah, I’m taking the summer off before I really start job hunting and get myself more thoroughly crushed to work on my portfolio. I’m making games. Just please someone pay me,  someone pay me to do that. That’d be great. Oren: And then finally, we have a third question. This is from our good friend Perspiring Writer, and they want to know: What are your personal favorite and least favorite books? Which could definitely be an entire episode, but we got 10 minutes, so we’ll do our best. Bunny: Oh man. This was a hard question. Go ahead. Oren: So first, I don’t think it’s fair to compare all books together. I just don’t think that’s something I can reasonably do. If I was gonna go with nonfiction, I’ve read some nonfiction that I really liked recently. I really liked Jackson Crawford’s Poetic Edda translation. Chris: Obviously related to a fiction writing project he’s working on. Oren: Maybe I just like Old Norse. You don’t know. Chris: The fantasy writer tells you their favorite nonfiction book is Old Norse. Like, okay, but this is clearly for a fiction project. Bunny: Okay, suuuuure. Oren: I found a bit about how Loki and Hell had their own undead soldiers to fight the Einherjar, and no one has written about them as far as I could tell, and I’m gonna tell their story. Bunny: Goddammit, somebody has to! Oren: Someone’s gotta. Anyway, I’ve also really liked Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish, which is about cryptids and the psychological phenomena that lead to people seeing cryptids. Bunny: Oh, I really wanna read that one. Oren: Yeah, it’s really good. Bunny: It’s been on my list. Oren: And how sometimes people just wanna sell newspapers and so they say that they saw a monster. Bunny: For my nonfiction–I guess I’ll jump on that there—I have trouble with this just because there’s so many categories of books and so many that I have positive feelings towards, but wouldn’t necessarily describe as my favorite. So I tried to narrow myself down by basically saying it can’t just be a book that I’ve enjoyed. It has to be a book that I would read multiple times or have read multiple times. But for nonfiction, my favorite author in nonfiction is Mary Roach, who writes about weird scientific topics essentially. And so, my favorite of her books is Stiff. Which is about what happens to human cadavers. I find that really interesting. But she’s also written one about the digestive system. Oren: Is that where the cadaver ends up? Bunny: Cadavers show up in a lot of places talking about science. The cadaver’s gonna come through the door at some point. Chris: The bar of reading it more than once… for me, nonfiction is too high. I’m not gonna be able to name a nonfiction book that’s like that. Bunny: That’s fair. Chris: The one that stands out is something that I did enjoy all the way through, because a lot of times with nonfiction, I will buy it and then I will skim it or just pick out the parts that I want. cause usually I’m seeking particular pieces of information. And I’m not searching on Google for it because there’s just so much trash that comes up these days that I’d prefer to buy a book that has no ads in it. Well, some of them do [laughs]. Bunny: But they don’t stall the book down to the point that you need to restart it. Chris: But one that I did enjoy all the way through is Because Internet, that one is about the evolution of language on the internet. And how technology changes and how people express themselves online and what is the equivalent of a gesture, for instance, in person and all that stuff. And I found that very fun. Oren: If we’re gonna talk about our least favorite nonfiction books, I got one of those too. Of ones that I have read all the way through—because if we include ones that I’ve only read, parts of it’s Atlas Shrugged hands down. but I have not read all of Atlas Shrugged. Chris: Atla Shrugged is fiction. Bunny: Is it not fiction? Oren: Oh, right. Yeah, it is fiction. Chris: Sorry, that was on my least favorite fiction list. Maybe somebody wishes it was nonfiction, but it’s definitely a fiction book. Oren: That’s a good point. I don’t know how I got that mixed up, but books of nonfiction, books that I’ve read all the way through. My least favorite is probably The Blank Slate. At least of the ones that I feel comfortable mentioning on the podcast. Cause there are a few that I don’t think anyone’s heard of, and I’m not gonna mention them in case they get more marketing. But this one’s already like a bazillion bestseller and I hate it so much. Cause the whole book is basically arguing that we don’t need social safety nets or anti-discrimination laws because we’ve actually solved all of our problems already. Bunny: [laughs] Oren: But it’s so subtly written that if you aren’t looking for it, you don’t notice that. And as you’re reading, it sounds like it’s basically disproving the idea that people care about each other and that you should just free market solutions baby to everything. And it’s pretty convincing. I only figured out it was all wrong cause it got to the end and that was when he suddenly said, oh yeah, by the way, we don’t need anti-discrimination laws for gender anymore because the wage gap’s not real. And I was like, hang on a second, my mom just got an equity raise. cause the university did a study and found out she was getting paid less than her male counterparts with the same experience in the same role. So clearly that’s not right. And then once I realized that the book could just be wrong about the things it was claiming, everything else fell apart. Bunny: Yikes. Oren: Yeah, it’s a bad book and it’s a bad book because it cloaks itself in seeming reasonable and it has tricked a lot of people. Bunny: So many of these big theory like economics or law pop nonfiction books. We were talking about podcasts earlier. I know I got you thrown onto a podcast that made you unproductive, which I’m still not guilty about. But every book they read on that podcast is basically that like they’re just saying stuff in these books. Oren: They’ve done another of that same guy’s books. I’m hoping they’ll do The Blank Slate eventually cause that would be cathartic release for me. Listen to them tear it apart. Chris: You should send them some fan mail. Oren: Oh, I should, that’s a good idea. Bunny: You could, that’s true. Oren: And you’d know how to write it too. Cause we’ve received lots of mail and I can tell them that I’ve developed a parasocial relationship with them and that I would like them to do the thing that I care about. Chris: Gosh, listening to podcasts, I also felt like I’d experienced the parasocial relationship thing for the first time on the fan end. And I was like, I do not like this. Oren: [laughs] Chris: I do not like this. This is frustrating. Sorry folks, that it’s happened to you. Bunny: I think when I was splitting up my list into most and least favorite books to put it wordily, I feel like I had to go through in a couple tiers, partly because my memory is short and I was only able to think about the last couple books I’ve read, and partly because I feel like I’m pretty good at having avoided the things I will actively despise. I think I’m pretty good at identifying those and then not reading them. However, there are a few. One is Cathedral, which I’ve mentioned on this podcast before. It’s a short story that I was forced to read in multiple creative writing classes. The story itself is fine. It does include the phrase, juicy thigh. Oren & Chris: Ew. Bunny: But I didn’t like it and I didn’t understand why we had to read it multiple times. There are other short stories in the world, please. Choose any other, so I have a dislike of that one. Chris: Yeah. For me, in fiction, I just stopped reading fiction very quickly if I don’t like it. And so the ones that stand out in my mind as being my least favorite are the ones that I was compelled to finish, even though I don’t like them, like Atla Shrugged. That one was not actually assigned to me, to be fair. We were doing an assignment where we were pairing up in class and we had to choose a book together. And my partner suggested it, and I did not know it was over a thousand pages long.  And then I was committed to reading it. Bunny: Oh gosh. Chris: So yeah, that and Catcher in the Rye. Oren: [laughs] Chris: Catcher in the Rye was assigned in class. Bunny: There was a book I read for my senior thesis where I was studying mysteries and thrillers because I was writing something along those lines. My professor hadn’t read this, but she was like, oh, I’ve heard good things about this book. Chris: Mm. That’s definitely something you shouldn’t trust. I’ve heard this is good, but is it though? Bunny: I looked at it. What is it though? That’s right. And it’s this book called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was pitched to me as a thriller mystery. It wasn’t, it was mostly the main character hanging out in the woods. And then murders happen around her and like the towns folk are shitty and she’s got a unique way of narrating and then— spoilers—It turns out she was the killer. So it was also a meta mystery. No. Chris: Sounds like it did not actually succeed in being tense. Bunny: No, it felt meandering. Chris: That would be hard if she knows that she’s the killer and you’re trying to make her act realistically, why would she be worried? Bunny: She thinks she’s the killer, but she thinks she’s doing it on behalf of the animals, but she’s still killing people, which was obscured by her first person narration. And she would’ve been thinking about that. And when I talked about this with my professor, my professor was even like, yeah, that seems like a bad decision on the author’s part. It just shouldn’t have been pitched as a thriller. The characters spend a lot of time sitting around and translating poetry. Yeah… Chris: Yeah. Oren: Is that not thrilling? Bunny: [laughs] Chris: Okay, let’s talk about the fiction books we like. Oren: Yeah. Cause we’re pretty much outta time already. But anyway, we’re gonna finish this question. Chris: I did not know it would take us so long to answer three questions. Well, four questions, Julia. Oren: Thanks Julia. Bunny: Thanks Julia. Oren: Of the books that I’ve read recently, I wanna pick either all Systems Red or Piranesi cause they’re both really good. Chris: I’ve read all Systems read three times now, so I, that has to qualify as my favorite. Oren: But I think my all-time favorite book is probably still going to be Thud! from Discworld. There are a lot of good Discworld books, but I think that one’s my favorite. It’s the culmination of several storylines and it moment in Vimes’ parenting storyline, which I found really, really touching. So I think that one’s probably gonna be my favorite. And my least favorite of books I’ve actually read is probably a Spell for Chameleon, which is so gross and so bad, and also so boring. It’s not even bad in an interesting way. It’s just bad. Chris: What’s your favorite, Bunny? Bunny: Well, again, narrowing it down to things I’ve read multiple times. Wildwood by Colin Meloy, who’s also a singer for the Decemberists, interestingly, and his wife did the artwork. Wildwood was a book I loved growing up, and I still love, it’s just, I just really captured my imagination and saw this interesting world and I just love the characters and the setting and the vibes of it all, and I’ve read it many times. So that has to qualify. I also really like Good Omens. That was the first Pratchett I was exposed to and it went over well. And I’ve read that one multiple times as well. I also just really like a whole laundry list of graphic novels, but I think The Girl From the Sea, which is about a selkie human romance between two young girls. There’s no creepy skin stealing, thank God. And then the Tea Dragon Society, which is about these dragons that like grow tea leaves. And when you drink the tea made from the tea leaves, you get to relive the memories of the dragons and their owners. Oren: We finally answered the questions. So, I guess our 500 episode was actually just a mailbag, so that’s great. Good job everybody. Bunny: Everyone loves a mailbag. Oren: I think with that, we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close. Chris: If you would like us to make 500 more episodes—but please give us 10 years for real—Consider supporting us on Patreon so that we can keep going. It’s not a given that we will last another five years. So just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

A writer can be a great thing, but would two writers be better? Three? Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of authors you can combine, Voltron style. Though there may be practical limitations, depending on the project and how you approach writing. This week, we’re talking about co-writing, a practice that has driven some authors to success while baffling many others. What are the benefits of co-writing, and what are the downsides? And perhaps most importantly: who do we get angry at when a co-written story disappoints us? Show Notes Sanderson Takes Over Wheel of Time  This is How You Lose the Time War Sorcery and Cecilia  The Expanse  Warriors Animorphs  The Long Earth  Center Your Darling First Avatar Episode  Starship Down  Alan Smithee Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is… Oren: Oren Bunny: …and… Chris: Chris. Bunny: We’re talking about co-writing today, and I think really the only way to make sure that it’s truly co-writing is to trade off each sentence, and to have each sentence be roughly equal length. So I’ll start, and we’ll go in a circle. “The worm was having a good day.” Oren. Oren: Yes, “…and the early bird was also there.” I think you all know what happens next. Bunny: Uh-oh. Chris, you wanna conclude us? Chris: “The worm ultimately had a very bad day.” Bunny: Oh no. That was beautiful. That really teaches me something about loss and hardship. And stories taking unexpected directions. So, I think co-writing, beyond playing an improv game, can be broadly defined as just when there are multiple people involved in creating a story. And that can take a lot of different forms, like obviously TV shows and games and stuff have writers’ rooms and teams, which might shift throughout the show’s runtime. And it might even get new creative directors. That sort of setup is also fairly hierarchical, so everyone’s writing towards the vision of one or two people who are the showrunners. There’s also graphic novels, which I would argue are co-written, even if there’s only technically one writer, because the images have a big effect on how the story is told. So I think that’s also a kind of co-writing. There’s also what happens when people trade off between books in a series, so, like, Wheel of Time started with one guy and ended with another guy. I don’t think that quite counts as co-writing, but it’s certainly still multiple people having inputs into the creative process. Oren: If you’re a real weirdo, you get dice involved. [Bunny laughs] Then y’all sit around pretending to be wizards for an evening. Bunny: I don’t know who would do that. That sounds weird. Disturbed behavior, very strange.  Oren: Big old nerds. Bunny: They just sit around and co-write together for a couple hours every week. There’s also ghostwriting, which I don’t think really counts. If you do count it, that’s probably one of the main ways that co-writing happens with regard to novels. I feel like novels are the hardest thing to co-write simply because you can’t do things like assigning particular characters to a particular writer. There’s just so many words. Oren: Au contraire, you definitely can. [laughing] It’s arguably less convenient. So depending on how you split the responsibilities, you can definitely have one person who is responsible for the dialogue of a character. Depending on the premise of the story, that can be easier or more difficult. If it’s something like This Is How You Lose the Time War it’s very easy, because that’s a series of letters. Chris: Similar to Sorcery and Cecelia, two writers that were writing letters back and forth to each other is how they wrote the book. Oren: But supposedly with, for example, The Expanse, which is written by two authors who go under a single pen name, supposedly Daniel Abraham was in charge of some characters more than others, and then Ty Franck had more influence on the other characters. Abraham in particular is noted for writing a lot of Miller, the detective, because that was based off of Abraham’s D&D character. It wasn’t actually D&D, but it was whatever roleplaying game they were playing as a setup for The Expanse. Now that doesn’t mean Abraham would write Miller’s line of dialogue and then he would turn the page and hand it to Franck, who would then write Holden’s dialogue. I’m not saying they did it that way. Chris: You could probably have improv-ed chats to get ideas for how the conversation goes if you want. Oren: And when it comes to ghostwriting, that is often a very squishy topic. Sometimes a ghostwriter is literally just told by a celebrity, “Write a book and put my name on it.” And then sometimes you have something more like the Animorphs ghostwriting. As the series went on, Applegate was busy and didn’t have time to do all of the writing herself. Supposedly, K. A. Applegate is already two people, like supposedly that also incorporated a lot of the work of her husband, and then they brought in more writers and Applegate would create outlines and then give those to the ghostwriters who would write dialogue and fill in description. Nowadays, the impression I get is that we would be more likely to just call that co-writing, and those authors would get their names on the books. It would be less common for that to be done in secret now. That’s just a feeling I’m getting from hearing people talk about it. Chris: I get the sense that with an IP work where somebody is hired, a writer is hired to write a story in an existing franchise, publishers don’t necessarily want some people to know that this is an IP work. A lot of times a writer does get their name on those, but not necessarily, and it could be secretive, and they want all the books to be under the same pen name. Bunny: Yeah. One of my favorite book series growing up as a kid, Warriors, was four people writing under the pen name Erin Hunter, and I have no idea how that work was split up. My little kid brain was not nearly developed enough to be like, “Yes, I bet this was written by writer number two, and this has the oeuvre of writer number three.” Chris: I suspect that most IP books are more heavily supervised and edited. All the contracts are different, but I think there’s more likely to be an editor who goes in there and just makes changes on their own to make them fit whatever franchise it is. Oren: And sometimes we are fortunate enough to have interviews and behind-the-scenes material where the writers tell us, and that’s how we know a lot about what was going on with The Expanse. We know that Ty Franck created the setting originally, and he was trying to pitch it as an MMO, which I have so many questions about how that was supposed to work. Do you mean like a space MMO, like they were supposed to fly the ships around, or are you imagining that they were like a people-scale MMO, and they would use ships to fast travel. That sounds really wild. And when that didn’t go anywhere, he ran it as a roleplaying game for a while. And as someone developing a setting for both prose and a roleplaying campaign, I can see that makes him smarter and more attractive. [Everyone laughs] Bunny: How clever and sexy of him to do such a thing. Oren: I know, right? Just a really classy act. And then he brought Abraham on board, and that was when they decided to go the novel route, and they collaborated on different parts of the story, basically. And so we know that, because they’ve talked about it in interviews. But then other times it’s a lot less clear. Like the Long Earth books are co-written by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. We don’t know how they split those roles. As far as I know, neither of them ever said. There are some characters who are a lot more Pratchett than others, like Lobsang, the AI airship who believes he is a reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman. That is just a Discworld character right there, let me tell you. Chris: [laughing] It does speak to some of the liabilities of co-writing. It can be weird if the work is written in two completely different styles. And sometimes it’s fine. Again, if you have characters by different authors that can give them separate personalities, that makes them distinct, and separate voices, that makes them more realistic as characters. With something like that, I would be nervous about, is a story tonally unified. There is Pratchett doing his thing. Oren: It worked fine in The Long Earth. The Long Earth had its problems, but I don’t think clashing writing styles was one of them. I did notice that the book felt less and less Pratchett as the series went on, which makes sense, his health was declining by then. I don’t imagine he had a lot of time for co-writing, so that part I was made a little sad by, but I don’t think there was any serious clashing. I have noticed that in other books, for example, Good Omens, the book. It’s very noticeable that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse three are entirely evil and have no redeeming characteristics. And then there’s Death, which is just Death from the Discworld novels and is almost a good guy. That always struck me as weird, right? It’s not like you couldn’t have Death be different than the others, but the book never gives any indication of why that would be. It’s just that’s how Pratchett likes to write Death. And I love that Death, so I’m not complaining too hard, but… Chris: Sometimes writers divide up the works in different ways to try to mitigate the unevenness. Either you have one person do the entire first draft, and the other person do like a second pass, or they edit each other’s writing. Or as we said, if you have the idea that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they might naturally sound a little bit more different. Or two people writing to each other, two different authors will give each their own voice, so there are ways to mitigate the style unevenness, but sometimes that can take work to resolve. Oren: Yeah, I have tried co-writing a couple of times. I’ve discovered I’m not good at it. I have not communicated well with the person I was writing with, and I would end up taking the story in a direction that they didn’t want it to go, and I didn’t talk about it to them enough. Then they would look at it and be like, “This is not at all what I wanted, and I’m so far into this I don’t feel like I can stop.” And then the project would fizzle. Chris: I think that’s the number one downside. We talk to a lot of writers about trying to make their stories cohesive, and we talk to them about “find out your darling,” and “center your darling,” and make everything about that, and it’s just really easy for two different writers to have two different darlings and to try to put the story in two different directions, because they care about different things. And so I think for co-writing to work well, you really need writers that have–either are very determined to make it work [laughing], because they’re like, both famous, this is a great opportunity. But in a lot of cases, co-writers with just very similar tastes. Like Sorcery and Cecelia, one of the reasons it works well, even though it’s got what are basically two different viewpoints in different locations, because that gives them an excuse to write letters to each other, is that they’re both cute little regency romances, fantasy regency romances. Both of the authors are into that, when a reader reads them, if you like one, you’re more likely to like the other, and it gives the whole book a more unified feel despite the fact that each writer has their own playground to work in. Whereas if you try to work with somebody who just likes different things in their books, it’s gonna be a lot harder. Bunny: And even when everyone’s aligned on the goal and the story and where we’re going with it, and so on and so forth, there can still be little blips where someone has a strange amount of passion for one particular small thing that doesn’t quite fit what everyone else is going for. So like right now I’m writing a script for a game with two other people, and we’ve had a couple of cases. So what we’ve done is essentially divvy up all of the characters in the game between us. And whenever we write a scene with our character and then another person’s character, usually one of the characters is leading the scene. And so that’ll probably be the person who writes the first draft of it, and then they just add “this is what I want to convey” type of dialogue for the other person’s characters. So you’ll write your character’s dialogue and the serious tone of the scene, and then you want the response from their character to have the gist of like, “Oh no, that’s awful! Frowny face, frowny face.” So you write that, and then later they’ll come back through and replace that with dialogue in that character’s actual voice. Chris: Have you ever had a circumstance where somebody came in and saw that and was like, “Yeah, I actually think my character would react in a different way,” and that created problems? Or did you all outline together closely enough that hasn’t been an issue? Bunny: We did a lot of outlining and brainstorming together, so I don’t think we’ve had that be a huge issue. I’m trying to think…we’ve had instances where we get attached to our various NPCs and want them to have bigger roles than they should in the story. Chris: [laughing] I have also encountered this, where somebody else who was just like helping me a little bit fell in love with the character that was supposed to be a random side character and wanted to give him, like, all the candy. Bunny: Right, in this game, people will be clicking through this dialogue. We don’t want it to get too long. People are gonna be like, “Why does this random bug guy have deep and tragic backstory about the main character’s brother?” And then we’ll have to go in and talk about that and see if we really wanna center this character more, or whether this is just going to confuse the player. Oren: Mind your own business, that’s why. Bunny: [laughing] Sit down. Let me talk about the bug guy’s trauma, star-crossed lovers. So we’ve outlined and stuck together closely enough, I think our main strength, and the thing that’s made this particular co-writing experience work so well, is that we all communicate a lot, and I think that is probably the most important thing when you’re co-writing, on an interpersonal level. Like, the cohesion part, obviously that’s important, but that’s a problem of the script. Getting the script out there, you’ve gotta communicate. There is no way to co-write if everyone’s not on the same page. Oren: Yeah. That’s why my attempts at it have all failed. By the same token, I also think that just my temperament with writing makes co-writing difficult for me, because I’ve also tried the other way where we all have access to the same document, and we can see it as it’s being written. And I hated it so much. When I’m actually writing, getting the words out is hard, and having to constantly worry, like, “Oh man, am I gonna have to delete this because my co-writer didn’t like it? Oh, no. Now I can’t write at all.” Now, obviously, that’s not a problem for a lot of people, so I’m not suggesting that’s a general issue with it, but certainly it was for me. Chris: I mean, for me, the opposite can be a concern. This experience is not fun because I’m stressing about the fact that I want to change what the other person has written. And it’s one thing if they, for instance, hired me as an editor, because I’m there to give them feedback. But I also know as an editor that their vision is the most important, and all of my suggestions are in service to their vision for the story. They are the creative here. But when you’re co-writing, and you’re like, “Okay, that plot point seems a little contrived to me, and I’d like to change this, and other things, I think I would like this to just be a little different,” then every single point you would have to explain to the other person why you don’t like their version. Bunny: I think, Oren, you make a good point about the temperament that you have to get to successfully co-write. Whatever temperament you have towards writing, there’s no good or bad necessarily, but I feel like there are better and worse temperaments to bring to a co-writing scenario. You cannot be defensive, for example, when it comes to co-writing. You’re gonna have eyes on your work constantly, and depending on the amount of co-writers, like you’re always going to be reading each other’s work and giving feedback and rewriting. Like, we just got out essentially the third draft of our script to our next round of beta readers. We were supposed to have it done earlier this week, and then we just kept bouncing it back and forth with like, “I’ve resolved these comments and I made some comments on your comments. Could you take a look at that?” “I made some comments on your comments, and added a few things here and there. Could you take a look and review that?” And you gotta be willing to do that quite a lot. Chris: It also brings up the question of when is co-writing faster, and when is it slower? Faster writing could potentially be a huge benefit, because prolific writers definitely have a big career advantage. And it’s not just because they have more books to sell, because you could be like, well, I have more books to sell, but now we have to split the profits between two people. But I think just putting out stories more often helps writers keep the attention of their fans, and build a reputation, and all of those things that are beyond having twice as many books to sell. So that’s a big benefit if you can put out books more fast by working with somebody. But if you’re going back and forth a lot and everything has to be coordinated, do you ever feel like it’s just really slow? Bunny: I feel like the pace that this is going at, because this is a game project, and we’re part of a pretty big team, and we’re all doing this as a portfolio project–we’ve been pretty regimented with schedules and stuff because we have a producer, and she’s been pretty on top of things. She’s actually one of the other writers. We’re pretty lucky in that regard, but I think if it were just us three writers, we would be bouncing it back and forth for eternity. Being like, “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve made some more comments,” like that sort of thing. It probably would’ve been faster if one of us had been the only one writing it, but I don’t think we would’ve had as interesting of a product. Oren: It definitely helps if you have one person who can be in charge of saying, “Okay, we’ve debated this enough. We have to make a decision.” Bunny: That was what was happening last night, when I finally got the scripts out. I was like, “All right, I’m locking this. Resolve the comments. Some of these lines we’re still not happy with, we can revise them later. We need to stay on schedule.” This project is lined up into “sprints,” which are just sections of time with specific goals in them. That helps keep things on track. But obviously not every set of co-writers will have that sort of thing. Oren: Closest I’ve ever come to make anything like this work is co-GMing a campaign. The most successful I’ve ever been at it is when there were too many players for one GM to handle, and so we split them into multiple tables that people would occasionally switch between, and that was fun. That worked. The campaign was more chaotic than normal because we sometimes had to revise things. The GMs communicated ahead of time and tried to have some basic ideas of what was going to happen. But it’s roleplaying games, right? Stuff happens in real time. You don’t plan the story a hundred percent. So sometimes the two tables would diverge a bit, and then we’d have to see if we could bring them back together, or if we just had to roll some stuff back. Bunny: That sounds far more complicated than the current co-writing thing I’m doing, because at least there aren’t a dozen wild card act player characters. Oren: But the upside is that with roleplaying games, the standards are a lot lower. [everyone laughs] You know, with roleplaying games, my players will accept a lot of contrivances as long as I make their play, their characters, feel cool. And that’s not necessarily the case with an audience for a written work or for a video game. Chris: You understand the story is gonna be less polished, but what you get is a customized story that’s for you. Oren: The one that did not work at all was when we once tried to have two GMs for the same table. Not saying no one could make that work, but it did not suit us. Bunny: How did you even try to make that work? Oren: The original idea was one person would handle NPCs, or combat, or whatever, but one of the reasons it didn’t work was that we didn’t communicate very well on what our delineation of tasks was. Chris: It was back to the communication. Oren: It was both of our faults. I started doing more and more, and that was on me, because I was taking up more space, but I was doing that because they had decided to do less, because they saw that I was doing more. Bunny: It’s like any group project. Oren: So it was both of our faults that time, but it just didn’t work. I just ended up becoming the sole GM. It’s not impossible, but it certainly didn’t work for me. Chris: I’m sure that you can also have a beneficial partnership by having people who are a little bit more specialist in what skills they take on. Like one person who likes to perhaps discovery-write that first draft, and another person who loves to have a draft to start with and wants to revise it and make it reflect their own vision, that would be a potential partnership. Or if somebody really likes the story, and somebody else is more into the prose and the wordcraft. I think there’s a lot of potential for that kind of thing. But I do think with those kinds of partnerships, it means that both people have to be ready to let go of the other area. [laughing] It seems like the biggest obstacle in many cases, besides communication, is if people have different visions for the story, it’s gonna be hard for them to both be happy with it. Bunny: If you’re doing anything in a non-hierarchical structure, like any co-writing that’s not that TV writer’s room example where you’re all following the direction of a creative lead or whatever… Chris: Or an IP work where you have the author that’s hiring people to fill out their outlines or something like that. Bunny: Exactly, like an IP work. Everyone has some level of creative control, and that means you’re gonna be doing a lot of compromises. Everyone’s going to need to have a level of accountability. Gets complicated very quick. Chris: Do you think that’s why in something like Sorcery and Cecelia, which two writers, they were just having fun over a summer and then decided to take all of their fun letters and make it into a book, giving them each their own playground where they had their own set of characters, but it was only cohesive because they were doing something very similar. Oren: Probably wouldn’t have worked if one of them was living in, like, a steampunk dystopia. [Bunny laughs] Chris:  After they were done, they did bring them together and decide to make some revisions. But if I understand, it was largely improvised, and they would do things like come from the countryside to London, or London to the countryside, which is the location of the two protagonists. Oren: One of the things that’s funny about TV shows is because so much of the writing is done in a very team environment, and there are a lot of hands on the script over time, it’s very difficult to tell who came up with specific lines and whose story goes with who. Chris: Yeah. I wanna know who from the Avatar live-action show was writing those terrible  dialogue lines. Oren: What if we front-loaded all of the exposition? Chris: To me, it felt like some other person came in, and was like, “No, we need exposition here,” and deleted somebody’s perfectly good dialogue line to put in something terrible. [laughing] That’s what it felt like. I don’t know if that’s what was happening. Oren:  I listened to an interview once with one of the writers of the Deep Space Nine episode “Starship Down,” which is an episode about the Defiant getting damaged and flying around inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, doing like a whole submarine parallel. One of the two people who was credited as a writer on that episode, the way he tells it is that they wrote their script and originally it was actually underwater. It was literally submarine stuff. It was accepted, and then it was almost completely rewritten, and almost none of their original script is in the episode, but they’re still credited as the writers. [Bunny laughs]  And assuming that story is true, then we just have no idea who wrote that. Chris: Yeah. It sounds like with TV shows, it can get political which person is credited, and can be sometimes a little arbitrary. Oren: It certainly has a lot to do with your ability to make more money later. The more writing credits you have, the easier it is to get a job, et cetera, et cetera. Bunny: Yeah, a lot of things are just black boxes, which is weird because we’re used to thinking of media as having only one author in general, but there’s a whole, dare I say, an ontology of authorship that you could get into. You could argue that plays are coauthored, simply because reading a play and seeing it are two different things. And just as the illustrator of a graphic novel contributes to the story, the actors of a play also do. It’s a weird and difficult thing, authorship. Oren: Yeah, but I need someone to form a parasocial relationship with. [Bunny laughs] Can’t do that with a diffused group of creatives, each of whom has donated a small but vital component to the piece. What do I look like? Some kind of epitome of the human spirit? No. Bunny: [laughing] When I take something they write personally, who do I write my email to? Oren: I need the hate mail address. Bunny: I need Alan Smithee. Oren: Okay, so now that we’ve covered that the most important part of authorship is who we send hate mail to, I think we’ll go ahead and end this episode for today. Chris: If you would like to help us co-write more episodes, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons, who while not technically co-writers, definitely make the show possible. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Rise, podcast episode, rise from an auditory grave and do our bidding! Muahahahahaha! Necromancers are a staple of speculative fiction, whether they use arcane arts or a spooky lab. They’re absolutely always evil, or are they? Perhaps they’re just misunderstood, even if some of their practices are a bit unsavory. That’s what we’re talking about today, plus a return of everyone’s favorite dystopian setting idea: the necro-industrial complex. Show Notes Article: Bringing Necromancy to Life in Your Story Eclipse Phase  Gideon the Ninth Three Parts Dead  Joyce Summers  Generative AI  Magic Bites  Mage: The Awakening Sabriel  Zombie T-Rex Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is— Bunny: Bunny. Chris: —and— Oren: Oren. Chris: Now, listeners, you’ve only heard our voices. You don’t know that we’re really alive. Perhaps someone used magic to reach beyond the grave. Someone who shall remain nameless but is definitely Bunny. Bunny: [laughs] Ooooooooh. Oren: Ooooooooh. Chris: Why did you do it, Bunny? You know there are consequences for violating natural laws. Bunny: Natural laws? I’m above such things. [evil laugh] Nature bends to my whims, and by nature I mean podcasters. Oren: Yeah. Consequences typically for violating the laws of characters being dead, because when we want characters to die, it needs to be dramatic, and if we could bring them back, that would be a problem. Other natural laws, like not being able to throw fireballs, it’s perfectly fine to violate those. No problem. Chris: It’s hard to have stakes if you could just bring everybody back to life exactly as they were. Oren: It really is. Chris: Do you hear that, DnD players slash writers? Yeah. I understand why it’s useful for an actual tabletop role playing game where people could die on accident to get resurrection, but it is not great for a story you plan ahead. Oren: The worst one, if we’re talking about RPGs, is Eclipse Phase, where everyone is just digitally immortal and as long as you have money, you can just print a new body and download yourself into it. It is so hard to create stakes in that setting. You can do it, but you are working against all of the gravity of the world because it’s a combat game, right? It’s not like a political drama game. You’re supposed to spend most of it shooting guns, but you can’t die. So [stressed noise]. Bunny: Dying is like nicking your finger. Oren: Yeah, it’s a little annoying. You have to pay to get a new body, and if you’re a successful adventurer, that’s not hard. Chris: I guess, first rule of necromancy is, your necromancy can’t just bring all the characters back to life. No problem. Bunny: Okay. I was thinking about—this is like, full on resurrection. Do we count that as necromancy? Does that seem like it’s a necromancy type thing? It seems adjacent. Chris: I think we should have an expansive definition of necromancy because we need to keep it fresh and just doing the same very narrow thing over and over again just makes it get old. Oren: No, it’s gotta be bones and rotting flesh, or it’s not necromancy. It’s gotta be like a creepy green, or— Bunny: It has to be purple. Oren: It could be purple. I’ll allow purple, but the natural color of necromancy is green. I’m sure we’ll all agree. Bunny: It’s the color of the slime from Ghostbusters, which is fitting ’cause ghosts. Chris: Yeah. I think it needs to be black with green accents to be precise. Oren: That’s fair. That’s fair. Bunny: It’s like an eyeshadow palette. Oren: But necromancy in most settings tends to be flavored evil and bringing people back from the dead perfectly intact and normal is usually considered a good thing. So even though logically that would be a kind of necromancy, socially speaking, it’s not usually qualified that way. Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could potentially have another consequence where you bring somebody back perfectly intact and then something else really bad happens. Bunny: Yeah. There’s ways to flavor that if you want it to be dark. Oren: Yeah. If there’s, like, negative consequences, you’re more likely to call it necromancy. Bunny: Yeah. Oren: But of course, that’s just an expectation, right? There are plenty of stories—especially now ’cause people love to be counterculture and stuff. Chris: I think when any villain or monster starts to get well enough used, right, it becomes really fertile ground to make it into protagonists and good guys. Oren: Sure. Chris: Because that adds some novelty that is lost just by again, being used for villains over and over again. Not that you can’t have good necromancer villains in your stories, it’s just you have to do a little bit more work at this point to make them cool and scary. Whereas if you turn them into a protagonist, then you know there’s already a little more novelty to that. It won’t last forever. But right now. Bunny: Oh, so you could say, you either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself resurrected into a hero? Oren: Well, there’s also just an element of, wow, okay, so necromancers are classically evil, but that’s largely aesthetics-based. Bunny: Yeah. Let’s throw some bones on it. Oren: People reasonably ask, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with animating a skeleton to do stuff? Does it not matter more what the skeleton does than that it is a skeleton? And the answer to that is a little more complicated than I think some fantasy fans are willing to admit. We also generally understand that a person’s remains—we have at least some responsibility to leave them as the person wanted them to be left, and that probably didn’t include being made into a skeleton and dancing around for amusement. Chris: Yeah. You could create a culture where everybody’s like, yeah, no. The ultimate death is to have my skeleton walking around. Bunny: Yeah, I once wrote a flash fiction piece where if you were convicted of certain crimes, then you would be sentenced to—essentially your body would be used for necromantic labor. Chris: So now was this, they executed and then it’s used from necromantic labor? Or is it just like eventually when you die? Bunny: In this case, I think they were executed because I was being edgy, but… Oren: Ooh, so dark. Bunny: It was so dark. Chris: Yeah. Honestly, being like, “yeah, someday when you die, we’re gonna use your skeleton for labor” does not sound like a great deterrent when it comes to crime. Bunny: No. I think at that point you’d be like, oh, I don’t give a crap. Chris: Yeah. I would love to see a protagonist who is a skeleton and they have to like, somehow regain their health and get free of the necromancer master. Hmm. I think we could do that. Oren: That’s another one, right? Is that the trope, the default is that any undead you create are basically mindless. And if they’re conscious, that’s certainly a lot more complicated. Bunny: Yeah, it’s a lot more interesting and it’s a lot more interesting than having just like zombies, but they’re controlled by someone. Distinguish yourself from those zombies a bit. Be a bit more nuanced with it. Don’t make it just like basically a robot or a golem, but it’s a corpse because spooky. Like, you could do more. Chris: I also do think that if you are gonna make your necromancer a protagonist, one of the tricky things is that having undead minions is inherently a pretty powerful magical ability. And it’s great for villains, right? ’cause they automatically have minions that your protagonist can fight first before they get to the final boss. That’s very useful. But if you have a protagonist, you have to make sure that they’re not too powerful. If they’re like, raising lots of minions everywhere. They could have really big obstacles. Well, honestly, at that point I would [be] inclined to—how about, like, a newbie necromancer? A wannabe necromancer. They’re just getting started. They can raise one finger from the dead and the finger will crawl along and try to do their bidding. It’s the ultimate pull my finger. Oren: Once you take the magic and give it to a good guy, you have to start thinking about limits that were less important when a villain had it. Or I guess you could just do Gideon the Ninth and just have everything be super bombastic and powerful and, uh, not have to worry about that part. But… Chris: Yeah. But Gideon is not a necromancer herself. Oren: That’s true. Chris: And I think that’s important. Again, we can talk about other stories like Three Parts Dead, where the main character is a necromancer and can just do who knows what Oren: Sort of.  Bunny: Yeah. Kind of. There is a skeleton in that one. Chris: Yeah. But in Gideon, again, there’s another character. Even Gideon’s ally, Harrow, is semi antagonistic. So again. There’s tons of necromancy everywhere, but we know what Gideon can do and that is hack at things with a long sword. Oren: And before anyone emails us, yes, we do know that Harrow is the protagonist of the next book, but we haven’t read that one, so we can’t comment on it. Bunny: I don’t want to ’cause I don’t like Harrow. Oren: Yeah, that’s the reason. You solved it. We’re all on the table now. Bunny: You’re just prejudiced against necromancers. Oren: Uh, everyone knows the best necromancer good guy was a DnD character that I played back in college because I found this absolutely busted ability in one of the Unearthed Arcana books for 3.5 that let me exchange my familiar for a skeleton warrior who got stronger as I leveled up and was actually a better fighter than the fighter in the party. Chris: Oh, no. Bunny: Oof. Oren: Oof. Bunny: I feel bad for that fighter. Oren: I felt a little bad, but not bad enough to stop. Chris: Isn’t that how it always goes?  Oren: And then I went around and I actually read the rules on how to raise undead in 3.5. And they were a little busted. They were like, primarily limited by how many opals you had access to. ‘Cause that was the material component for raising undead and wasn’t that hard to get opal. So I ended up with a lot of minions and then I made my GM play—we were doing a little strategy game instead of DnD ’cause okay, the enemy rolls up and it’s like, all right, I position my five giant undead shrimp on the ridge here. Chris: Yeah. I mean, okay, so besides having a necromancer who is a villain or protagonist, necromancy can be used in other ways. You can have it as more of a cosmic-horrory thing, like a temptation for your characters. “Don’t resurrect your loved one. Don’t do it, Dawn. You hear me?”  Yeah, and what can be there is just something that people shouldn’t touch in the dark book or whatever you have, or it can be a part of your world where there’s not necessarily lots of necromancers that are famous, but the actual magic itself is used often. Which I feel like should lead us to the Necro Industrial Complex. Bunny: We knew it was coming. Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Necro Industrial Complex. For anyone who hasn’t listened to our old episodes, this was a concept I came up with, uh, from reading the 3.5 rules on skeleton raising ’cause in Fifth Edition, there were pretty strict limits on how many skeletons you can control. But those didn’t really exist in 3.5, at least not by my reading of the rules. It was basically just again, how many opals can you afford? And it occurred to me that these skeletons can basically do everything a human laborer can do, but forever. And they never tire and they don’t need money and they don’t need food and they don’t rest. So the amount of things you could do with them, like you could have a bunch of them turn a crank and start the Industrial Revolution with skeleton power. But skeletons are also powered by negative energy, which is established in some other parts of the book as having bad effects on stuff and turning everything more evil. So no, I figured that no process is a hundred percent efficient. So some negative energy must leak out of the undead over time, and if you have enough of them, you get Global Negative, Inc. And that’s a problem. Bunny: The hole in our optimism layer. Oren: That could be an interesting story, I suppose. Chris: Yeah. If you did have a world with lots of necromancy, it seems realistic that you would have a lot of labor offered by necromancers and everybody has their own skeleton servant. Oren: Yeah, but hang on, they gotta license those skeletons. You can’t just scrape everyone’s skeletons out of the ground. People whose skeletons those were deserve to profit from them. So you gotta pay a licensing fee. Chris: I don’t know. They were out there just like in an open graveyard that was open to the public. Does that mean that it’s free for me to just scrape them and use them for my own skeleton training purposes? Oren: Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna inhibit progress. Bunny: Yeah. Can’t stop innovation with too much regulation. I mean, in some places there’s—I’m pretty sure here in the US we think you put someone in a grave and they stay there forever. But you know, in some places in the world, it’s actually pretty common that you’re essentially leasing the grave. Like, your loved one will stay there for maybe five years and then they’ll get moved and someone else will take the grave. I think they get moved to—I don’t remember what they’re called, but it’s like they’re all stacked in like a building. It’s— Oren: Like a crypt? Bunny: More serious than that, I guess. Like a crypt or something. I forget. But at that point, why not just cremate everybody? Maybe they do get cremated, I forget, but I don’t think they just get cremated. I should have done my research on this. Oren: There are a lot of different burial rights and a lot of different funeral customs, right? You do have cremation. The reason why they might not do cremation is that’s actually hard. Cremating a body in a meaningful way without modern technology is difficult and resource intensive. Like, you can do it. You don’t need a blast furnace, but just doing it with whatever you happen to have lying around is not easy. So that might be a reason. Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like this happens in European countries and stuff, like thoroughly developed countries like Germany or something. Oren: I would imagine it’s a tradition at this point, right? It’s probably not. Chris: I think that what this means is that we all need an urban fantasy setting where Necromancers run all the funeral homes. Bunny: Yeah. Chris: And take care of your dead for you. And some of them may be on the side, animate some of those dead, but they’ll deny it if you ask them. Oren: Going back to the fantasy side of it, that is an interesting thing you can do if you wanna play with the morals of necromancy. Maybe necromancy isn’t inherently evil, but there’s a good chance depending on how your necromancy works, that your characters are like—any necromancers are directly benefiting from death. They either—it gives them more bodies to raise or it gives them more death energy to power their spells or whatever. And sure, people die all the time naturally on their own, but if you get power directly from that happening, you have a pretty strong incentive to move things along. So that could be interesting. You could play with that. Bunny: Yeah. If you wanted to get a little silly with it, it could also be like organ donation, right? I don’t know. Like you will your body to this necromancer, “this underserved industry needs more workers. Be generous. And will your skeleton to Nursing Homes Incorporated” or something? Oren: Look, if they’re gonna profit from my skeleton, again, I’m going to need a share. Please send money to my heirs for all the work my skeleton does. Chris: I wanna earn above minimum wage. Oh man. Can you imagine having some families just be inherently richer than others because they have a long line of skeletons that they still profit off of? Because they have a long family history with lots of people. Bunny: Oh, I’d read that. That definitely gives nouveau riche a new meaning. Chris: And then the orphans are extra poor ’cause they have no family connections and therefore are not making passive skeleton income. Bunny: Oh. Oren: Oh no. Oh my gosh. Bunny: This is how you have a four hour work week, is that you have all of your ancestors working in the mills. Oren: Big oof. Chris: I do think it’s worth talking a little bit more about what kind of powers, right? Obviously we’ve talked about skeletons a lot and there’s so much rich material that has not been tapped there. But again, I do think it’s worth broadening what powers might be considered necromancy, just a little, so that you can come up with more interesting things. And of course it always can be a combination [of] things, like, you can always include reanimation if you want to. So we talked about having intelligent undead, or [were] talking about, I think it’s Magic Bites that has—vampires are raised by necromancers, but for some reason that means they’re just mindless corpses. Oren: I hated that, I did not like that part of Magic Bites. For one thing, the necromancers are called the People, which is the worst name for them, like, they’re not even communist. You would hope they would be communists with a name like that, but no. They’re just a group of necromancers, so it’s such a generic name that I had to keep reminding myself who they were talking about when they said the People. Bunny: Those ones over there. Oren: Then also the vampires are just, yeah, we have vampires, but they’re really just flesh golems that our necromancers pilot around, which is—why call them vampires at that point? Is it just to give a little middle finger to any vampire fans who read this book and were hoping for real vampires? Bunny: Yeah, I’d feel cheated. Oren: It’d be like if you had a, “Hey, we have werewolves in this setting,” and it’s just like a dog that sheds all its hair once a month. And we call them werewolves. That would be disappointing, right? It’s a weird thing to lead people on about. Bunny: Disappointing to us and disappointing to the rug.  Chris: But you could have a situation where necromancers do create vampires and then maybe the vampires are self-sustaining after that, but they have an interesting relationship with a necromancer who started the line, for instance? Oren: Yeah. Chris: That could be a thing. Oren: I’ve seen fantasy stories before [where] that’s the origin of vampires, is that they were originally created by some powerful necromancers, such and such. Chris: And maybe they’re beholden to them or they have to like, they’re indentured for a while or something like that. Obviously there’s Talking to the Dead. I don’t feel like I see enough necromancers doing things with ghosts. Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts! Chris: Instead of just zombies. Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts! Oren: Oh man. Getting flashbacks to every Mage campaign I’ve ever run where we have to have a huge argument about whether or not ghosts fall under death or spirit. Bunny: I think the answer is just yes. Oren: And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like the changes they made in Mage: the Awakening. ‘Cause they added death as a type of magic, which hadn’t existed before in Ascension. And it just has a lot of weird overlaps with the other types of magic and it’s confusing and I did not love it. Chris: You could have a necromancer that deals with living spirits as well as the dead, or does things like steal souls from people’s bodies and swaps their bodies, or maybe even temporarily, somebody’s on their deathbed. It’s like, okay, we need to get some information on this person. I can keep them from crossing over for a little while. Oren: For me, I think what it comes down to is like you want it to feel like it’s its own thing and not just a reskin of another type of magic, and there’s always gonna be some gray areas, but if you want your necromancer to have like offensive spells, I think you can do that. I would just like them to be more in theme with like death or maybe even like vitality forces than like, for shooting a green ball of fire and saying that’s necromancy. Bunny: Or purple. Oren: I find that kind of boring. DnD does that sometimes. Like a bunch of spells or—they have a lot of damaged spells, but this one’s necromancy. For whatever reason, we said this one was. Chris: That does sound like something that would happen in a game where somebody’s trying to manage the mechanics and doesn’t want to create all new mechanics for raising skeletons, right? Oren: Yes. Chris: Instead of just casting a fireball. Oren: Correct. Chris: I think another one that’s really good is having your necromancers travel to the underworld, like Sabriel was probably one of the coolest depictions of necromancy I’ve seen, where she got her bells. Oren: I love the bells. Those are so cool. Chris: And they take her to different levels of the underworld and kind of command things. Very cool. Bunny: Underworld is just inherently cool. Chris: And of course, immortality. Powerful mages gotta have immortality.  Oren: Immortality is definitely one of those things that like, depending on how you flavor it can be necromancy or it can be something else. Bunny: Yeah, I feel like flavor, as we’ve been talking around, is a very important part of what makes something necromancy or not, like a Frankenstein’s monster type of creature is flavored as science rather than magic. So we probably wouldn’t think of it as necromancy, even though it’s pretty much necromancy. Oren: I was gonna list one of those actually.  Bunny: Okay, maybe I’m wrong. Oren: Frankenstein and Reanimator. I mean, we don’t call them necromancy, but I think a lot of the same tropes apply. Right? You are bringing to life something that was dead in a weird way. Things don’t go great when either Frankenstein or Herbert West does this. So that falls under the same milieu as it were. Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that they are given—some science aesthetics are put in there, but they’re also aesthetics like seeing bodies sewn together in the green color of Frankenstein’s monster and a lot of popular depictions that feel similar to magical necromancy. Bunny: Look, science is also green. Oren: Science is often green. That’s true. Bunny: I think you could also do something interesting with the necromancers if instead of focusing so much on like, just death, you could do more with Chris mentioned earlier as well and focus on like, vitality and the transfer of like vital forces and stuff like that because as much as it’s about death and that is, I would argue one of the important parts of necromancy, you could do more with the other half of that equation. Oren: Yeah. I’m a big fan of necromancers that just drain the life from other people to fuel themselves. I like to literalize the metaphor of the powerful draining the life from the less powerful. It’s a lot more fun with magic. Chris: I also think you can get more novelty if you focus more on non-humans. So you got your skeletal or zombie dragons, or— Bunny: Yeah. Chris: —perhaps your necromancers are just like all the plants around where they walk, die. Right, as [you] draw the life from them. And maybe you have weird skeletal trees, right? So you can—doesn’t always have to be humans and undead humans all the time. Bunny: The trees are necromancers. Oren: There’s a very fun moment in the Dresden Files where he is like looking at the rules against necromancers and he notices the law only technically applies to human remains. So he like, summons a zombie T-Rex from the museum. I don’t remember if the book acknowledged the fact that the dinosaur on display is probably a plaster mold and not the actual bone, but I was willing to give him a pass on it. Chris: Yeah, that’s cool enough. If you believe hard enough that it’s bone, it’s bone. Was there an explanation for why it’s not allowed with humans? Is it just we’re being disrespectful to dead bodies, or was there something inherently harmful? Bunny: Skosh. Oren: I’m pretty sure—okay. If I remember correctly in the books, it’s been a while. There was an implication that necromancers are inherently evil, but it was never really explored. Dresden does that and he doesn’t suffer any negative effects. He doesn’t become corrupted from using necromancy to bring back a T-Rex. It’s possible that it was supposed to be like a closed-minded law, or maybe we were just not supposed to question it, and we assumed that it would be evil to bring back a human who knows. One thing that I was surprised by is from reading a couple of books with necromancers in them, I think people maybe have a stronger sense of like necromancer costume aesthetics than I did. Like in Three Parts Dead, there was this thing about necromancers wearing skull caps, which is a pun obviously, but also literal. The character Tara was playing against type by not wearing a skull cap, like a literal skull cap, not a figurative one made of a skull. I was really confused by that. Is that a thing? I try to think of all the necromancers I’ve seen and I don’t remember them having that outfit. Chris: Yeah, that’s news to me. That must be just—I would’ve not thought of them wearing skull caps. Bunny: That must just be like a Three Parts Dead thing. If I had to guess. I don’t know. Oren: Gideon the Ninth did the same thing too, where it was like, ah, necromancers, and their like goth punk aesthetic with lots of spikes and stuff. Chris: Was that all of them or was that just like the Ninth House that wore the like skull face paint? Oren: At least like the skull face paint. Okay, sure. Skull is bones and stuff. They do that. But I swear they had like silver studs and stuff. Maybe I’m making that up. Bunny: Did they also have skull caps? Chris: I don’t think so. Oren: Not that I remember. Bunny: Okay. Okay.  So that’s not a universal part of the aesthetic then. I was gonna say, I feel like. Yeah, I would be very behind if I’d learned that right now. Chris: Yeah. The most aesthetic thing, I think about Three Parts Dead of Tara is just learning that even though they seem immortal and unaging over time, they do wither away into like skeletons themselves. So that was a neat detail. Other than that, it was interesting ’cause she seems a lot more like a magical lawyer than she does like a necromancer for most of the book. Oren: Yeah. She is only a necromancer on a technicality. What kind of magic can Tara do? Yes. Bunny: Face removal magic. Oren: Yeah. She just has, among other things, a spell that lets you take off someone’s face and keep it in your bag. And they are, of course, they cannot be harmed while their face is removed. Obviously. You can’t be hurt without a face. Chris: But removing somebody’s face while leaving them alive does seem appropriate because it sounds like next to manipulating death, but not exactly traditional necromancy. So I like that one. But yeah, most of what she does, it sounds like all magic in that setting is just powered by souls. Oren: Maybe. The book is vague about what powers a lot of magic. Bunny: The stars. Chris: Oh, that’s right. I forgot. That was very strange. I guess I just wanted it to all be powered by souls because that would make it feel more cohesive. Bunny: That’d be thematically cohesive. The star thing is… Oren: That was one of the things that bothered me about that book series is that it was like, Hey, magic comes from people’s life energy. And so you get magic by convincing a bunch of people to give you some of their soul or life energy or whatever. Or also you can get it from the stars, I guess NBD. Chris: It’s like, what?   Bunny: But not if it’s Cloudy. Chris: So last thing I might mention is. Again, should you have other forms of magic besides necromancy in your setting? Three Parts Dead has just divine magic and necromancy. All the mages, as far as I know, are necromancers I think, and that can depend on if you want a setting that’s really horrific and you want magic to feel horrific, it can actually be better to not have any other form of magic. Because this disempowers people and makes it a bigger temptation to use necromancy. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because there’s nothing else. And that’s very creepy and can be very cosmic horrorish. Whereas if you add other kinds of magic, that will, again, empower people and give them magic to fight necromancers. That is not evil, but you can make aesthetic contrast that way. You just, as Oren said, don’t just have the fireball be different colors. You want it to feel like a different type of magic, but at the same time you can have your golden rays of light and plants blooming and other things that are meant to contrast with your darker necromancy magic. Oren: All right, with that, I think we will rebury this podcast ’cause the energy animating it is starting to fade. Bunny: No, [it’s] not starry enough to sustain my power. Chris: And if this episode helped bring you back to life, then consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Slash Mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to invoke the spirits of some of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is 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. Chris?: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.

I’d love to tell you what the topic is this week, but then what reason would you have to keep reading the rest of this blurb? Obviously, the best option is to string you along by abruptly ending each sentence without really giving you any information or closure. At least, that’s the strategy behind cliffhangers, which is what we’re talking about today. Advice around these can get pretty weird, and if there’s one thing we hope you take away from this podcast, it’s to not treat your audience as the enemy. Also, we’re upset at the streaming model even though we will never willingly go back to the way things used to be. Show Notes Annoying Cliffhangers  Buy My Book! Unreliable Narrator Demon Slayer  Best of Both Worlds  Orphan Black Cliffhanger  First Kill Ending  Dark Matter Red Seas Under Red Skies  The Alchemyst  Luke Tosses His Lightsaber  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] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orie. With me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Oh, no! This podcast is going to end without saying what the topic is. I’d better say it now! The topic is… Thank you for listening. Please do the Patreon stuff and like that smash button and share/scribe to all of your friends and yeah, that’s… I think we can call it, guys. That was a good podcast. Bunny: Yeah, if we don’t do that, why would people listen to the next episode? Oren: Yeah, come back next time and you’ll find out what today’s topic is. Bunny: It was a princess with a shiny tail… I don’t know the closing theme as well. I definitely won’t be too mad to continue if we do that. Oren: Yeah, it’ll work right. Everything’s fine. Nothing bad is going to happen here. I wouldn’t worry about it. Chris: It’s only a cliffhanger if they’re literally hanging off a cliff. Otherwise, it’s sparkling dissatisfaction. Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We need to get into term policing of cliffhangers. Bunny: That was going to be how I was going to start. Oren: Yeah. So today we’re talking about cliffhangers and whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. And if you’ve read my previous coverage of the topic, you probably won’t be surprised which side I take. We do first have to answer what is a cliffhanger. So I discovered, having published a book… Oh, I published a book. Buy my book. That’s my whole personality now. Chris: Ooh! Oren: …that people are way more liberal with the description of what a cliffhanger is than I thought, because I had several people tell me that my book ended on a cliffhanger, and I didn’t think it did! Chris: No, that is not… Oren: I don’t think that’s a cliffhanger, guys! I didn’t think it was one, but, you know, they didn’t like it. It was annoying. So, you know, the customer’s always right to a certain extent, I guess. Bunny: Yeah. Customer is always pedantic. I don’t think that counts. Chris: Granted, you can’t always expect all the people online to be… It’s like with the unreliable narrators. People now use that for all kinds of things that are not unreliable narrator, and we can’t necessarily expect people on the internet to be very particular about the way they use terms. Oren: And I don’t want to make it sound like I’m putting people who read my book on blast if they didn’t like the ending, and that’s perfectly legitimate. Maybe the ending’s bad, who knows? But I don’t think it was a cliffhanger because, without any spoilers, it leaves a plot thread unresolved, but it doesn’t end in the middle of a fight, which is what I would consider a cliffhanger. Chris: Yeah. Oren: I would consider a cliffhanger something that ends in the middle of an open, urgent conflict. So it could be literally hanging off a cliff, it could be an argument, it could be a fight. That’s what I would consider a cliffhanger. Chris: Yeah, I think so. In most cases, there’s something new that arises, some new urgent threat that becomes last minute, and then it’ll cut off immediately after it happens. Like someone breaking in, and then lifting a knife to stab the protagonist! And then cut, go to black, would be something that is a typical cliffhanger. It’s something new, but it’s also annoyingly urgent, so it gives you a feeling of annoyance. Whereas we talk about hooks a lot, and we recommend those to end with, because people… I’ve heard a lot of people recommend, “Oh, you just end chapters with cliffhangers.” That is not my opinion, but I do often recommend having a little hook, and the difference is just… Again, it’s not something that you feel like has to be addressed that second, so the… For instance, the protagonist might learn the villain broke into a place and stole powerful weapons. Like yeah, they will probably use that weapon in the future, it is going to cause trouble, but they are not currently aiming that weapon at somebody, about to shoot that. Bunny: Yeah, it seems like it’s a cliffhanger if you’re justified in using the Dun Dun Duuuun music. Chris: Yeah, that… That’s a good measure. Oren: And people also describe endings where a sudden new thing shows up, even if it’s not necessarily a conflict. You’ve spent the whole book with the protagonist doing stuff and having an adventure, and then the book ends, and in the final scene, their long-dead spouse walks in the door and then you cut to ending. People might describe that as a cliffhanger. And even though there’s not a fight, right? they’re not like… As far as we know, there’s no reason to think that the spouse is attacking anyone. But the extreme curiosity of, “What, hang on, I thought the spouse was dead. What’s happening?” That could be considered a cliffhanger, maybe. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Bunny: Yeah. And I think also what counts as a cliffhanger can also depend on the scale that it’s appearing at. So something that might count as a cliffhanger at the end of a story would be less of one if it was simply ending a chapter, just because one happens on a smaller scale than another one. At the very least, that’ll change how the audience takes it. Chris: Yeah, I would say that if it’s something that’s designed to make it so that the audience cannot rest at a place that is normally designed for them to take a break, including chapter endings, that it could qualify as a cliffhanger. But I would say that, generally, the type of hooks that people would have as end of chapter often would not be as large. They could be as large as the end of the book, but often just because that’s a smaller break. Oren: So the way that I look at it is that cliffhangers at the end of chapters, or the end of scenes, to a certain extent, are probably inevitable if your book has interesting high-tension conflicts, just ’cause you do want to end those with a hook; you don’t want to feel like the story is over. And those don’t have to be cliffhangers, but they probably will be sometimes. Like, that’ll just be the most convenient thing you’ve got to hand. It’s like, “Man, I’ve been going for a while, I need a stopping point, but I’m about to start another fight.” I could put in a new, completely different hook, or I could just have the fight be about to start. “All right, I’m calling it, this chapter needs to be ended at some point.” So that’s probably going to happen. I would say don’t do it a lot, but a few times it’s probably not going to kill your story. Chris: I would also say, if it’s a hook, it’s more likely to be accompanied by some kind of satisfying resolution, and that’s more usable because we fulfilled some of our promises to readers, but at the same time left something open for interest instead of closing up nothing. Oren: Right. Bunny: Right. Chris: Or, for instance, I think it was Demon Hunter, the anime that just had this really annoying habit of always ending an episode right before a fight started. The actual story arcs were deliberately misaligned with where episodes would end. Bunny: That’s obnoxious. Chris: So that you always felt like you had to watch the next one, and then they would actually resolve the arcs in the middle of the episode and then open new ones. Bunny: See, I feel like the reason people, and by people I think I mean us, because by now I feel like our standpoints on this are pretty clear, the reason that cliffhangers are so annoying is because they tend to be used for things like commercial breaks, for instance, where it’s really disingenuous: “Watch this commercial about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the sponsor of today’s podcast, to learn where things are going next.” And I think about cliffhangers the same way I think about jump scares: It works, but it’s a cheap trick, and sure, it can be done well, I suppose, and some people really like jump scares, and true, it affects me the way it’s supposed to, I jump when I’m jump-scared, but it’s not a pleasant experience. Oren: It has been fascinating to look at streaming shows over the years as they evolved from regular TV shows, which had commercial breaks built into them, because everyone knew what the commercial breaks were going to be approximately, and so they would build those into the episode, and so you had these obvious breaks for commercial, and they were often cliffhangers, right? because commercials are annoying. “Don’t change the channel! You have to come back.” And then streaming shows came out and they had those same breaks for a while, even though they didn’t have any commercials. And then those went away and streaming shows stopped having those breaks ’cause they didn’t need them. But now all the streamers have commercials again, and a lot of their shows haven’t caught up. So a lot of the breaks for commercials are in very awkward places. Bunny: Ugh, the villain turn. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think, again, hooks are good, and there is definitely a fuzzy boundary between a hook and a cliffhanger where it gets more annoying. I do think that a lot of cliffhangers, especially if the storyteller is in the habit of always using a cliffhanger at the end of everything, in effort to bring the audience back, I feel a little like that starts to get into Black Hat storytelling, where our purpose is no longer to actually serve our audience and give them the best experience we can, but instead to manipulate them for our benefit. And that’s the thing that I don’t like. I think that I want to win, but I also want them to win. I don’t want to feel like I’m in competition or playing against my audience, right? Bunny: I think I have genuinely quit shows before because I reached a place where the episode didn’t end on a cliffhanger and a thing got resolved and things seemed to be okay, and I’m like, “I know if I keep watching, I’ll start hitting those anxiety-causing cliffhanger endings again and just be dragged along,” and it gets exhausting. I would rather end here in the middle of the show where there’s a semblance of resolution than continue being dragged along. Oren: That is the best way. If we could all get the audiences for all shows together and convince them to do that, that would stop writers from putting in annoying cliffhangers. So, hang on. I’ve got my new organizational platform ready. Bunny: I’ll sign up. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Yeah, where’s the dotted line? Chris: I do think there’s a real chance that cliffhangers give a short-term boost, right? where people are more likely to read the next installment, but at the cost of a long-term following. And because, again, short-term gains are always just so much easier to measure than long-term loss or gain, but we don’t really know, I think for sure. But I have also, you know, I quit Orphan Black because of the cliffhanger at the end of the season. I felt very cheated by that. I felt like that was what was supposed to resolve at the end of the season, so even though I had been mostly enjoying the show, I decided not to continue for that reason. So it can cause people to leave. It’s possible. The numbers are hard to tell, right? Oren: Yeah. One of the reasons I quit Foundation over on Apple was the same reason, although Foundation wasn’t a great show in other ways, but… Chris: Oh, Foundation was the absolutely… like, when I think of the ultimate worst cliffhanger I have ever seen, it’s the Foundation show. Oren: Yeah. Spoilers for Foundation if anyone cares. So there’s an episode where we discover that someone we thought was a good guy has murder-knifed another good guy, and they’re all dead and it’s all terrible and bloody. And our protagonist sees this and is like, “Why did you do this? What’s going to happen?” Chris: And to be clear about the emotional investment here, it’s the protagonist’s boyfriend who kills their mentor. Oren: Yeah. Chris: So this is like a group of three who are very tight-knit as far as we know. They’ve been getting along great; we have no reason why he would just suddenly turn around and murder the mentor, so it’s very bewildering. Oren: And then the murderer throws the protagonist into an escape pod, and she is sent off into the void, and episode ends. Okay, I guess we gotta come back next episode to find out what that was about. Next episode we’re like, “Hey, we’ve jumped to the future. You don’t get to find out what that was about.” Bunny: Ugh, that’s awful. Chris: Yeah, now we’re at the colony with other people now, and it’s three episodes of that before we get back to her, and even when we get back to her, we don’t get answers, right? She’s now in the future. So it’s just… it’s awful. Bunny: And that’s the problem that… A very similar thing happens when you do too many cliffhangers in your chapters, especially if you have multiple points of view. Again, I’ve had books do this to me where a chapter will end on a cliffhanger and then it switches to another character’s point of view and I… I just… I skip that chapter because I know that chapter is going to end on another cliffhanger, and so I just read the chapters out of order. Oren: Man, Feast for Crows ends… Spoilers for Feast for Crows, I guess; it’s a billion years old now, one of its endings is this big cliffhanger of whether Brienne is still alive or not. We had to wait six years for the next book, and in the next book she’s maybe alive. It’s actually unclear if the character we see claiming to be Brienne is actually her. And then that book ends. So we never even found out. And we never will. Bunny: Oh my gosh. Oren: Which is the biggest danger of ending your show, book, or whatever on a cliffhanger, because you might not ever get back to it. If you’re an author, you might just lose steam and not ever write the next one. And if you’re a television show creator, especially now, where it just seems like they murder shows left and right because the streaming bubble is collapsing, there’s an even higher chance that you’ll never come back to finish the show. So it’s… oof, it is a… Man, that is a gamble you are taking. Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, Isn’t that what happened to… uh, I think it was called First Kill, where it ended at least on a very low note and then it didn’t get renewed? Oren: No, I wouldn’t… Okay. I wouldn’t say quite that with First Kill. Chris: I think First Kill still resolved a lot of things that were mainly addressed in the season. It just opened up another big hook for the next season. I think that was a little more reasonable. Bunny: Ah, okay. Oren: Yeah. For spoilers for the end of First Kill, but it’s like a Romeo and Juliet-type story, and it ends with the two of them running off together. I think that’s what happens, right, Chris? Chris: Yeah. But then, I think, one of their brothers has got some bad evil plans of some kind. It’s been a while. Oren: Yeah, it’s clearly laying a big hook for season two, and it’s disappointing that that was never made. I liked First Kill. But I’m thinking of something more like the show Dark Matter, or I should say one of the shows called Dark Matter. This is the sci-fi one that tried to be Firefly and it ends with an evil alien fleet from another dimension warping in. And that’s it. Show over. Bunny: Wow. Chris: I mean, they were probably trying to do a TNG, which I can sympathize because The Next Generation, Best of Both Worlds, again, if you’ve only seen it in reruns, you may not know how torturous this cliffhanger was, because Best of Both Worlds, that two-parter was three months apart. Oren: Yeah. Although I have to be honest: I’ve joked about that, but nowadays, three months apart for a show cliffhanger feels like nothing. I used to joke, “Oh, we had it so much worse.” I actually realized: no, it’s worse now! Chris: Yeah! Oren: It takes two years, if you’re lucky, for a show to get another season now. It’s ridiculous! Chris: And honestly, those streaming service shows are really relentless with trying to do all the cliffhangers and fancy doodads. Honestly, they just get too elaborate with their stories and try too many reveals. Just tell a good story, come on. But in any case, we got only eight episodes that are two years apart, and I just… I’m just waiting for streaming servicess to realize, “Oh, we need to keep our subscribers, not just to get them to subscribe in the first place. So we should actually have a 22-episode season now.” Oren: Yeah, someone can suggest, “Hey, what if we spent less money per episode so we could have more episodes?” And they can call it, like, Disruptive Micro-Prestige Television. And it’s not really that simple, there are other reasons why streaming seasons are so short, but one of the reasons is the arms race of spending so much money per episode. Not the only reason, but it’s a big one. Bunny: And the gaps between seasons and stuff like that is one of the reasons I just can’t really get into television, I’ve found. Because not even necessarily… and I think cliffhangers are a big part of it, but not necessarily the only part, is because you’re never guaranteed to get a satisfying outcome to anything that happens. Chris: Especially if it’s a mystery box show. Bunny: And an incomplete TV show. Yeah, no, exactly. Chris: Yeah, that’s true. Oren: I could complain about what TV is like now for the next five hours, but moving back into the realm of books, because I think most people who listen to this are probably more likely to be writing books than TV shows… Chris: That’s right, those things. Oren: Those weird, like, collections of pages. Who knows? Chris: Going back to just when cliffhangers work personally, regardless of the medium (books, shows, graphic novels), I am much more sympathetic to a cliffhanger if it’s the end of the penultimate installment. So if we have a series of any kind where it’s the second-to-last episode of the season, or the second-to-last issue in a series of comics, or the second-to-last book in a series, I’m just much more sympathetic to having a cliffhanger on those ones, because I feel like that kind of helps escalate and generate excitement for the finale, so it just feels more appropriate to me. Oren: Yeah. One thing that I would strongly recommend for anyone who’s thinking of adding a cliffhanger, regardless of where you’re adding it, is make sure you can actually follow up on the cliffhanger. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Because sometimes that’s harder than it sounds, and there are a number of cliffhangers that are more annoying than normal because they end with, like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen?” And then they come back and it’s like, “Oh, it wasn’t actually a big deal. Don’t worry about it.” Chris: Which I think is another issue with this whole mentality, that every chapter needs to end on a cliffhanger, is writers try to push it too much and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t really have a cliffhanger here.” Okay, does this make up something that doesn’t actually work? Bunny: It’s definitely like… If you watch a lot of old serials (not the food, the serial shorts and stuff like that), where it’ll feature some hero doing heroics and stuff like that, like the old Batman shorts or something, it’ll always end on a cliffhanger because they want you to watch the next installment or whatever. And so it’ll be like, “Oh, the hero’s in a car, and the car went over a cliff and it crashed. And it exploded. How will the hero escape?” And then the next episode, it’s like the hero got out of the car before it went over the cliff. And they weren’t actually in any danger, and that’s the worst way to pay off a cliffhanger. Chris: That happens a lot with the “Oh, I know! Let’s create a threat by making a character that does not actually mean any harm/look threatening,” or having them end on a dramatic line that suggests they’re mad when they’re not actually angry. Oren: My favorite is when it’s just like, “Yeah, it was just the thing you guessed it probably was, but we’re going to pretend like that was a surprise.” In Red Seas Under Red Skies, which is a novel I otherwise actually like a lot, but it starts with this flash-forward of, “Oh no, my friend is betraying me!” And of course, as you’re reading, you’re like, “Okay, these characters are tricksters and they all are constantly pretending to betray each other.” So he’s probably only pretending to betray you ’cause you’ve done that several times at this point. And then you catch up to that point in the story ’cause it’ll flash-forward and yeah, he was pretending to betray you. Whoa, whoa! Chris: Yeah, there’s a lot of places in books where I can tell a line is just too dramatic, and so the storyteller is definitely just inflating a hook because there’s just no way that they can follow up on that. I think a good example is in The Alchemist. There’s this chapter that ends with saying this character “saw something and realized that the world would never be the same again.” And it’s like, “Okay, what? I very much doubt…” And then the next chapter it’s like, oh, he saw some people robbing the shop. That’s what it was. That’s your chapter hook. Oren: The worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone. Chris: World will never be the same! Bunny: It’s like the trademark trailer lines that are just like in there to have a soundbite that sounds intriguing and dramatic but doesn’t actually have much to do with anything. Oren: It’s like lines that don’t make sense in context if they actually make it into the show or the movie. Chris: Right. Sometimes they don’t. Oren: In season two of Discovery, they have Pike say, “We’re going to go exploring and have a little fun along the way,” and you think, you stop for a second, you’re like, “Why would he say that?” That is a weird line in context. That doesn’t sound like something he would say to his crew. But the reason he says it is that in the trailers, they’re trying to let us know that season two will be less grimdark than season one. Chris: And it was a lie. Oren: Yeah, it was kind of a lie. But they knew that we thought it was too grimdark. So there was marketing about how it was going to be less grimdark this time, and that’s why that line exists. Bunny: I didn’t see him do a sarcastic eyeroll and finger quotes. “Let’s have some ‘fun.’” Oren: Oh, another one that is just one of the most annoying kinds of cliffhangers ever is when it seems like the story is over, and then, to create a cliffhanger, the author undoes the victories that the protagonists just won. Chris: Rude of you to attack Stranger Things 4 that way. Oren: Yeah, rude of me, except I’ll never apologize ’cause I was right to do it. Bunny: It’s the anti-resolution. Oren: It’s like, Stranger Things 4, they go through this whole thing of blowing up the bad guys and doing all the stuff, and they win and they have their hard-fought victory. And then at the end, oh no, the bad guy did the thing he was trying to do anyway. I guess he just did it after you left. Good job, everybody. Bunny: Oops. Should have stuck around another five minutes. Oren: Yeah. Come back in five years and you’ll maybe see a resolution to this. All of the children will be in their late twenties by then. Chris: In the category of having a cliffhanger and then skipping over the actual resolution to that cliffhanger in the story, which happens for a couple reasons, I think, and sometimes it happens just because the story doesn’t really have anything to do there, like a character walks dramatically in, is like, “We need to talk,” and then they just skip the conversation ’cause they didn’t have anything for them to say. Like in The Last of Us, where the characters are in a really tough situation to get out of, you know, as they’ve just been shot, and we end there, and then, “Oh, look, they’ve arrived at safety when we open the next episode, please forget where they left off.” Oren: There is another kind, and you can argue whether this is a cliffhanger or not, but it’s certainly related, and this is where you end the story, not on a new conflict, but right before the resolution of your conflict. So, like, the conflict is over, but you haven’t seen the resolution yet, and that is especially awkward because you can’t start the next story with resolution, ’cause that’s boring. That means the next story would start off on a really boring note. But it also means that the next story, if it doesn’t have that resolution, then it will make the first one feel unsatisfying. And I’m not just talking about the first two Star Wars sequel movies, but I am definitely talking about them, right? Because The Force Awakens, the whole movie is spent trying to find Luke, theoretically. And we find him, and then the movie ends before we can get the resolution. And Rian Johnson gets a lot of flak for having Luke just toss his lightsaber away and having that be the opening of Last Jedi. Or not the opening, but that’s like where it starts with Rey, right? But on the other hand, what else was he supposed to do? Like, just have the Rey sequence be, “Alright, you found me. Now we’re going to do uncomplicated training”? No, that should have been the result of the last movie. Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely… I feel like that plays into the sort of weird, staggering thing that you talked about earlier, where things resolve in the middle because you want to constantly have cliffhangers at the end. Oren: Yeah. Gotta keep bullying me into coming back, ’cause you couldn’t just make the show good. Bunny: That’s hard, Oren. Oren: You gotta withhold satisfaction from me. Chris: It might be worth giving some tips for. Okay: if we do want something at the end of the chapter, then we create it without something that’s annoying. I do think that just having a resolution first helps, again, so people get some satisfaction. Having it so that you have, for instance, a chapter plot arc that actually ends before you bring up something can be helpful. A lot of times I don’t think you necessarily need to add a new problem to create a hook; you just have to remind people of the plot that’s already there that hasn’t been resolved yet. So if you have your big throughline for your story, whether it’s defeating the big bad or going through a dangerous journey, right? talk about what step is next and why that step is going to be dangerous. That can help. You can raise questions that are not somebody dead walking in the door, but then just be like, “Hey. I thought back about this. How come this happened? Or why did this person do that?” to bring a little curiosity in without having a huge twist right at the end. Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the biggest one is just keep it relevant. Don’t completely pivot. It should have something to do with what you’ve already done and where you’re going. Oren: Admittedly, the current project that I’m trying to work on, I do really want to end it with the long-dead spouse walking through the door, but I probably shouldn’t. The urge is real. Bunny: You’re putting it on record saying you think that is bad and should not be done. Oren: Do as I say, not as I do! Bunny: You’re shaming your future self into avoiding the worst temptations. Chris: I do think, as storytellers, we’re naturally drawn to the big, dramatic things. In addition to things that are clever, of course. Oren: We do love to be shocking and clever at the same time. Chris: Yeah, I think often a little hook is just about advertising what’s next, right? Because presumably you’ll continue to have cool, exciting things in the next section of the story. So if you have the ability to bring those things up and remind readers of them, that can be a good way to do it. Bunny: Yeah, really, if you have that, you shouldn’t need cliffhangers per se. Like, you can have them, but if you’ve got this other stuff going on, you shouldn’t need them to get the reader invested in continuing to read or watch or whatever. Oren: All right, with those words of wisdom, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you felt satisfied rather than annoyed by this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who have never left us hanging. First, there’s Aman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Generative AI is everywhere these days, whether we like it or not. And to be clear, we very much do not like it. From LLM slop crowding out real search results to image generators putting artists out of work, we are not at all fans of this Franken-baby created by unregulated tech companies and amoral venture capital. But, zooming in a little further, today we’re talking about how so-called “AI” affects writers and storytellers. We’ll talk about our own experience with it, why the ethical implications are so important, and why this feels like the Metaverse all over again. Show Notes AI Generated Novella LLMs Stealing Stuff Pompei Scrolls  Google Books Case  Failure of the Metaverse  New York Times Lawsuit  Adobe’s Image Generator  Perplexity: LLM That Defeats Paywalls  Ao3 Getting Scraped  Problem of Investigative Journalism  Open AI Takedown Request Transcript Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  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.  Chris: I’ve got it. The new podcast creation tool of the future.  Bunny: Ooh, what could it be?  Chris: Okay, here we’re gonna just republish our previous episodes, but then re-edit it to mix them up. So every episode will be a clip show, ’cause people love clip shows, right? Oren: Famously.  Bunny: Yeah. You gotta put those on TikTok.  Chris: Yeah. So you see the future is really the past. It’s so deep.  Bunny: My brain just curled into a knot.  Chris: Oh shoot. I just realized something. We need new ideas, of course. We’ll just take them from other podcasts. It’s fine. You know, we could ask permission, but they might say no. Bunny: [Laughter] Chris: So I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t ask permission.  Oren: Right. ’cause we wouldn’t wanna give them a chance to inhibit progress. [sarcastic] Chris: Yeah, we’re being very innovative, okay? [sarcastic] Bunny: Don’t they know this is the internet and therefore they should have known what they were getting into? [sarcastic] It’s just a thief’s paradise.  Chris: If they didn’t want us to use pieces of their podcast and insert it into our own podcast, why did they make it public? Okay? It’s publicly available. [Laughter] Clearly. It’s a fair game.  [sarcastic] Bunny: [Laughter] Slam dunk.  Oren: Or it might not be publicly available. [Chuckle] Maybe we’ll just buy a big stack of private podcasts and pirate them and then use them for our clip show.  Bunny: Oh, even better  Chris: Or sneak past their paywall to steal their podcast and add it to our clip show. Oren: Crime is the answer, okay? We have discovered entirely new ways to commit crimes. Bunny:  Podcast crime. Chris: So innovative. So we’re talking about machine learning, commonly called AI and in particular generative AI or large language models.  Bunny: Thanks. I hate it. [Laughter]  Chris: Now, I have to say I’m not all against machine learning stuff, not all of it.  I’m not just “the technology is bad.” I do like to differentiate the actual technology from how it’s being used. I don’t even hate all generative stuff.  There are definitely use cases where it is helpful and makes tedious work faster. I think the big problem is that for tech companies, what they want to advertise is replacing creative workers because that’s flashy and gets them all the investor bucks. And that’s the whole “move fast and break things” mindset where they identify a new niche and then they try to raise tons of money really fast and move into the space really, really fast and claim territory before anybody else and be “disruptors”.   Oren: Right. Because the investor class doesn’t care if you’ve created a piece of software that can help analyze burned scrolls from Pompeii to help us figure out what they say, which is a real thing that machine learning is being used for and is super cool, but that’s not gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money. What is gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money is telling people that you found a way to not have to hire writers anymore.  Bunny: So unfortunately that is the main thrust of a lot of the hype, and I don’t know, for me, I feel like I have… some of my friends and my parents call this kind of a basic view of AI. And maybe it is.  But my fundamental problem with AI is that the way the current models are trained. I feel like the ethics question — you can’t talk about the ethics of AI without that — and I think that’s pretty patently unethical. So is there a way to use AI ethically when it was trained in this way? I don’t know. I don’t think so.  Chris: Yeah. I feel like AI, generative AI that’s being widely advertised is like an ouroboros, where it has a basic conceptual problem, which is that it depends on training data, which it also destroys, right? [Laughter] By competing with it.  Again, I’m not an IP lawyer, so take any legal stuff I say with a grain of salt. But everybody is citing this Google Books court case because if somebody wants generative AI to be fair use, they will make the argument that it is. That’s just how it works. Just like they’ll make the argument that, oh, well, this is just the inevitable future, so there’s no point in fighting it. There’s just a lot of disingenuous arguments that come with it.  But the Google Books case was ruled fair use. Google was taking everybody’s books and it was scanning them in, but it is not creating a competing product with the book. If you’ve ever had a Google Book search result, it shows you only a really small portion of the book. You can’t read the rest, right? So it’s not replacing a book sale and that’s really crucial to one of the reasons why it was ruled “Fair use”.  Generative AI is just a very different case. Because it has a huge effect on the market of the original and can destroy its own training data by putting all the people who create that training data out of business, which is just shortsighted from the tech perspective too. But when everybody is afraid of getting left behind and they’re all racing to claim the space first, they don’t really stop and look at what is the long-term viability.  Bunny: It’s definitely bandwagoning. I noticed this in just a lot of websites that suddenly have AI features where none are necessary. LinkedIn now has an AI feature and Quora has one.  Chris: Don’t even talk to me about Quora.  Bunny: [Laughter] Okay, I shall not say its name. But my roommate’s book recommendation app. The point of the app was to ask people for book recommendations and now it’s got like a stupid little AI thing that responds in addition to those. And you can’t turn it off.  There are just AI things in a bunch of places now where they don’t need to be. Even putting the ethics aside, it’s really obnoxious.  Oren: It’s also definitely hit the point where the people who have invested so much money in this are now also invested in making you think that this is gotta be the way of the future, ’cause they’re so committed.  It’s like how Facebook wouldn’t shut up about the Metaverse for several years because they had invested so much money in the metaverse. And fortunately it was only Facebook. This is like if everyone had invested in the Metaverse.  Chris: Mm-Hmm.   Bunny: Oh boy. Quora is part of the Metaverse, now. Oren, Chris, Bunny: [Laughter] Chris: Again, there is a way to fix this problem with the technology. It’s simply to pay for the training data. It’s that simple because if the training data is paid for, then that supports the creation of new content. So it’s no longer cannibalizing itself anymore. And of course companies don’t wanna pay and they say they can’t. Oren: That wailing you just heard is all of the companies claiming they can’t afford it. Chris: And they’re probably lying, but we don’t know for sure. There’s other expenses involved. It’s impossible to know for sure. At the same time, Adobe has an actual licensed image generator, but it did it in a very underhanded way where it had Adobe stock and some pre-existing contracts that were agreed to before the existence of generative AI.  But the language just allowed for the creation of new products. So a lot of people who did not actually wanna agree to this have a contract that technically allows it. At the same time, it seems like it could be viable for, for instance, a large stock photo site to get mass buy-in to create generative images. So that’s one reason I think they’re probably lying. But at the same time, if our choices are between AI and the creative workers who actually create new ideas and are actually innovating in countless areas of knowledge, I’m gonna have to choose the creative workers. Obviously, I’m biased since I am one, but… Oren: If I can’t afford a hammer, I don’t just get to demand that I be given one. That’s not how it works, man. Did you all suddenly forget money? That’s the premise of our economy. And I should just be clear. I do wanna mention that the thing about content holders using their contracts with creators really underhandedly with AI? That is a real problem.  I don’t want people to think that OpenAI is the only issue here. Because if Simon and Schuster decides that, oh, actually all of those contracts that you signed with us to publish your books, those all expand to AI now. And there’s no legal precedent saying they can’t do that? That would be a disaster. So let’s keep that part in mind too. Of course, this brings us to the very existentially uneasy question of: can AI write fiction? And the answer currently appears to be that it can write bad fiction with some human input. It can use probability models to create a block of text, which resembles bad fiction. I’ll put this in the show notes, but I read an AI generated novella for this podcast, which was not pleasant. Both just because AI makes me feel bad at the moment, I feel like I’m under siege by it. But the story itself was also really bad.  Nothing made any sense. Characters appeared from nowhere. The plot never went anywhere. The super genius hacker was really surprised that there were electronic defenses around the big government thing he was hacking.  But I also should note that it wasn’t like it was uniquely bad. There are humans who write this way too. So I, I don’t wanna sound like I’m trying to make some kind of appeal to the human soul. Chris: Do you know if this novella had any human intervention at all in it? Oren: Yeah. So the process, according to the person who made it, is–this was done using a specialist writing LLM. It wasn’t done with standard ChatGPT.  And what this person did was they typed up a brief synopsis of this cyberpunk story they wanted. They fed that into the program. The program then spat out a chapter by chapter summary/outline, and then the human rewrote the outline to the point where it was largely unrecognizable and then put that back into the app, and then the app spat out the text itself.  Chris: One thing that I personally think is the toughest is the small stuff. Sentence by sentence is definitely easier to predict than the large conceptual big picture stuff. My prediction when this started was that I didn’t think AI would write good novels anytime soon. And so far that seems to be true. And my reasoning was, it’s all about concepts. And this is something we talk about actually fairly regularly with lots of people trying to create plot structures that are too concrete and too specific. But real plot structure is based on very loose, abstract concepts that are based on emotion. And those are the very things that machine learning has trouble with. It doesn’t understand concepts. It only sees patterns in words and the correlation between concepts and emotions and specific words is a very loose correlation. And it’s not that it’s not theoretically possible, but I’m not sure there are enough novels on earth to train an AI to actually write a good novel. Bunny: There’s also just the issue of people disagreeing on what a good novel is, which is maybe a very basic point, but I feel like if we’re going to be heading towards a space where I type “write a good novel” and an AI spits one out, it feels worth mentioning. That in itself is not obvious.  Chris: Yeah, I mean there are definitely differences in opinion for sure. At the same time, there are also some works that people agree are good generally, or that more people agree these works are good. So we can honestly, [laughter] with some data, that’s something that machine learning is fairly good at, like creating an image that resembles images that people have rated highly, with the data. Oren: And with this story in particular, it’s notable that the prompts being put into it were not good either. And I don’t mean to knock the person who was doing this. I’m sure this was for a work assignment. I don’t think they put their A game into it, but if I was getting this outline that they created as a content edit, I would be like, okay, what’s the throughline? What is the bad guy trying to accomplish? How does the hero feel about it? Where did these two characters come from? They come out of nowhere in the outline too.  But this also speaks to something that people were asking me when ChatGPT first hit the scene. There was this question of, can I have a rough idea for a novel and ask ChatGPT to write it so I don’t have to think about the difficult choices of what actually goes into the novel? And as far as I can tell, the answer is no.  It’s possible that the software has gotten better since this article was written, but I haven’t found any other coverage of it. So that suggests to me that it hasn’t, if it’s even possible. Chris: As far as I know, the most effective way to use AI to make a fiction work is to, again, start with a high level outline, right? You still have to have all the storytelling knowledge yourself to make a good high level outline, and then have ChatGPT or whatever, expand it, and then fix that, and then do it again, and then fix that [Laughter] So that you are creating the high level conceptual structure because machine learning does not know how to do that. Oren: And could you fix the prose that it spits out? Maybe, but I’m not convinced that would be less work than just writing it yourself, because that prose is really bland. You’re gonna have to do a lot of work to make that prose any good.  Chris: I’ve heard of people who have said that it speeds up their work. I suspect if you’re super picky about your prose, it won’t. I think that if I try to use something like that. Every sentence it put out would be like, no, that’s not the sentence I wanted. [Laughter] Oren: There was an article, this one’s even older, about an author whose business model is to write super fast and put out, I think it was at least one novel a month, maybe more, and they were like, oh, it’s great for this. And I looked at their books. I looked at some of the ones from before they started using this software and some of the ones from after. And admittedly I couldn’t tell the difference. But it was bad before. it was just generic and bland. And sure, I bet it can replicate that.  Chris: Again there are a lot of writers, especially indie writers,  who are just under a lot of pressure to write really fast to make their living. And so that’s probably where it will make the most inroads. Because under that pressure, a lot of people who are catering to a more sort of niche group and selling more books to fewer people, are I think where that comes in. And there may be people who are okay with planned prose if the story is exactly the type of story they want because it’s niche. Again, on an ethical level, we should probably separate concerns because a lot of people are reacting very, very negatively to the idea of AI in fiction writing. And often, some of it is for very good reason, but there’s a difference between just being disgusted at the idea of having sentence writing be automated and the concern about those automated sentences being based on stolen works, works that were just outright pirated,  [laughter] or whether those automated sentences aren’t very good. I, personally, as a person who likes word craft and cares about my sentences, I don’t like the idea [laughter] of the computer doing that work for the human. At the same time, I don’t think that’s enough reason to be opposed to it.  If we had a situation where writers were all choosing to pool stories together to train an AI that would automate that process for them and everybody was choosing to do that and choosing to contribute… But that’s not what we have right now.  Instead, we have stuff scraped from AO3 and the Omegaverse showing. If anybody’s not familiar, the Omegaverse is a whole area of fan writing that is raunchy and people found Omegaverse elements coming out, I think it was in the software SudoWrite, which revealed that Archive of Our Own had been scraped and fed into it. People were not happy with this. They did not consent to that.  Bunny: Even if it were a bunch of artists pooling their work, which critically would be an opt-in system rather than the opt-out one, and right now we can’t opt out. So it’s just a no-opt system with how it currently works.  Oren: Currently opt-less.  Bunny:  We’re currently opt-less, unfortunately. Even in that case where it’s an opt-in, I feel like we kind of, no matter what, run into this Ship of Theseus situation. How many elements of AI do you add or remove until it becomes your own work? Or the AI’s work? Or the stolen person’s work? Even in that scenario– Oren: I mean, from a purely abstract standpoint, you would probably have to apply the same standard you would use if you were deciding whether or not to credit someone else as your co-author. Just in terms of nonfiction — this comes up on the site sometimes — usually when Chris and I do editing on each other’s work, it’s pretty minor. It’s like, “Hey, this part’s not working. Can you fix it?” Stuff like that. And we don’t list each other as co-authors for that.  But sometimes Chris will change a big section of my text or add a new subsection or whatever. And when she does that, I list her as a co-author because that’s her work. And so it’s the same level, I would say, if you’re doing something like that with an LLM. Even if you’ve solved all of the other ethical problems, the LLM is your co-writer at that point. Chris:Yeah. I do think that labeling is good because I just believe that consumers should have a choice, especially right now because of the ethical problems with training data. If we had a world where that was taken care of, there would still be a lot of people who just want to know where the art came from and how it was created. That matters to people. And knowing even if machine generated text was normalized, people would still care whether or not it was created by a human. And so I think that we should always have those labels. Oren: Yeah. At least we will. Who knows? Maybe if you’re young enough, it’ll all seem completely normal. I don’t know.  Chris: These days, if you have, for instance, a photo that was not put in Photoshop, that would be unusual enough that the person would advertise that photo as “no, this is the original without any Photoshop enhancements”. Because Photoshop is just a normal part of working with photos these days.  So that could happen. I would prefer it not to, but that could happen.  Bunny: Yeah. I guess all this leads to where will it go from here? And the answer to that is, I don’t know. I hope it dies. [Laughter] Oren: It certainly feels like on the whole, at least as far as the average public facing stuff, it’s been a huge net negative, right? It’s like we have all these problems and then as a side benefit, also way more energy consumption.  We have seen some positives, right? Some mild positives. Now, if we shut down all of the unethical uses of this stuff, is the technology gonna be worth keeping around for figuring out what these scrolls from Pompeii say? Or is that gonna be prohibitively expensive? I don’t know the answer. I’d like to still know what those scrolls from Pompeii say, but I don’t think I’m willing to pay this price for it. Chris: Just to go into other uses that are not competing with training data.  Bunny: Oh, I thought you were gonna say that are not Pompeii scrolls. Oren: [Laughter] Chris: Not Pompeii scrolls. We have things like automated transcriptions. A human can listen to speech and copy it down by hand, but that’s pretty tedious work. That’s not creative work we really want to be doing. It can improve transcriptions, it can do some more audio filters. It can’t replace an audio editor or engineer, but it could take away some of their tedious work. On the image side. You know, I have been looking at Photoshop’s Remove tool that has become suspiciously good. But again, all it does is if I have, for instance, a book cover and I wanna feature this book and I want part of this cover to be the feature image of the post ’cause we’re gonna discuss it. We get a lot of awkward situations where part of the title is cut off, so we have partial letters and the background is really complex so you can’t just easily take them out. The tool assesses this irregular complex background and fills in a plausible background to remove the letters so that the image looks a little nicer. Again, it’s not impossible for me to go in and create that effect, but it would be pretty tedious and I’m not really worried about it replacing an artist by doing that. So it can do good things, but it’s a lot more of an incremental “make things that we have better” type of a change in many cases, and that’s just not sexy enough. Oren: That’s not gonna get five bajillion dollars in venture capital funds.  Bunny: I wish that was the sort of thing that money would go to. It’s a shame that it’s not being used on Pompeii scrolls rather than thieving the internet. Chris: I will say a couple things as Mythcreants. We’re talking a lot of fiction writing, but obviously Mythcreants itself has a really large stake in this, and the biggest threat to us is honestly probably Google. [Laughter] So Google is responding to this by creating AI generated answers to search results. And Google, because it has a huge search monopoly, has become a huge choke point in the internet and has increasingly decided it would like to keep all of that traffic for itself, please.  Oren: Yeah. Why would you wanna go to a website? You can just stay on Google forever.  Chris: You could just stay on Google forever and it’s taking people’s content. The only way to get Google to stop is to just not be on Google’s search engine, which for most websites, that’s just professional suicide. Because again, people just use Google as a utility. It’s like a basic navigation feature of the web. I feel like it probably shouldn’t be a private company.  There’s even this new search engine that is trying to raise money right now called Perplexity. It snuck past Forbes paywall–and apparently Forbes is not the only website it has done this with — to steal content.  It doesn’t even have links like Google. It’s just an answer engine. I would advise not investing in them. I do think they’re gonna get sued. In fact, I feel like the New York Times and its lawsuit against OpenAI can just use Perplexity as an example for why the courts should side with them.  Bunny: That feels pretty clear cut.  It’s really blatant.  Oren: I hope they get sued. It just feels wrong that they’re just allowed to do that. Someone should stop them.  Chris: That’s exactly how I felt when ChatGPT and these other image generators came out. I was like, what’s happening? Where is everybody? Where are the people stopping them from doing this? Stopping them from violating copyright? And is it that all the businesses that should be stopping them think that they will profit from this? Or does it just take a long time? And the answer was both.  Lawsuits take a long time, so they probably will get sued. But I think that people hire lawyers, they talk about it, they do data gathering.There’s a whole lot of steps to filing a lawsuit and it just takes time, which is why there’s this whole strategy of we’re gonna become so big that courts don’t wanna side against us because they’re afraid of destroying us because we’re too big now. Bunny: I think I heard — and I don’t know the exact details of this–but I’m pretty sure Google, even before all this AI stuff really hit the scene, Google was facing a lawsuit in Australia because of those little preview things. You’d look up how to change a light bulb and then it would have a little dropdown. It was already doing this. It’s just accelerated.  Chris: Google was absolutely already doing this stuff.  Bunny: Yeah. But it’s gotten way worse. Absolutely. And I am glad that finally I have a workaround to get away from that AI and just use the web like it was. It’s frustrating that it’s something you have to go out of your way to do.  Chris: All the social media companies are doing something similar where they’re also algorithmically hiding things that have external links because they wanna keep all of the traffic for themselves. And it’s just… But at least most of the time when they’re doing that, they’re not actively stealing your content and using it to keep the traffic to themselves.  Oren: When they started talking about walled gardens, I assumed the walls were to keep people out. I didn’t realize this was a Berlin Wall situation. Bunny: [Laughter] It’s also just the issue of now we’ve got AIs that will be writing for a search engine optimization, and then the Google AI is picking those out. And so it’s just AIs writing for AIs. And are we kinda losing the point of this whole internet thing, guys? Let’s pull back a little bit and think about the users. Oren: Hang on, hang on. Are you suggesting that a user does not want to be trying to find reviews of an older book and find a review that doesn’t really make a lot of sense at the top of the search result and realize that it’s because it’s an AI generated site trying to sell me off-brand accessories? I could have bought a really cheap purse, and if you all have your way, I would never have seen that purse.   Chris & Bunny: [Laughter] Bunny: Oh Oren, what a specific example. I’d almost think that’s what happened to you.  Chris: Just a really hypothetical thing, you know.  Chris: And I should also add, a lot of these AI content farms are deliberately targeting articles and other websites and plagiarizing those articles. So they’re not just making up random works. They’re taking original investigative journalism and just rewording it. Just plagiarizing it. And so it’s very blatant. Investigative journalism was famously just fine before this all happened, so I’m sure that these extra knocks aren’t gonna cause any problems for it. [sarcastically] Bunny: [Laughter]  Chris: Just as a last thing, ’cause of course we’re going over time, I just wanted to add that if you were somebody who is copyright skeptical, obviously we have a different position, especially since most authors can’t make a living on their work and really do need those copyrights. But I think it’s worth pointing out that tech companies are absolutely not on the anti-copyright side. Hilariously, OpenAI recently did a copyright take down request on a ChatGPT fan Reddit that was using their logo.  Bunny: Oh my God. It really is an ouroboros, isn’t it?  Chris: And they really get mad when they find other machine learning that are training on their AI. This is a thing that’s happened. It’s apparently a faux pas in the machine learning community if you train your machine on their machine.  Bunny: [Laughter] Chris: So they are willing to take everybody else’s work as training data, but oh they get mad if somebody uses their work for training data. They are absolutely not anti- copyright, they just want to be able to take other people’s work when it’s convenient and protect their own copyright and their own machine generated outputs, which are not copyrightable right now. But they certainly want it to be.  Oren: Alright. Well, with that, I think we will call this podcast to a close and we will all give a silent prayer that this ends up like NFTs, but we don’t know. We’ll just have to see in the future.  Chris: And if you’d like to help us keep going as the internet collapses, potentially consider supporting us on Patreon. It really does make a huge difference to whether or not we’re able to continue in our budget. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Bunny: Help us fight OpenAI single handedly in a brawl.  Oren: That’s what we’re doing. Imagine us as the plucky hero against OpenAI. And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.   [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

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