The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hark young traveler, for not all is as it seems in this strange land. In fact, nothing is as it seems. If something ever is as it seems, that’s just a sign it’s extra not as it seems. Sounds confusing, but that’s just how it works in the weird and wacky worlds that fairies and dreams inhabit. This week, we’re taking a stab at such settings: their strengths, weaknesses, and why everything always seems to come in threes. Show Notes Area X Holodeck  Severance FROM The Broken Earth Piranesi  Wonderland Oz The Witches’ Road  The Staryk Realm Wicked Lovely  Strange and Norrell   Uprooted  Butcher of the Forest The Nevernever Sandman Duel Inception  Why You Should Theme Your World Types of magic Transcript Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro music] Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is- Chris: Chris. Bunny: -and. Oren: Oren. Bunny: Welcome to my dark and twisted game. Don’t you know that this is what happens when the number is five and then two and then two again are put together? We are going to play a tricky game of dice, which could be your doom. That wailing? That’s the souls I’ve trapped within the dice. Barter your true names or you’ll never leave here. [sinister chuckle] Oren: This sounds very whimsical and surreal. I’m into it. I like it. Chris: I don’t. I’m not sure I want to roll these dice. Maybe I could play a different game instead. [chuckles] Bunny: Well, there’s the spooky chess board, and this rarely seen game of Uno. That’s also spooky. Oren: Spooky Uno reverse. Okay, I’m into that. I think I can make that work. Bunny: But if at any time any of these sets come up, all threes I turn into broccoli. And if you know my true name, then I become a mollusk. That’s just how things work. Chris: What if I just put the dice, all of threes? Because I want you to be broccoli. Can I do that? Bunny: No. [chuckles] Chris: Yes, I won. Bunny: No, you’re too witty. You have outwitted the trickster I am. But maybe I’m lying. Maybe I’m lying. Maybe I won’t actually turn into broccoli. [laughs] Bunny: It’s 16-dimensional chess that’s also dice; that’s also Uno reverse. Chris: Maybe I’ll have to suss out the pattern in your lies. To find out what is lying, and what is truth. Do you have a twin and one of you always says a lie and the other says the truth? [chuckles] Bunny: Exactly. So, today we’re talking about “Fairylands and Dreamscapes” and basically places where things are all weird and trippy and normal rules don’t apply. And there’s probably someone challenging you to a game which is very surprisingly common. Oren: I’ve been preparing since 2014 to argue that Area X from The Southern Reach is basically a fairyland, so I’m ready for this. Chris: I see your Area X and I raise you, the Holodeck. [laughs] Bunny: Fight. [chuckles] Oren: I mean, it’s not wrong. [laughs] Computer and program. Chris: I feel like the holodeck is used for this in so many Star Trek episodes. There are also Star Trek episodes that basically become a weird alternate reality that don’t use the holodeck, but holodeck is a common one. Oren: They use the holodeck for that when they don’t feel like coming up with an exposition to explain what’s going on because the holodeck exposition is always the same. It’s like, “Oh, man. Ensign Bradley’s abstract milk painting holodeck program came to life. I guess we’re all in abstract milk paintings now.” It’s the same thing every time. They just do whatever they want. [chuckles] Bunny: There is usually, as with both of these I assume, I haven’t read Area X, but I do know that the holodeck frequently does this. There is usually an element in these stories of like nothing is as it seems. What you think is there is not actually there. It’s like it’s to trick you and there are mind games and word games and chess games and consequences if you fail the games. Which are usually existential consequences like losing your name or your memory, or taking years off your life, or being forced into servitude. I think a lot of these are coming from literal fairy tale, fairyland. They will kidnap you if you step in the fairy circle type of mythology. Chris: When I tried to think about– okay, what are the various settings that we have where they have the elements of you don’t really understand how the world works? And the reality is weird, and you have to figure it out. But there’s fairylands, there’s dreamscapes, there’s spirit realms. Mindscapes, also very popular. But I would even go so far as to say some mystery box TV shows like From and being the big one kind of do that. From, probably more than others because in that one, it’s like they’re not even living in a regular reality anymore. Whereas if you have something like Severance. This is a really weird workplace. It does not work like other workplaces, but I guess technically we could say that physics is the same here. People are very strange though. Oren: This is often down to feeling more than anything else, but I would argue that there’s a pretty distinct difference between a place that we might call a fairyland because it’s weird and different versus just a world that’s kind of unusual but still feels like it more or less operates on the same cause and effect that we’re used. I always bring up The Broken Earth because it has a really interesting world. But it doesn’t feel like a surreal place. The world is very strange because of all the seismic activity, but you could figure out how it works without too much trouble. Chris: Here’s one for you. What about Piranesi? Oren: No, Piranesi absolutely has elements of a fairy world. It’s not the most extreme, especially because the main character has been in the house or the labyrinth as if it were long enough to learn the rules. But there is elements of it for sure. If you were going there for the first time, it would have a stronger fairyland-type feel. Chris: But that one doesn’t have any overt magic. It’s just very strange. It’s just statues everywhere and I guess what is a big house with an open sky that’s flooded with water. Oren: You’ve got the really chaotic examples like Wonderland and then you’re slightly less, but still pretty chaotic examples like Oz. When you see a bunch of munchkins, you don’t really wonder, “What is their food production?” You don’t ask the question, “What do they eat?” Because you know this is a world that does not have a good answer for that. [chuckles] Chris: I think this– the surrealism really is the distinguishing factor here to some extent because surrealism generally comes with low realism. I think it’s that low realism that kind of takes away the questions of like, “Okay. What do the munchkins eat?” Because we’re not doing something really and super realistic feeling. I wouldn’t normally say that Oz would be kind of a dreamscape, but at the same time there’s no hard line there. It’s just become surreal enough. Oren: And you can do stories where characters can move from the more real grounded world into the weirder one. For example, if they were to go on some kind of witches’ road as a possibility. Chris: Man. Okay, spoilers for the end of Witches’ Road for anybody who’s not seen it. Oren: Which is Agatha All Along is the name of the show in case anyone’s curious. Chris: Yes, but the witches’ road is what matters to me. [chuckles] I was so disappointed at the end of the show– when we made that not real and I understand that the reveal that the witches’ road was kind of an on-the-spot invention, fits other aspects of the show, and is in its own way. But I just wanted the road to be a permanent part of the setting. That’s all I wanted, and they took that away. Oren: Don’t worry, Chris, because this is the MCU. So, anything that was fake but popular will become real. Chris: And bring it back to life like, “Oh, I thought you thought that that was dead, but actually, we should go to an alternate universe and it’s just like this universe, except for the witches’ road is real.” [laughs] Don’t you want more, and more, and more? Oren: Or they’ll be like, “Well, actually, you thought that Teen invented the witches’ road, but he was actually just channeling a much more ancient magic of a real witches’ road. Don’t worry, the witches’ road can rise again whenever we need it.” Chris: But part of the nice thing about Agatha All Along is that it didn’t feel like the rest of Marvel. So, I don’t know. It’s like the Zombie Resurrection. Like you loved somebody, and they were brought back, but they were brought back wrong. Oren: Do you not love it when Marvel brings back a thing you like, but not as good? [chuckles] Chris, you’re terrible at consuming things. My favorite classic fairyland, as it were, is of course the Staryk realm from Spinning Silver. Well, a big surprise or unlike Spinning Silver, we never heard this one on the podcast before. [chuckles] Chris: I thought about that because we also started a series called Wicked Lovely that had kind of fairies that were initially invisible, and the protagonist learns more about that and kind of becomes a fairy. And I think one of the things that really distinguishes the Staryk, is that yes, that’s a separate universe, but it is the fact that Miriam has to learn how they work. Whereas in Wicked Lovely the protagonist just doesn’t have enough agency, and it never feels like she has to figure out the rules and then use them in a clever way. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the Staryk realm just work so much better in Spinning Silver than it does for most of the other stories, with Fae in them. Oren: Well– and the Staryk have– strike this very tricky balance between a world that is weird enough to be cool and novel, but also stable enough that people can live in it. Because I have seen other authors try that and they tend to end up in, well, this place is either so weird that it feels like nothing matters or it just seems like kind of a slightly more colorful version of the real world. Chris: What did you think about the Vinland in Strange and Norrell? I know in that story there’s a woman who half of her time is bartered away to a fairy, and so whenever she goes to sleep, she ends up in fairyland and has to dance all night. Oren: I haven’t read the book in a long time. My memories are mostly of the TV show, so I’m going to go with that. Chris: The TV show was good, the mini-series. I think it’s six episodes. I’ve never read the very, very long book, but the mini-series is great. Oren: Find someone who loves you as much as the people who made that show love the book, but I thought it was good. Again, it’s not a place where you could go and spend long periods because they use the fairy world in that show like spooky and creepy and weird. There’s like a bizarro party that this girl has to dance at constantly, and that’s kind of scary. She never gets to sleep. She wakes up in the morning and her feet hurt from dancing all night. That’s mildly horrifying. It’s very uncanny, I think, is the word I would use, and it works great for that. I don’t really think you could have large parts of the book set there with the civilization of the fairies the way that you do in the Staryk realm in Spinning Silver. Chris: You might lose some of its mystique, I suppose. Oren: I think you would either be forced to lose a lot of mystique or just feel like this doesn’t seem like a place where anyone can actually live. It’s too weird. Chris: Yeah, the forest is the reason to read Uprooted in my opinion. Oren: That’s why I find the Staryk so impressive is because it feels like they managed to thread that needle. Although honestly, Novik is really good at that in general, like her forbidden forest in Uprooted. I didn’t like Uprooted at all, but I liked the forest. It’s spooky. Bunny: I think that both of these examples you’ve mentioned and Piranesi to an extent touch on a really common feature of stories that have like fairylands, which is that the protagonist is an outsider to them, which means that it’s time for me to pull the mask off our Scooby-Doo monster and say, “Oh, hey. It’s portal fantasy. Discourse.” Oren: Let’s see who you really are. [laughter] Bunny: Oh yeah- [chuckles] -but it’s true that a lot of fairylands, dreamscapes, fairy stories, types of things, are portal fantasies because you kind of need an outsider who doesn’t understand the rules for it to be- Chris: Mysterious. Bunny: -yeah, for the mystery. For the weirdness. Chris: I think having them being mysterious and– really requires an outsider to come in and kind of gives it that sense of mystique. And also, a part of the point is you have to learn the rules and you feel off balance. Bunny: I think because a lot of them come from those like original literal fairy tales that are about, “Don’t go in the spooky woods because there are fairies there and they’ll make you dance for them all night or whatever.” There are some common features in a lot of these types of stories that the book, The Butcher of the Forest, has pretty much all of. Which is, I made a list, let me go through the list really quick. Don’t eat the food; a tricky guy wants to play games; it’s all an illusion; don’t tell anyone your name; spooky animals; disembodied voices; pretty things are evil; recognizable things are fake; children; things come in threes; and everything is kind of proper and genteel, even when it’s killing you. [chuckles] Chris: That definitely seems very Fae. Bunny: Yeah. They’re not all necessarily Fae, but it seems like these are pretty common features of worlds like these, and they’re also– speaking of the outsider’s thing, they’re usually contrasted with a normal fantasy world or a more normal world, right? So, even when we have a fantasy story that takes place in an alternate world, if there’s like a fairyland or a dreamscape, it’s usually another section of that world. So, in Butcher, the Elmever, which is the fairyland area, is part of the bigger fantasy world. Like a dissection of it rather than the entire world being the Elmever. So that our character, who’s from a fantasy world is still an outsider to this world within a world. Oren: Oh man. When they’re trying to tell their kids not to go in there, do they say Elmever, more like Elm Never. Bunny: Oh. [laughter] I don’t even want to dignify that. Oren: Having the weird, surreal part of the world be in either a specific place or separate from the rest of it. That’s pretty common. You’ve got your Dresden Files, which is written by Jim Butcher. So maybe there’s a butcher parallel here, but it’s got your regular urban fantasy area, and then you can go into the magical world, which is called the Nevernever, I think. And that was a little boring. Honestly, it’s been a while, but it felt very like– after a little bit of being there, you’re like, “Yeah, Okay. This is sort of the normal world, but everyone is a little more colorful, I guess.” Bunny: Yeah, the real world but quirky doesn’t quite cover what a fairyland is. Oren: Or at least what I would argue it should be. I don’t know. Not every fairy world can be as weird and surreal as I want it to be, but I still want them to be. And one of the big perks of this sort of thing is that you can design the setting around fulfilling very specific plot arcs that you want, especially character arcs. Like if you want your protagonist just wrestling with some kind of issue from their childhood, good news, the world can reconfigure itself into the house they grew up in. That’s very helpful. Chris: I do think that there are some tricky things about– once you have your protagonist there and you’re going to have some conflicts there and some plot there, there can be some tricky things on making the realities work and how much this becomes an issue can depend on, how much time you are spending there? For instance, Lockwood and Co. has a spirit realm at the end of the series, and they just have to travel from point A to point B and they get colder the longer they’re there. So, it’s a pretty simple; we know what they have to do, we know how it can go wrong. But a lot of times the farther you get from reality, if your world is really, really weird, the more you have to kind of make up in order to support the story and have people kind of understand how things work and that can be challenging. Because you have to do things like, “Okay. First of all, make sure people can still– there’s still stakes.” So, if you have a spirit realm and everybody’s dead. [chuckles] Which is– we talked about this before in the previous podcast episode about making it so that people can die in the afterlife, which is strange. Oren & Bunny: Double death. [chuckles] Chris: Double death. But you need something. What are people capable of doing and making sure that’s balanced? So, if reality’s an illusion, how do we know what the protagonist’s chances are of getting through this. Oren: Well, it’s very simple, Chris. They get into a duel with somebody, and they say, “I am a super-fast snake.” And the other person says, “Well, I’m a creature that kills snakes.” Then they say, “Well, I’m a creature that kills things that kill snakes.” [laughter] Bunny: Oh my gosh. Oren is referencing Sandman, if anybody– we’ve made jokes about this before. Oren: That was so silly. Bunny: It is the silliest magic duel, like- Chris: Scribblenauts. Bunny: Yes. Oren: It’s just kindergarten. I have Infinity plus one. [laughs] Chris: But literally, it’s like, “I’m the hope and I’m the death of hope.” Really? [chuckles] You could just do that. So, whatever your opponent says, you can just be like, “Well, I’m the death of that.” Done. Bunny: I’m A. Well, I’m not A. Oren: The only way that dual makes any sense if the real test is it’s just about who can keep talking at a quick pace. It’s like those games where you’re supposed to name words that end in a certain letter or whatever. There’s no shortage of them, but eventually you stop being able to think of them. So, I guess that’s the real part of that game. It’s just who can keep improvising new stuff the fastest. [chuckles] Bunny: I need to put that in my oof with chess and Uno. Chris: We basically need rules that make it so that your protagonist doesn’t die instantly, but it’s also not too easy. And if things are very very strange, just narrowing it down to be like, “Okay. This is the problem. This is what the protagonist has to do to solve that problem.” Like, “Hey, the longer we’re in here, the more we die.” “This is what the protagonist specifically has to do to get out.” “Oh, there’s a door that can appear, but it will only appear if the protagonist cries enough.” [chuckles] And then now we have a challenge that we understand, “Okay. The protagonist has to make himself cry.” And now we’ve put it in terms that the audience understands. So, we know what the conflict is and what we’re trying to do, and how hard that will be. Because otherwise– yeah, you get that fight where it’s like, “Okay. Well, I summon a waterfall.” “Well, I summon a bunch of fire.” Oren: And I would say that most of the time in these sorts of more surreal worlds, usually things like riddles, then you’d solve a puzzle, or they need to admit something about themselves or whatever. Those usually make for better conflicts than a Kung Fu fight. Bunny: Yeah, it’s usually about wits over who has a bigger sword. Oren: Right. Because sword fights or gunfights or whatever, those all depend on physics to work. And if the whole premise of this place is that physics are weird, it’s not impossible to do in physical conflict, but much harder and hard to do in a way that your reader will care about without the world just seeming boring. You don’t want to end up as Inception, which is theoretically in a dreamscape, but just feels like a series of action scenes in regular normal places. Chris: And also, even if you have wits, this can be an issue of what I call the clever Ex Machina where you’re doing a bunch of technobabble like Star Trek technobabble, or it could be magic babble. And the protagonist is, “Oh, I know. My solution is to run clockwise three times because of the moon and being at this angle and blah blah.” If the audience can’t follow the logic and it can’t click into place for them, then you’re just making up random stuff at that point. Bunny: The world might run on dream logic a bit, but your story still has to follow cause and effect. Otherwise, it’s going to be a very frustrating experience and Butcher of the Forest is a book that does this. There are weird rules, but the protagonist is clever about it. There’s a scene where she has to play dice with a tricky Foxman for her soul or whatever, and she’s clever about it. What happens is that the Foxman is like, “We’ll do best of two.” And she’s like, “What if we tie?” And he’s like, “Well, we won’t tie.” So, she’s like, “Oh, he’s going to cheat.” And so, she cheats. And it’s like, “Okay. She gamed the system. She learned information by doing something clever and then she exploits it and that gets her further along the path that she needs to go.” If it were just the Foxman going to play dice with me, but instead of playing dice, I howl at the moon for two minutes and he lets me go. That would make a whole lot of sense. Oren: If I was playing dice with someone and they just started howling, I would probably encourage them to leave, to be fair. I think that would work on me. [laughter] Bunny: It would be pretty awkward. Chris: And if you do have to, sometimes if you are making up a lot of stuff about how this works because it’s really fantastical. You have to be careful that you make up stuff that feel like they are thematically consistent and that you are building off of a few elements. Having that good theming, world theming makes a difference that it doesn’t feel like you’re arbitrarily making stuff up. So, for instance, I have a world where everyone is a floating bubble and wait, I need a reason why these two bubbles don’t pop when they run to each other like normal. It’s like, “Well, the supercomputer designed them not to.” And then it’s like, “Wait a second. Why is there a supercomputer here?” Oren: Because a wizard made it, obviously. [chuckles] Bunny: End program. Chris: Exactly. It feels made up, and that may seem like an extreme example, but that happens all the time. If you don’t come up with an explanation for why these two bubbles don’t cut pop in this case, that feels like it builds off of what you’ve already established about this area. You kind of have to choose some common themes and some common traits and kind of reuse those things in your explanations, or else things just feel made up. Bunny: And I will say Butcher of the Forest does actually stumble at the very end. Spoilers, but there’s a point at which the character needs the price of continuing means she needs to tell her worst memory to the tricky Foxman, and she tells a pretty brutal memory. And then later, they are confronted by the lord of the Elmever, who’s like, “You lied about.” We’re just kind of supposed to be like, “Oh, he knows somehow.” But even with all the dream logic and stuff, there’s been no indication that he’s done anything– that any of the creatures in this place have automatic access to your memories. They pretty clearly need to be told to them, which is why they’re a valuable resource. But I don’t know. I guess the guy just knows them now and in a regular story– in a normal world that doesn’t have all the dream logic going on. That would be a lot more noticeable, but I think readers in a squishy surrealist fantasy fairy tale world are more willing to skim by that, but I would say that’s a place where the book, even within this place, where things aren’t supposed to make sense, like the story itself seizes to make sense, which is not what you want. Chris: There is going to be some fun in having a protagonist sort of outwit people or learn the rules. If you get the sense that there isn’t actually a consistent rule set for them to learn, that really puts a damper on it. You don’t want to feel like the protagonist succeeded because the author said so, so you need some feeling that there are rules to learn, even if the place is really surreal and mysterious. Bunny: You want them to win because the wizard said so. [chuckles] Oren: Hang on. I’m going to pull a double Scooby-Doo and take off the mask that we didn’t think was a mask. We thought it was a face, but it’s actually the podcast’s other mask and reveal that this podcast was actually, “Why you should theme your world?” A blog post posted by Chris Winkle on August 26th of 2022. [chuckles/laughs] Bunny: Oh shoot. It’s masks all the way down, isn’t it? Spooky. Chris: I’ve just had some clients recently make some really imaginative worlds which are really cool, but it’s really just highlighted the challenges that come with having a world that’s really different and how much burden it puts on the storyteller to figure out how the world works in a that supports the story and is actually believable. And that’s just harder than if we’re taking the real world or a typical genre with setting conventions that you could just reuse. Oren: I’ve had some clients who I think have been led a bit astray by the current state of the romantasy market, with the way that it portrays Fae as just kind of asshole magic people. So, as a result, their fairy worlds are kind of boring because there’s just not a lot going on. It’s just normal people live here except their wizards and their jerks, is the entirety of what makes Fae different. Chris: I think that happens a lot when you have some starting works in the genre and then you have people copy it a lot of times. Some of the magic is lost and it almost becomes more cursory. It’s like the difference between Lord of the Rings that spends a lot of time building up things like the elves and making them feel magical, and having a current fantasy where elves just walk in. And it’s not that those elves that are just walking in are bad, but now they don’t have nearly the mystique that they did in Lord of the Rings because they’re just familiar and we’re not spending all this time setting them up. I think there is a common pattern when something becomes popular and people repeat it a lot, it becomes more and more like cursory and less and less effort is put into it. Oren: Do fairies good is the good place to end the podcast, I think. Just write them good and your story will be gooder for it. Bunny: If you enjoyed your time in this land of the Mythcreants podcast, consider supporting us in the mysterious land of Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: It’s very strange there. You give us money and then we have some. Weird. [laughs] Bunny: The rules. Can you figure them out? Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then, there’s Kathy Ferguson, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme. The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

A common complaint about spec fic stories is that the world feels like it has no history, like entire planets simply appeared fully formed from the author’s mind. And yet, most readers get annoyed if presented with a block of historical exposition, which puts authors in a bit of a bind. How do we create histories for our stories without boring everyone? This week, we’ve got a few ideas of how to do just that, plus a lesson on why it’s important for your history to sound like juicy gossip. Show Notes Space Needle  The Bean  The Broken Earth The Abbess Rebellion  Byzantine Silk Industry  The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  Middle-earth  Dragons of Pern  Sauron  Plus One  Dune: Prophecy Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast.  With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.   [intro music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is– Bunny: Bunny. Oren: And– Chris: Chris. Oren: Now settle down. I have 500 pages of Mythcreant podcast history to get through. We’re gonna cover every significant event and also every insignificant event. Bunny: Oh no, I thought I finished this class in high school. Oren: So obviously we’re gonna cover the times when we changed hosts and the creation of Sandwich Discourse. Bunny: Oh, he’s holding a textbook, Chris, we might wanna run. Chris: Yeah.  Before I introduce any idea, it’s important that I stop and to just tell you my entire evolution of how I came up with that idea, what I was doing at the time when the thought occurred to me, and all the posts that I had on that topic, so you know exactly how it happened. Oren: Yeah. We need to cover things like how often we adjust our recording levels. That’s part of the history of this podcast. Bunny: Can’t understand us without it. Oren: You might notice that despite being more than a decade old, the podcast hasn’t really changed at all. Actually, that’s not true. It’s changed a lot. It used to be so much worse. Bunny: There used to be somebody named Mike– Chris: Yeah! Bunny –I’m told, I don’t know who this Mike is. Oren: This was the ancient days. The ancient days when Mike was around. And then the slightly less ancient days when Wes was around. Things change over time. Come back in 10 years and we’ll be telling some new person about Bunny, like “Bunny once was here!” and they’ll be like, “Uhhuh. Yeah, sure, Oren, you podcasted with a bunny. That’s real.” Bunny: Very sentient bunny. Don’t worry. Chris: Before the Bunny reckoning. Bunny: Yes. Before I deposed Wes. Chris: And then after the bunny wars we banned Bunnies. Bunny: No bunnies anymore. And since I’m a part of this podcast, that means I need to explain where I was 10 years ago. Get ready to hear about me as a tween. Oren: It may or may not be relevant to the podcast, but we did research for it, so now it’s everyone’s problem.  So we’re talking about giving your world history ’cause that’s the thing that in theory, everyone wants, but no one likes reading. So, that’s worth talking about, I think. First I have a process question for my other hosts, which is when you guys are writing, whether it is prose or you’re creating a campaign world or any kind of creative activity, how do you go about building history? Bunny: So for me, because my stories tend to be standalone and not multiple stories set in the same world, I’m usually most concerned with what the present day looks like and how it got there as the most relevant parts of the history. For my most recent project, I’m only really focused on one specific part of the world. So the history there is what’s most important, and the story is set in a former mining town that had a boom when the fantasy natural resource called Radiance was discovered there, and it became a huge mining town, and then the resource ran out and everybody left, and now it’s a ghost town. So that is the history that’s relevant to the story. So I think when I look about putting together history for my worlds, it’s very “how did we get to where we are now for this specific circumstance?” I don’t know much about the greater politics of the country that the story is set in or whatever. It’s very focused in on this little town where the story takes place. Oren: Yeah. Chris: For me, the first question I would have to ask is how much world building am I trying to do in this particular story and how much room I have? I’ve been doing a bunch of shorter stories. I completed a novella recently. There’s just not room for a super detailed, nuanced world. And my answer to that, I just didn’t. I didn’t add history. It’s like, “hey, this is how it is now.” ‘Cause it is. It’s a little realism, fairytale world, which doesn’t demand a lot. If I was doing something super high realism, maybe I would have to think a little deeper, but that’s the point where you need things to be simple and you don’t have room. If I tried to do a short story and make a super unique world that would not usually go over very well. I would be squeezing and squeezing to try to make everything fit. Now that I’m actually plotting a novel, yeah, I can feel like I have room to add more nuance and interesting things to my world. Oren: There’s so much space. Chris: Yeah. I’m just like, okay, so. What things do I have in this setting that are unusual that the plot makes use of in researching those specifically? So, for instance, I have a big spire that’s like a natural feature, and I decided that that spire was caused by some kind of volcanic eruption of some kind that was somewhat magical in nature. And then I did research on geology features around different types of volcanic activity, and then used that to hape the geography of the area. So that would be really far back history. Oren: Yeah. Chris: My story also features a religious order and did some history there, and so just took the things that were unusual and let most other things go without tons of research. But then I used the research, of course, to make things feel—to gimme more ideas for more ways I can make the world creative, but that fit the things that I already have. So adding more novelty there and adding context that makes things feel a little bit more realistic and more detailed and that kind of thing with, again, the goal not being to sit down and give people a history lesson, but if you have more knowledge about the world, hopefully that translates to more nuance when you write about it and readers can tell. Oren: Right. A lot of your world’s history is gonna be implied. ‘Cause if you’re trying to directly communicate it, you are probably gonna have a bad time. Usually the history that you’re directly communicating is gonna be whatever is really relevant to the plot. Bunny: See appendix one for more information. Oren: Right. I mean that’s basically backstory, that kind of history where you straight up lay out the events that happened. That’s backstory for your setting, and you should treat it the same way you treat backstory for your characters, which is that sometimes you need it, but only as much as you need. When I’m creating a world that is big enough that I’m gonna be spending more than a short story worth of time there, I try to have signifiers of things that give the impression of the passing of time.  I don’t want to have a world where it feels like everything there was built today. Everything here is from, we built it two weeks ago. It’s all modern. Everything’s from the same time period. Unless I’m doing an unusual world, a popup city on an alien planet or something. Bunny: There’s still someone named Mike here? What’s going on? This hasn’t changed at all. Oren: I try to think about, okay, what are different, easily distinguishable time periods that stuff can be from? And that’s not gonna work all the time. Again, sometimes you will have places where things were all built recently, but that’s its own thing. I have the ancient walls of the city. Those are the oldest part, and you can distinguish those in how they’re described. And then you can have the really nice buildings. Those are newer but still pretty old. And then you can have the ramshackle buildings that burn down every time there’s a fire and those are gonna be brand new. So that sort of thing. Chris: My setting has periodic, let’s just call them mini cataclysms— Oren: Yeah! Chris: —that tend to destroy buildings, instructors. So I thought it’d be fun. Like, okay, there were city walls. They’re now past the period in which they would be using walls. They didn’t take any time to take the walls down. But the walls would basically be destroyed a lot faster because of the environment. So now I can put in old remnants of the pieces of the walls that are still there, they haven’t bothered to take down, but it’s not like a full wall anymore because that stuff goes away pretty fast. Oren: Mm-hmm. Bunny: Yeah, people love ruins. One thing that I’ve had fun with in this mining town setting is that the mining town itself is a ghost town, right? It’s been abandoned for a hundred years, 50 years maybe since it was at its peak. And so the protagonist that’s coming from a world that’s gotten a lot more technologically advanced, so that’s given me the opportunity to have the protagonist go around and comment on, “oh wow, that’s pretty ancient by my standards piece of technology, everything’s all rusty and falling apart,” and when there’s a shiny new piece of technology in this rusted, dusty old town, it stands out like ruins do, right, exactly. Finding a way to have the history really clash with the modern stuff, I think helps make the world feel like it’s had a progression. Oren: Yeah, I agree. And you also wanna think about what is in here that needs to be explained, that is gonna stick out as weird to readers, and they’re gonna be like, what is that? A lot of the stuff we’re talking about here are subtle details that help make the world feel more real, but don’t necessarily need a big explanation, like Chris’s city walls that the town has outgrown and are now in ruins. That’s a cool detail. You probably don’t need to go too much into it. You could throw in some lines about it, but it wouldn’t be confusing anyone if you didn’t. Chris: The only time I’ll probably mention it is I think I have one scene planned where there’s some gawkers that are looking at something and a convenient place for them to gawk would be to climb up on this old city wall. So it’s just a description. It’s not gonna really affect the plot that much. Oren: But like if your medieval town has a giant glowing orb in it, even if the orb has been there for a long time, and to the locals, it’s just the orb that everyone already knows about. Bunny: You know, the orb. Oren: Yeah, the orb. Bunny: Orby. Oren: To readers, that’s gonna be weird and it’s gonna be very confusing if you mention that and then just keep going as if that’s a normal thing. Bunny: Wait, you mean you don’t have an orb?  Chris: Yeah. Bunny: What’s wrong with you? Chris: Although, I would say that I think that the most important thing there is that you have a world where the orb fits in. If this is a fantastical element, you could give the orb history, but history by itself is not necessarily gonna make the orb feel less bizarre. Oren: True. Chris: So if our goal is to take something fantastical and make it feel like it’s a natural part of the world, we need to see other parts of the world that are orb-like, whether it’s, this world has lots of glowy things, or this world has lots of altars to a particular God that glow and for this city, it happens to be an orb, or in some way that gives it some thematic unity with the rest of the world. Bunny: I’m gonna write a story set in Seattle, but instead of the Space Needle, it’s an orb. Oren: Yeah, the Space Orb. Bunny: And that’s the only difference. It’s a space orb. It’s just an orb.  Chris: Somebody has a story about somebody traveling to the most uninteresting, alternate worlds ever. Went to an alternate reality, and it’s exactly the same as this one, except for the Space Needle is an orb. Bunny: You go to alternate reality, you go to Chicago and instead of the Bean facing downward, the Bean is curving upward now. Oren: We flipped the Bean. It was a pretty pivotal moment in history. Chris: I did some dangerous alternate world traveling for this. Bunny: Worth it? Surely. Oren: I do have an important tip for the writers at home, which is that if you love history and you love creating history, and you wanna tell your readers more about the history you created, there’s one weird trick. Nobody hates it. Everyone loves it, which is to make the history important to your plot. I’m not gonna say that gives you free reign to give all of the history, but it will greatly increase the amount of history you can give. Chris: Yeah. Oren: The most obvious example I can think of is The Broken Earth by NK Jemisin, which has a really weird world that has a lot of strange history about constant apocalypses and how the mages were enslaved and all that stuff, and that’s very important to the story and to the plot that’s happening now. So there is more of an opportunity to explain it. Now, Jemisin still has to work it in over time. She can’t just open up with, “here, read this textbook and then I’ll tell you about the world.” But that allows her to do a lot more with it. In my book, I of course, ’cause I’m a huge nerd, I have a lot more history for that world than is in the story because most of it’s not relevant. I included the bits that were relevant and a few bits that I probably shouldn’t have, but I thought I could get away with it when Chris wasn’t looking. Chris: Not the silks. Silks had to go. Oren: Yeah, you wouldn’t let me keep the Byzantine silk parallel that I was really excited about. Bunny: You had a Silk Road, is that what I’m hearing? Oren: I did sort of. Chris: They were traveling at the time, so. Oren: It was a reference to the Byzantine silk industry that was supposedly, this part’s probably apocryphal, but was supposedly created by smuggling silkworms out of China in a hollow walking cane. Bunny: Whoa. Oren: It’s a fantastic story, and I love that story, and I wanted to reference it, and Chris was like, no one knows what the heck you’re talking about, Oren. Stop that. Bunny: Well, now you can put an asterisk in the book that says, “refer to podcast 521 at minute 15” or whatever.  Oren: Yeah, find out all about the silkworms. I’ve got history that I thought of about, the main character has a darker skin tone than some of the other characters that she encounters, and I’ve got a whole history to explain that. But I didn’t need to put that in the story. It wasn’t important. Chris: Speaking of NK Jemisin, I think another good one is 100,000 Kingdoms, because some people like to have world mythology of how the world was made, and that’s one where it’s actually relevant because the story is about a struggle between three ancient gods who created the world. And so that world origin story is their backstory of their relationship, and it matters. Whereas if you pulled out an origin story for the world and it just wasn’t relevant, people, their eyes would glaze over pretty quickly at that point. Oren: Yeah, and much like too much exposition in general, it’s not super common to find published novels, at least not published novels that have any wide readership, that have too much history, just because to get published, you generally have to understand that you want to cut that down to the minimum you can get away with. But there are a few, Lord of the Rings has both, right? It has the stuff about the mines of Moria, which is really interesting and contributes to the story. And then it also has a bunch of stuff about various princes of Gondor and we don’t need to know any of that. Like that doesn’t help. Chris: Yeah. When it comes to really old history, like you’re doing mythology for your world, if you don’t have Gods, you can use it to explain something. Let’s say your origin story explains how magic works to the audience. That might be helpful. Oren: Yeah. Chris: I do think, again, people have to remember that it’s not just the fact that it fits your story. Also, how much you tell readers at once really matters. You can only get them to learn a few things at a time. So if you have this origin story that’s full of very useful information, you still probably can’t give it to them at once just because they can’t remember all of that. Oren: Yeah, and I suspect tolerances for that are lower than they used to be. The Belgariad books, which have a lot of problems, but they open with, at least what I remember, and granted it’s been a while, maybe it’s shorter than I remember it, but I remember them opening with a very long creation story of how the gods made the world and how one of the gods was a dick, and then they had to fight him and then they did a lot of fighting and made an ocean. They’re like, this is this. It seems like a lot. Chris: So, uh, hot tip. Don’t make your world creation story racist. Oren: Yeah, that’s also a good idea.  Chris: I cannot not think about that. If you talk about the Belgariad and that origin story, it’s just oof, it’s messed up. Oren: Well, the Belgariad is like the ultimate example of why a wizard did it is a bad explanation. ‘Cause that’s a thing that some people in fantasy or even sci-fi think is acceptable to be like, “yeah, well I have a world where people of different skin tones really are stupid, and it’s because Gods made them that way. I’m not racist. The gods are.” And it’s like, that’s not, mm-mmm. Mm.  Bunny: And who made the gods? Huh? Huh? Oren: Or like [Dragonriders] of Pern, where we eventually get the backstory on why girl dragons can’t breathe fire. It’s not ’cause the author’s sexist, it’s ’cause the person who made the dragons was sexist. It’s just like, why? Just don’t do it. Bunny: Yeah, you could just not. Chris: Another thing that you can use a little history for even a little history in exposition is just building mystique around things. And I think that’s also really important to Lord the Rings. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Is that we build atmosphere where we build up Sauron. Sauron would not be impressive if he did not have a long history. Oren: That’s true. Chris: And even if we don’t necessarily need to know that history, having some of that history really builds him up as a villain. And so you could do other things if you’re introducing a new noble house, be like, oh, this was the noble house that was marked a traitor after the reckoning. You would have to keep it really brief and really focus on what is the impression that you want to create for this story element, and make sure that emphasizes that and that it’s a simple, iconic, easy to remember. But that’s another thing that history is great for, especially in fantasy. Oren: [My] experience of both written stories and role playing games is that audiences have much higher tolerance for spicy history as it were history that has some kind of ooh factor of, okay, so this is the family that was cast out for having cowardice at the important battle. It’s like, oh, really? Tell me. That sounds juicy. Bunny: Oh, the Real Housewives theory of exposition. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Yeah, just make all of your history sound like gossip, and you’re good to go. Oren: Yeah, I mean, honestly. You know, people, they’re not gonna care that much about a trade deal, even if the trade deal is gonna be important later. But they might care about the merchant who made everyone’s clothes suck for a year ’cause they bought up all the good cloth, right. That’s a little more interesting, you know. To a certain extent there, you can even test it by just imagining, would my friends be interested in this story? Sometimes that can be a surprisingly good bar for whether or not this is worth including. Bunny: Would someone go “ooooooooh” at it? Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s the perfect sound effect.  Chris: Another thing I think that history can be good for is helping to flesh out your culture and another place that history can show up. So simple things like readings, prayers and ceremonies, any symbols or ideologies people have can be shaped by past history, and so you can have a scene that is supposed to be a wedding scene or any other thing that’s supposed to be fancy, and you need people to say something that sounds grand, then you can reference any beliefs that they have or remaining, “Let’s never let the reckoning happen again,” you know. Oren: Yeah. Chris: “For unity, so we never sunder again” or something like that, you can build it in. I do like having culture that has some level of memory. It’s not as simple as, “oh, there was a war, so we banned X,” which we’ve seen just way too many times. Oh, the eugenics war. Now no gene manipulation whatsoever. There may be reasons to ban eugenics, but people use, “oh, but there was a war, and so then we did this ridiculous thing.” It’s like, look, we’ve had lots of wars in the world and we have not banned love yet. So. Oren: Yeah, I mean, we haven’t banned the things that actually caused the wars, let alone a random unaffiliated thing like love or friendship or like in Plus One, where it’s like, hey, the world is divided into people who work at the daytime and people who work at night. Why that? Because of the Spanish flu. That’s why. Bunny: Really? Oren: Yeah, that’s the explanation. ‘Cause the Spanish flu caused a shortage in workers and so they were more divided. It’s like, what is this? No explanation would be better than this. Chris: There is cultural change that can be brought about by historical events where people shortly after a disaster are usually more motivated to ensure that it doesn’t happen again and take certain precautionary measures, and that can include having some kind of ideology that started, or new rules or something like that. But it’s just, be practical with it. We fought over oil and unfortunately have not banned oil yet, so. Oren: Yeah. We wish. Bunny: Turns out the things we go to war over are things we care a lot about  most of the time and are probably going to war to keep ’em around rather than get rid of ’em. Oren: Yeah. I would also encourage wherever possible to think of history in terms of things that make the story more immersive instead of adding friction. I see this is a thing people online sometimes like, ’cause they’ll be like, well, “the save icon is a floppy disc and a lot of people using computers don’t know what a floppy disc is. So in your setting, you should describe how something is weird and out of place like that.” But should you? I would argue no, usually, because that just makes the reader think that you’re going to go into that and then you don’t. Chris: I do think that we have to consider cognitive load. Part of this is how much detail do you have room for for your world in your story? If the complexity of all of the other story elements are low and you have a fairly high word count, maybe you have room for lots of details and you can explain some of those details. But at the same time, there can be a cost when we add more detail and especially if we’re making up new terms. And there is something to be said for just immersing somebody in a world and having context clues and some terms used in ways where you tell what they mean without stopping and explaining everything. But that also can be a liability if we just add tons of unfamiliar words in there, especially for your first few pages when people are getting to know your story. It all just adds up to the point where it becomes really confusing and disjointed for somebody to try to read. So again, some terms are good and it’s not like you can’t do that at all. It doesn’t mean you always have to explain terms and things you’ve added because you understand history, so you know that people do X, Y, Z, but that can become confusing and it all adds up. So just a limit on how many weird things that the reader’s just gonna run into while they’re just trying to read a paragraph and trying to understand what’s happening. Bunny: For the most part, you should definitely name your historical events intuitive things. You’ll notice we usually do that in the real world too, right? It’s World Wars One and Two. They didn’t even have Electric Boogaloo in the second one, and you hear about something called the God War, you’re probably like, oh, it’s a war involving Gods. Pretty straightforward. If it was called Boopdi Wawa War, even if that’s something in your setting— Chris: When the Boopdis and the Wawas went to war! Bunny: Yeah, the Boopdis versus the Wawas. Chris: Very brutal. Bunny: Everything changed when the Boopdis attacked. Oren: I can absolutely think of a bunch of historical things with names that do not make sense, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to say which is more common. But I would generally agree unless you are trying to make some kind of statement that is important to your story, you probably don’t want to name something that is neither Holy Roman nor an empire, the Holy Roman Empire. Yeah, it’s real, it’s from real life, but it’s probably not worth the time it would take or the confusion it would cause in most cases. Chris: Descriptive names in general are gonna cause less confusion. So it doesn’t mean that you always have to use descriptive names or a reason not to, especially if you have a con lang and you want all of your world terms to feel like they come from the same language. It’s just, it all adds up. So you have to conserve that where it’s not important. If this is not important to you, make it simple.  And that way you can spend your complexity points on some other part of the story, some other part of the backstory, some other terms. Oren: Yeah. One more thing I wanna cover before we end the podcast is the issue of whether your world was actually different if you go back in time, back in your history. And that’s a thing that for a lot of us is never going to matter because we are never going to tell a prequel story. We’re never gonna go back in time from the present. So you don’t have to worry about it too much. But if you are planning something like that, be it because you wanna tell a bunch of stories in the same world, or you just are big into prequels for whatever reason, that’s something I would consider because it gets real weird if your story is set 500 years earlier and everything is exactly the same. Chris: Or 10,000 years earlier. Looking at you, Dune: Prophecy. Oren: Oh man, I tried to think of a joke, ‘Cause in Dune, 10,000 years before the book starts, you still have the Atreides and the Harkonnens, the same houses. And I was like, okay, what joke can I make using a famous historical figure to show how long a time period that is? And I can’t because 10,000 years ago is 8,000 BC and we don’t know the names of anyone from that time period. Chris: That’s too long before our recorded history. Oren: The best I could come up with is, okay, so imagine if the Caesar and Magnus families, which are Julius Caesar and Pompe Maximus, or Pompey Maximus, respectfully, were still  fighting for control of Italy, but times eight. That is how long these families have not only been around, maintained the same name and the same enmity. My gosh. Bunny: It’s like if the earliest known customer service complaint. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: If the copper guy and the other guy were still beefing Oren: If Ea-nāṣir’s copper industry was still around, times three or something.  Alright, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you would like this podcast to continue our long and storied history, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons who have been with us for quite a while. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [outro music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant podcast.  Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.

Narration styles: Some are good, some are bad, and some are just frustrating! They leave you wondering whose thoughts you’re reading, how the narrator knows so much, and why they have to act so damned smug. Or maybe it’s just bad storytelling disguised under the banner of an unreliable narrator. All of that is our topic for the week, as we discuss books that did their very best to turn our hairs gray with frustration. Show Notes Dr. Strange Looks at All the Futures First Person Omniscient  Eifelheim The Last Murder at the End of the World  Black Swan Ministry of Time Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and here today is: Oren: Oren. Bunny: And: Chris: Chris. Bunny: So I’ve run the numbers and I already know everything you’re going to say because I’ve been very clever and I’ve guided you into a probabilistic path that will result in the best possible episode. Chris: Oh, I see. So we just do what you tell us to do then. Bunny: Well, I knew you were gonna say that. Oren: Or alternatively, we don’t do what she tells us, but she knew we were gonna do that, and that was all part of the plan. Chris: She was just using reverse psychology on us? Oren: Or if we do what she was gonna say, then it was double reverse psychology. Bunny: Look, I just have a hand of Uno reverse cards right here, and I’m not afraid to use them. Oren: This is great because it means everything automatically makes sense, because if you think it doesn’t make sense, actually Bunny has complete knowledge of time and space, and this is the only way it would’ve worked. Bunny: All the other universes where something happened slightly different, they just ended in ruin. So this is the only way that we’re gonna save the day. Oren: It just makes sense. It just works. Bunny: Don’t worry, it’ll be a hilarious romp. So much hilarity. Just very romp. Trust me. Chris: Do you wanna tell me where this book hurt you and which book? [Bunny laughs] Oren: It was in a lot of places, Chris. Bunny: So many places in multiple places, and this is an episode that’s definitely not born out of Oren and I sharing grievance about certain books that we’ve been reading and I’m sure anyone on our Discord can already guess where this is going. Oren: [grandly] Begin the ritual airing of grievances. [Bunny laughs] Bunny: Today we are talking about frustrating narration choices. Oren: That title was a frustrating narration choice because it’s hard to say. Bunny: It’s actually clever meta commentary when I trip over my own tongue. Oren:  We’re very smart. Bunny: Perfectly calculated it. Chris: You had to do that, otherwise the day wouldn’t be saved. Bunny: Yeah, Oren’s computer would’ve exploded if I hadn’t pronounced that in a horrible way. Oren: Oh, no. Bunny:  So both of the main offenders today that inspired this episode were a version of pretty much first person omniscient. Starting with that makes sense because it seems like the perspective that’s easiest – or maybe not easiest, but has a very prominent ability to go wrong. Oren: I have only read three first person omniscient narration stories, and they have all been bad. Not bad for unrelated reasons; the narration has actively contributed to their problems, and it’s like my bugbear, second only to oppressed mages. Bunny: The thing is, it’s hard to have an all-knowing narrator who’s also a character, ’cause if they know everything, there’s much less tension. And there’s also just the question of why we aren’t just in someone else’s head. I don’t know if I can think of a first person omniscient story that wouldn’t have been better by just being third person omniscient or a limited perspective in a character’s head. Oren: There are several different ways you can go with first person omniscient, and none of them work. First you can go with, well, they’re not a character in the story. They’re like God watching the story. But why bother with a first person pronoun at that point? It’s just gonna cause confusion. Just do third person. Chris: If they’re not in the story, why are they talking about themself? Oren: But if they are in the story, how on Earth do they have all of this information? And how does it not just make them OP? The answer is either it does make them OP and they are ruining the story by being there, or you just have to ignore the fact that they know all of this when there was no way they could know it. Chris: They’re not really omniscient, but somehow they’re omniscient and we’re supposed to just live with that contradiction. Oren: The example of that one was from this book, Eifelheim, that I’ve mentioned a few times. I really love Eifelheim. It’s very good. It has this omniscient first person narrator who just turns out to be a random friend of the protagonist. It’s like, how on Earth did you know all this stuff, man? Bunny: Or at least all of the first person omniscient stories, to some extent that I’ve read have been like, the omniscient characters are like puppet master-type characters, and you have to hear them talk for the entire story because they’re narrating it. Even if they’re not puppet masters, they’ll pop in and provide commentary and I don’t want that. I want to read the story. Oren: I don’t mind commentary. Omniscient can provide commentary in a way that works very well. You have two options with this. You can either have the first person omniscient narrator, just be there constantly, in which case their presence gets very old, or they can just disappear for long sections of the book and then suddenly reappear. And you’re like, what? Who are you? Have you been here this whole time? And I guess we should stop dancing around the bush. I’m talking about The Last Murder at the End of the World. Bunny: Oof. That title. Oren: Yeah, so spoilers for that, ’cause Bunny and I both had to read it and certainly our time was spoiled. Chris: Wait, let’s be accurate. Neither of you had to read it. You’re not in class, this was not assigned reading, I wasn’t grading you, I was not giving you credit- Bunny: And it was Chris’s fault! [laughter] Chris: This is something that you punished yourselves with, okay? Oren: We were so depressed from Chris being mean to us last episode about our short stories that we made a bad decision and went and read this book. Bunny: It was a coping mechanism [mumbles indignantly] Our interfering leads were better than Abby! [laughter] They didn’t have Abby in my story, so… Oren: I don’t know this for sure, but I looked at some of the reviews for this novel. Because this author just likes to do weird, trippy murder mysteries, which in premise is fine. Weird, trippy murder mysteries can be very interesting. But I noticed that fans of his previous books were in the Goodreads reviews being like, what is this? What’s going on? And I’m not positive because his books are weird and trippy. But the difference seems to be that in this version, he has introduced the character of Abby, who is an omniscient AI narrator, and I don’t think his previous books had anything like that, and I really think Abby is the reason that fans of his previous books didn’t like this one as much. Bunny: Yeah. There’s also the setting. I don’t know if his other books have the strange asinine setting details that this one does, but man, I did not like Abby. I don’t think Abby added anything, and in fact, I think she subtracted a lot of things. She’s an AI that’s embedded in everyone’s head. Her role is to keep them feeling good and tell them the time when they ask, things like that. But she’s also got Dr. Strange powers. She’s calculated that the only path forward is if these things happen. Oren: And much like with Dr. Strange. If you think about it for two seconds, you can immediately tell that that’s just complete BS. Like with Dr. Strange, it’s like this 50,000 universes, this is the only one where we win. It’s like really? There’s no other universe where, what’s his face—Chris Pratt guy didn’t mess up the plan to defeat Thanos, because you guys were like this close to beating him and then Star-Lord messed it up. Chris: Or Thor aimed for Thanos’ head. They make a big deal of that. Oren: There’s no universe where he aimed a little higher or just his aim was a little off and it went higher? Come on. And it’s the same thing with this book, right? The moment the convoluted reveal gets made, you’re like, wait, hang on. That was your goal? There are so many more efficient ways you could have gotten about doing that. Bunny: The other thing about Abby is that, did you even pick up on the fact that she can apparently control people’s bodies? Oren: The book makes a point out of making you stumble over things that you would expect to have been established earlier. Bunny: So we find out that she can control them when they’re asleep, but it turns out, no, she can just control them anytime. You’d think this would factor into things. I’m pretty sure if I went back through the book and looked at it with that in mind, I could be like, why didn’t she just control that character then? Oren: There are a few points where that happens, where you’re like, hang on, you can control most of the characters, and if you could do that, you could have solved this problem much more easily and you simply chose not to. Then it does other things where it’s like, well, I have to obey the human characters’ directives, but clearly you don’t. You disobey them all the time, or you can interpret their directives in such a creative way that it’s basically no different. Chris: It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, right? So how does a murder even happen then?  Oren: Through a very contrived series of events. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like 10 levels deep of “Then this happened,” and then it’s like a Rube Goldberg murder. Chris: Why didn’t the AI stop the murder? Oren: There’s reasons, okay? There are reasons, and they do not make any sense. Bunny: Once the actual murder mystery investigation starts, the parts when Abby is very minor or functionally not present and the characters are doing some good old fashioned investigating—those parts can be very good in places. Just proving the point that Abby should not be here. Oren: Abby is just what drags that book down, like a weight around its neck. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be smug. Bunny: I don’t think she’s supposed to be. I think she’s supposed to be neutral. I mean, she’s what inspired our episode on emotionless characters. She talks about how she’s not supposed to have emotions, but you could tell the author seems pretty smug about Abby. Chris: The thing about a know-it-all character is that she probably seems know-it-all because she’s supposed to literally know it all. Puppeteers, not a great narrator. Oren: Abby has a lot of problems that are not specific to her being a first person omniscient narrator, but her being a first person omniscient narrator makes them all worse because you can’t get away from her. You don’t even have the advantage of her being a normal character who could potentially have problems that they encounter, because to be omniscient, she can’t really have any problems. It’s just a no-upside scenario other than it technically allows you to withhold information from the reader so that you can have a bigger reveal. That’s the only thing it does, and it’s just not worth it. Chris: If a narrator has an annoying personality, that’s hard to get away with. Again, this was one of my issues with 10,000 Doors of January, and this was just regular first person retelling. It was not omniscient. It just felt like the narrator took joy in scolding you and telling you what you think, and then in fact, you were wrong within the first line. The first paragraph, I just already wanted to punch her. Oren: That’s the book that tells you that actually, this is a great love story and if you don’t like it, you’re an imperialist. Gotta love the nerve of that to be like, my story’s actually great, and just have the narrator tell you the story is good. Bunny: See, Chris, I should have put that in my short story. I should have ended it with “And if you didn’t like it, you’re an imperialist.” Chris: Make sure you summarize the entire love story too. Oren:  I should clarify. Unlike first person omniscient, I do not think first person retelling is a viewpoint to be generally avoided. I like first person retelling. Chris: Yeah, it’s fine. Bunny: That was also like pretty common, whereas first person omniscient is like extremely rare. I can think of maybe three books off the top of my head that use it. Chris: I think it depends on how often we’re using first person. I think that we would find the number is greater if we found every single mention of the word ‘I’ in any book. But I think if we’re talking about where the narrator is calling attention to who they are and using ‘I’ a lot, I think we would get it down. Maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events. That one actually does have a first person narrator who is a person, who I think is supposed to be somebody who researched events after the fact. It’s unrealistic. At the same time, the book is light enough that I feel like it gets away with it a lot easier than if it was really serious, and the overall realism is low enough that I think that narrator gets more leeway. Oren: You can get a lot of mileage by being funny. There is an issue with first person retellings, which is that you need to be disciplined. You need to have discipline. Pardon if that sounded weird. Bunny: [laughs] Sit down on the caning bench. Oren: You have to have self-discipline because first person retelling can be an excuse to indulge in bad habits. We talked about 10,000 Doors of January, where the character is just lecturing us on the fact that her story is good. And I’m not gonna say that couldn’t happen in some other viewpoint, but I think an author would be much less likely to do it. And then the same thing with something like Deadly Education, because first person retellings allow you to do some pretty powerful things. Like, you could pause the action for your narrator to talk, which normally in a normal limited perspective, you couldn’t really do that, because narration indicates character thoughts, so passing time. But that means that if you have a tendency to ramble, now there are no safeguards to stop you from doing that, and you’re just gonna ramble. Chris: Again, first person tends to encourage people to get more into character and write in a more casual voice, which often is good. For a lot of writers that’s very helpful, but it also can encourage a little bit too much rambling. Related to this, of not using enough restraint, I’d like to talk about the thought dimension. So we say, oh yes, there’s no safeguards, but sometimes when there are safeguards, authors ignore them anyway. The thought dimension is what I’m calling it when you have a narration that is supposed to be unfolding events, so it’s not a future character retelling the story. It’s not an omniscient narrator that’s outside the story. It’s the character experiencing events as they happen is your narrative premise, but the thoughts just defy time and space. It can happen anywhere, but it’s usually most obvious in dialogue. So he’ll have dialogue like, ‘“Are you okay?” And then he’s looking at me with his deep blue eyes as though I’m insect pinned to a board. There’s only one time he’s looked at me like that before.’  There’s a whole backstory around that look and what that look from him means in the middle of a conversation. Bunny: It’s time for my manifesto, reader. Settle in. Chris: The premise here is that the character is somehow thinking all of this before they answer. You can tell, if the character comes to some conclusion that changes their answer, there’s no way to explain that other than they had all of those thoughts. There’s other parts of the narration that shows they must have been thinking all that, but like, who can think all of those things? Oren: They’re just like Xavier in the X-Men movies who just freezes everyone and has a little chat while everyone’s frozen. Bunny: It only works if they come out of the thought dimension and the other character has been snapping their fingers in front of their face for the last minute. Oren: Are you in there? Are you okay? Chris: Again, it’s just a matter of restraint about how much are you gonna prioritize pacing when you really want to talk about his deep blue eyes, and what kind of look he’s giving, and how you’re interpreting that look, all of the previous instances where he’s had that look. And I think a lot of authors just want to say all that stuff ’cause they like the nuances of reading deeply into conversations or other stuff like that. But I think you should just keep it trim, and then create pauses in the conversation for you to add commentary. Oren: Just to head this off at the past, ’cause I’m sure some smart aleck is listening to this and thinking, oh, I will make a character whose superpower is that they can pause and have a thought dimension. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t ever do that, but be really careful because you would be amazed at how many sequences the drama is going to depend on your protagonist not having a lot of time to think. If they can pause and think about things, there will be no tension. They will just see the obvious solution and do it. Before you get real clever, consider the potential consequences. Bunny: Ah, the thought-dimensionator. Another book that gives into its impulses in the first person retelling and hamstrings itself with the specific premise it’s chosen to do the first person retelling within is A Ministry of Time: the other book that inspired this episode, and part of our Hugo Bait binge. So the premise is that the British government has a time machine and they’ve brought forward some people from the past. And the main character, her assignment is to basically host one of the guys who is like a sailor from Old England who is on an Arctic expedition that got lost. And so she’s introducing him to the world and teaching him things and also getting really horny over him in weird and uncomfortable ways. Oren: As one does. Bunny: But the problem is once the novelty of time travel stuff and the kind of comedy of manners witticisms that they exchange, once all that wears off, you realize that nothing is happening and nothing can happen. Because the reveal of the end of this book is that all these tiny moments, they mattered. You’re just not gonna see them pay off in this timeline. Oren: I’ve had dates like that. Nothing is happening and nothing can happen. [laughter] Bunny: Because the twist at the end of the book is that it’s the narrator writing this—question mark—for her past self so her past self doesn’t make the same mistakes, but the sorts of things that she points to as like, oh, don’t do this. Or she’ll go off and meditate and be like, man, if only I had done something a little differently. If only I hadn’t paused for 12 seconds. Chris: That was the one where the narrator was constantly pointing at everything in the story and being like, and this would be super consequential. Bunny: Yes, exactly. Chris: That’s its own frustrating narration habit there. Bunny: Pinky swear, this really super matters. Chris: I know this seems boring to you, but I swear this will change the world. And it’s like, will it really? And then you go to the next paragraph, and this will upend time. Oren: Many things can upend time and change the world, Chris, you don’t know. Bunny: It’s like Butterfly Effect, the book, except you never see the hurricane that the butterfly summons, because that’s in a different timeline. Didn’t happen in this book. Chris: I would actually say that effect is a subset of another thing that really frustrates me which is overhyping, or if I’m gonna be a little more critical, lying, which is the one where the narrator is basically overselling the content to try to make it more exciting instead of just having exciting content. And this one is that you’re talking about is particularly special because the payoff is completely outside the book, and so the narrator can just say whatever she wants.But a lot of times what you’ll see is that I have a lot of my lessons post, my critiques post, is a deliberate setup that raises expectations only for it to just blatantly not meet those expectations. Probably the most blatant one is The Alchemist. You have a chapter that ends with “And in that instant, Josh Newman realized that the world would never be the same again.” And then in the next chapter, it’s just, oh, the bookshop he’s working in, there’s a couple robbers. Oren: By the nature of entropy, the universe is never the same again from moment to moment. So it’s not technically wrong. Chris: Or in the beginning of the Remnant Chronicles, we’re doing all this kind of meta mystery, vague buzzwordy opening where,  oh, wouldn’t you know what to know what this ritual is where they’re scraping the protagonist’s back with knives and it’s like, calm down. They’re just applying henna. Bunny: Yeah. You’ve ever been to a festival? Oren: This is how they put henna on you, okay. Calm down. Bunny: special knife henna. Chris: So I’ve seen a lot of those and it’s all just like, why? Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that you do wanna make your narration exciting and sometimes there can be some judgment calls to make over whether you are selling it or overselling it. Bunny: The other problem with this narrator is also that when she’s not saying, “Don’t worry, this little moment, it matters, pinky swear, trust me,” she’s apologizing to the reader about the bad choices she’s making. The government program she works for is shady, right? So she goes along with a shady thing that they’re doing and you, the reader are like, aargh, when is something going to happen, and she’s like, I know I did the shady thing, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done the shady thing. Please. You gotta understand where I’m coming from when I was doing the shady thing. All right, moving on. Oren: Look, I can see the value in a first person retelling of pointing out that the thing that they were doing in the moment was wrong. But that doesn’t help the fact that it’s boring. Bunny: and it is quite a boring book. Oren: An interesting one that I ran into recently was the Watsonian viewpoint, which in retrospect, I actually almost never see in published fiction these days. Bunny: Yay, pop a champagne. Oren: I almost always see it in unpublished manuscripts, and I try to tell the author, please don’t do this. The reason is it’s a bad viewpoint choice, and it was annoying even back when Arthur Conan Doyle was doing it. We just let him get away with it ’cause he’s old and famous. I actually encountered a book recently that used it, the Justice of Kings, which was just the worst. We have our Sherlock character, the Watson character, and then a third character who is the POV character. The Watson’s Watson, if you will. This one is unusually extreme, so it might not be entirely fair to judge the entire practice using this one ’cause she gets nothing to do in the first scene. She has so little dialogue. I thought maybe there was gonna be a reveal that she was a ghost and that no one can see her. But no, she just has no presence. Chris: That’s something that I’ve seen happen in client works is if you don’t have enough for a character to do in a scene, it can just feel like they evaporated. And sometimes it can happen with a viewpoint character where it just feels like the viewpoint character just isn’t there anymore. Oren: But the beautiful irony is that I have seen more direct Sherlock retellings, and they do not use the Watsonian viewpoint anymore. Usually what they’ll do is one of three options. They’ll either just make Sherlock the main character, they will make Watson the main character, or they will make them more equal co-protagonists and switch between them. The Mimicking of Known Success does that. Chris: Yeah, it’s much better.  Oren: I really liked it, and it worked really well. That’s where the actual Sherlock style of story has evolved to. And then you just have occasional weird throwbacks like the Justice of Kings, where the viewpoint character is like a camera following the main characters around. And you might as well just use a non-embodied viewpoint at that point. What’s the point of giving it a character? Bunny: Just make it an actual floating camera. It’s just Cambot from Mystery Science Theater. Chris: Okay, I got another one. I gotta mention framing devices where people talk about the story. [laughter] So, Interview with the Vampire, there’s the boy who is technically supposed to be the interviewer, but it’s really just the audience for Louis to tell him like, “Oh, what happens next? What’d you do?” Or the Titanic movie where we have this whole framing device that’s just not completely unnecessary. Or even Name of the Wind where we gotta talk about how cool Kvothe is before Kvothe tells us his life story. Oren: Chris, if the story is boring, that’s just because it’s about a real thing that happened and real life is boring sometimes. Chris: It just feels like all of these framing devices, their actual purpose is just to hype the story.  Bunny: If you’ve got a character whose only role is to be like, “Wow, gee, tell me more, man, what happened next?” you don’t have confidence in your story to carry itself. Chris: It’s very storyteller wish fulfillment. They’re inserting somebody to be like, “Oh wow, storyteller, your story’s so cool. As your audience insert, I’m totally riveted.” Honestly, I’m not a fan oftentimes of narrators talking about stories at all. Like 10,000 Doors of January, for instance, is very much about stories. I found it all insufferable. Oren: As people who our entire lives at this point are built around stories, being lectured by the fictional narrator about how stories work doesn’t work well. Chris: I think my issue is that usually when we talk about stories within stories, it has a very romantic culture and connotation where we’re saying what to me is just a bunch of nonsense that sounds poetic. Bunny: [long noise] Oh man. Chris: I just don’t have patience for that. Oren: Well, I think with that final pet peeve, we are gonna have to call this episode to a close. And wouldn’t you agree, Chris, that it was a very good episode. Bunny: Just as I predicted. Chris: We’re gonna need a minute while I go into the thought dimension to review this episode and ask our listeners to support us on Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: While Chris is off in the thought dimension. I am going to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.

Novels are a delicious meal, but sometimes what you want is a snack. A bite-sized bit of fiction. Hence, the short story. These compact narratives pack a punch, but they also come with unique challenges. Fortunately, if a short story doesn’t work out, you can move on to a new one relatively quickly. This week, we’re talking about the best practices when writing short stories and also getting our own work cruelly roasted! Show Notes Bunny’s Short Story  How to Write a Short Story Save the Cat  Magnum Opus  Storytelling Constraints  Deathslinger  Shattered Ascension  Honor Among Thieves  Chaser of Shadows  Hellgate Incident 24 Gently Down the Stream Dragon’s Hoard  The Dragonet Prophecy  Spinning Silver The City Born Great  The City We Became  Vorkosigan Saga 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]  Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…  Bunny: Bunny Chris: …and… Oren: Oren.  Chris: Oh, sorry. This episode could only be five minutes long, so we need a topic that we can completely cover in that time. Quick, what should we do?  Oren: How about a topic about how this was supposed to be five minutes long, but ended up being two hours. Because that’s usually what happens when I try to do this sort of thing.  Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately, I have to agree with Oren.  Oren: Or maybe we could just play the first five minutes of another episode as its own episode.  Chris: [laughs]  Bunny: What if we just played The Princess who Saved Herself for five minutes?  Oren: Yeah, here we go!  Chris: We could just cut it off at five minutes and then say To be continued, then promise somebody will make a follow up, and then never do it.  Bunny & Chris: [laugh]  Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about writing short stories, which is partly because I’ve recommended short story writing on the blog, and I’ll explain why. But if you’ve been writing novels and really longer works for a while, you might not know how to pivot to writing a short story. And there’s lots of different types of short stories. There’s not necessarily just one way to do them. At the same time, I think it’s worth going over some tips and what tends to work better for them. And I’m gonna focus on the 3000 ~ 5000-word length, just because that’s usually the standardized short story side that if you’re size it, if you’re submitting to a publication, people are writing. But I don’t mind talking about other sizes if the need arises.  Bunny: Oh!  Chris: Oh no, I just rhymed.  Oren: You did it. There’s an excellent rhyme there, but you should obviously do is start by saving the cat on page three.  Chris: And that ends up being like the very end of the story.  Bunny: And the cat was saved.  Chris: The cat was saved. The end.  Bunny: To be continued. Chris: To be continued. So first: why two short stories? We’ve talked before about how we work with a lot of writers—when we’re editing—that are on their magnum opus: Their first story, which is usually super huge, often a series. And what I personally experienced is very often you start this big passion project when you don’t know anything about storytelling, and then you learn a whole bunch of stuff because you wanna make your magnum opus that you’re super passionate about work. But what ends up happening is, unfortunately because of practical reasons, it’s just hard sometimes to get something that you thought of when you were new and didn’t know anything to a really good place. It’s not impossible. Some people have done it, but it’s like pulling teeth. It’s real hard and you have to rethink everything. And a lot of times you’re attached to everything, and you don’t want to give anything up. And so you’re working under 20 different constraints. We had a whole episode about constraints and storytelling and how they make everything hard. And it’s just really easy to get discouraged and think that’s how storytelling always is when your project has just made everything really hard for you. Because it can be really hard to rearrange those pieces. So if you work on a short story, that gives you the chance to start fresh. Focus on your skills as they are now, and to also experiment, which a lot of new riders really need—to get some experimentation out of their system. So that’s a really helpful place to do it at the same time. And then you could get a feeling of accomplishment because you could actually finish something that’s short. That doesn’t mean it’s like super easy. It tends to be more intense per word than writing a novel, but it’s still a short length. Again, it’s easier to just get it done and call it finished.  Bunny: See, I can intellectualize why all of these points are good reasons to write short stories. And yet I am god awful at it. I don’t think I would write a short story of my own volition. I’ve mostly been made to write short stories for various classes and granted. Those classes usually had us read short stories that were far longer than the short stories we were actually able to write for the class. So most of my frustrations with short stories come from specifically the 10-to-12-pages-double-space-Times-New-Roman-font-size-12 limitation. But I just, I cannot. So I’m glad someone here has tips about it.  Oren: Yeah. I used to have fun with a biweekly little flash fiction “contest”. The prize was that you got a little emblem to put next to your forum name for a week.  Bunny: Oh yeah. I love flash fiction for some reason. I can do extremely short and long things, but the short story is simply the wrong length.  Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause the flash fiction is enough for one kind of neat idea. And then the moment you’re like, okay, I need a second one, and then that just opens the flood gates and it’s like, why not all the ideas?  Bunny: Exactly. See, Oren gets it.  Oren: I do.  Chris: This is process advice, but again, if you have not been consuming any stories that are about the length that you wanna write. Right, because that helps you get a sense of what kind of stories can you tell in a small space and helps get those ideas flowing. So I think that if you do wanna write a short story and you’re having trouble pivoting, one of the first things I would do is just look for how you can consume smaller stories on a regular basis. But I do think that sometimes it comes a matter of if we’re writing longer stories, we have a sense of what kind of material we find motivating. And that’s gonna change because you can’t do some of the things you’re used to with a novel. But you can do other things that might not hold your attention for a whole novel. And so, getting used to like, okay, this is what actually works for me at this length and this is what I like writing. I can take some kind of experimentation.  Oren: Yeah. Like I mentioned a few podcasts ago a manuscript that out of nowhere has a really intense car chase. Why does it have this? Well, the person watched Fury Road. If you want to write about a car chase and there isn’t room for one in your novel, just write a little short story. Car Chase is a perfect thing for a short story. They’re fun, they’re tense, they’re easy to explain what’s happening. Go for it. That’s a perfect scenario.  Chris: So just to be mean and stir up some drama on this podcast.  Oren: Oh yeah…  Chris: I gotta point out something I’ve seen both of you do in the short story, that does not work very well. And that is the fraught interaction. Between two characters that have a long history together.  Bunny: No! [laughs]  Oren: Chris, no, no! You can’t take that from me. Come on, Chris, have you no decency?  Chris: It just doesn’t work very well at a short story length because again, what you learn is that that matters if you already have emotional ties to the characters. If you already understand their history, so that you can be invested in that conflict. Whereas with a short story, you don’t have time to set any of that up, so you’re dropped in with characters you don’t know, with a history you don’t understand, and it really kills the emotions in their interaction. It really makes something that would be really heartfelt just fall flat. Backstories in general require— Bunny: Don’t take my backstory from meeee! Chris: [laughs] Oren: Maybe I want the emotions to die, Chris. maybe this is a story about emotional ghosts. You can’t be the boss of me. Bunny: Ugh, I’ve been burned so thoroughly. Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize I was gonna be personally attacked on this episode. Bunny: But you’re right though. I think that is another thing that I struggle with with short stories is that we want a climactic, heartfelt, dramatic confrontation, but you don’t have time for much context. And it sucks because I want you to weep at my scenario, but you don’t care about it. Oren: It’s not my fault that I love interactions between characters with lots of history. It is a medical condition that I have, Chris. Bunny: [laughs] Chris: People can definitely do heartfelt short stories, but I do feel like by default the ones that are most successful, particularly speculative fiction, short stories, tend to be the ones that focus on high novelty concepts and fun ideas and gimmicks, and not on creating deep emotions. Because of that upfront investment in, okay, we have to get to know the characters and get to know their situation. And emotional investment takes time. So, I think that if you were gonna try to do that in a short story, you really have to focus in on it. You have to simplify, cut it down. And I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but it’s gonna be a lot more difficult. And you gotta think about, okay, how am I gonna sell my audience on this character real fast? And is the character in a really sympathetic position, for instance, for me to do that? So it’s definitely a higher bar, whereas I think the ones that tend to be do really well are just like, Hey, look at this cute, fun monster. Oren: Yeah. Sometimes this can be a good opportunity to make use of one of those high novelty storytelling prompts that float around Tumblr and potentially other social media sites, but they’re like always screenshots of a Tumblr exchange. Some of those can work pretty well as short stories. What if that frog that we see dancing a lot was trying to start a dance school or something? That could be a short story maybe, but like probably not the ones that are like, okay, so what if a woman sold her firstborn to both a witch and a demon, and then the witch and the demon had a custody battle, and then they had to co-parent and then they fell in love. That probably wouldn’t work for a short story. There’s too many steps there. Chris: There’s a lot of different steps there. Yeah, but here’s some example of concepts I’ve used for short stories. I have a short story— Bunny: [sarcastic] Which are perfect and without any flaw.  Cause I don’t do that tiresome, ineffective, dramatic character confrontation. Isn’t that right, Chris? Chris: I mean, I do have serious short stories. I just think that the novelty ones work better. I’m just shoving them under the rug so that you don’t see them. [laughs] Bunny: Are you gonna passive aggressively link to Honor Among Thieves with the show notes? Just to leave that there. Chris: I don’t make the show notes. This is up to Oren. Oren: But I was definitely going to do that, so… Bunny: Oh, no. Cut it. Now I’m passive aggressive. Chris: I didn’t name any names. I did not name any stories. Bunny: Look, mine’s not published so you can’t prove it even exists. Oren: Yeah, we’ll see about that. Bunny: I don’t even remember what I called that one. Chris: But again, these are things like little shadow creatures must tame the household cat that’s terrorizing them. It’s a fairly familiar situation. There’s something that’s different, but it’s also something that can happen relatively fast, like you’re trying to monitor a gate to hell, but your asshole coworker won’t get you in an important document. Again, something that has something novelty in it, but is a relatively familiar situation otherwise, and is something that could be resolved quickly. Oren: Based on reader feedback in a mild defense—but not really—of my bad habits. My two best received short stories on the site have been Deathslinger and Shattered Ascension. Both of which have characters with backstories but getting that backstory across was the hardest and probably worst part of the story. Chris: But those are also your longest ones. Oren: That’s true. Chris: Those are notably your longest short stories. Oren: They are longer. Bunny: They’re so good! Chris: Which is fine if you decide that, okay, I wanna do my backstory and I need all this set up and I can’t fit it in the standard story length, and you don’t have your heart set on sending it to a publication or whatever, then yeah, go ahead! Make it a little longer! Make it a novelette instead or something that’s at a slightly longer size. Make it the size that it needs to be, and then you can try for a shorter idea for your next one. Oren: And even in those two stories, I didn’t depend on characters who knew each other super well. In de Slinger, the protagonist. Meets a character who she knew as when they were kids, but they haven’t seen each other for a while, so it’s not like they have a long history. And then in Shattered Ascension, the protagonist doesn’t know either of the two main characters who are also there with her. She’s only just met them. And so instead, I spent the time explaining this weird premise of what if everything was airships. Chris: I do remember having to very carefully manage how your backstory and context was communicated in Deathslinger. I do remember working a lot on that. Oren: Yeah, that was hard. It was a hard thing. Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Bunny: And that’s why you should write novels only. Chris: [laughs] Oren: Yeah, only ever novels. Bunny: [laughs] See, I think the problem I have with a lot of short stories is that they feel like scenes from novels, and that’s because I’m used to writing novels and because I want them to be novels. And that’s how I end up doing these interactions that require so much context. I think the first short story that I’ve written that was alright but not very good was basically just an action scene. It was just an action scene grabbed out of context and it still wasn’t very good for that reason. Cause I had to explain in the middle of combat how the magic system works. Oren: Yeah! [laughs] Bunny: And that was, difficult, let’s say. But required less personal setup. Oren: I did basically the same thing for the first and possibly only short story I got to write for college. Bunny: Wow. How’d you get away? Oren: All of the classes said creative writing. And I finally found one that didn’t entirely lie. We did one short story exercise. And I wrote something similar, it was an action scene. And with very little setup, it was like, assassins want to kill this lady and she’s very cool, so she’s not gonna get killed. And I turned it in, and the professor’s feedback was basically: It’s not very good. Make it better. Which you’re right, it’s not very good, but I don’t know. Could I get something a little more specific? Bunny: Right. And I think Chris, with the short story that you mentioned, of mine, that you’re subtweeting here: I made it more difficult for myself because not only was it this backstory between two characters, but they were also on a quest to retrieve or reach a magical object that also needed to be explained because it was affecting the environment. So there were eight different things going on at once. Chris: Bunny. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not referring to just one story. Bunny: Oh, no. [laughs] Wait, what else would mine have you read? Chris: I’m so much a meany. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it. I had to say it. Bunny: Okay. Okay. Okay. You gotta name ’em then. Chris: I don’t remember their names. Bunny: Oh… [laughs] we were gonna fight about this. Chris: That was one of them. The other one was actually a play. Bunny: Oh, it was a short play with the monsters, wasn’t it? Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Okay. Yeah, that one too. I like that one though. Aw. Oren: Please stand by as the Mythcreants hosts air their dirty laundry. Bunny: [laughs] I mean, maybe I’ll just give you a link so you can post one of them, so that people actually know what we’re talking about here. Oren: If you want, you might as well. Bunny: I might as well. Oren: If they’re available, I’ll take a link. I’ll put that in the show notes. Just see if I won’t. Bunny: Yeah, I think Stormcaller was that first one. I will get you all a link so you can see how bad that short story was. Chris: Yeah. Oren just has lots of them. Oren has even more of them than you. Bunny: Look, I think Honor among Thieves is very good. Don’t listen to her, Oren. Oren: It’s less bad than it originally was. You put it that way. It’s part of the expanse punk genre of stories where you can tell whoever wrote this had just recently read The Expanse. Chris: Again, the other thing, backstory is huge. That’s a really big deal and trying to jump into super emotional moment without enough context… But I think it’s also worth talking about, okay, how much stuff do you have in your story and how unique are you trying to make it? So you have a unique and complex world and tons of characters and lots of places and things. It can just be too much. That’s unfortunately a lesson I had to learn when writing short stories is that I don’t really have room. To do an interesting world. Even in my novelette, Gently Down the Stream. I tried to do an interesting world and I realized it was a bit overburdened. That I struggled with that one a bit because the world was actually more complex than my 12,000 words short story could really handle. Oren: I do remember there was a bit of discussion about whether we could have letter carrying dogs. Bunny & Chris: [laugh] Chris: I really wanted the letter carrying dogs. Bunny: Oh my gosh. Chris: I really wanted them. Bunny: Okay, well now I want them. Chris: That was the darling I had to kill. Oren: We tried to figure out a way to make that work and we just could not do it. Chris: Yeah, we had to kill, I had to kill that darling Oren: But the dog is fine, to be clear Bunny: This episode is just trauma. This is just short story related trauma, some of which is inflicted. Chris: Now that I’m working on stories that are longer, that’s the thing I’m enjoying: doing more worldbuilding. With the short story, again, it works much better if you just take a stock world from the nearest sub-genre. And then if you want something unique, make the story about that so that you’re not overloading. The story has to be directly about that. I mean, Gently Down the Stream is a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle with a unique monster that causes a post apocalypse and then people live an entirely different way and it’s just, you know, it’s just too much. Oren: I would say that the pick a standard sub-genre and then add a weird thing is a very successful way to do short stories. Because one of the issues with short stories is that they cannot deliver the same level of satisfaction as a novel because they’re very short and they aren’t gonna have the same attachment ’cause they are short. So giving something that is a big novel hook. Is a good way to get people to read them. And good news: By the time the novelty fades, the story’s over. Chris: And that’s also why they work really well for subversions.  Cause you can then use that stock story and then make something different about it. Oren: Yeah. I don’t have to do an entire novel from the point of view of a dragon. What is a dragon gonna do for the entire novel? I’m sure I could come up with something, but it’s not easy. Chris: I mean, there are a surprising number of novels now about dragon main characters. Oren: Yeah. But they all just turn into people. Boring! Bunny: Yeah. You’ve read The Dragonet Prophecy? Oren: Yeah, they’re just people. Chris: They do kind of just become people. Oren: They’re just people that are vaguely dragon shaped a little bit. Whereas when I just did it, it was just for a short story. It was for 2000 words. What’s the point of view of this dragon as adventurers attack her in her cave? And that works great. I couldn’t have done that for a novel. There wasn’t a novel worth story in there, but it was fun for a short story, and it was neat. People were like, oh, that’s interesting. And also kind of gross, it turned out. But you know, you take what you can get. Chris: Horror also can be novelty driven. So I think horror can actually work surprisingly well. cause you can bring out all of the surprises and kill a character right away and you’re done. Oren: Yeah. Horror works well as a short story for the same reason. And that is that in a novel, horror fades over time. You get less scared of things as you learn about them with familiarity. And that’s not to say you can’t make a horror novel. You can. It’s just more challenging, you need to figure out how you’re gonna keep the spook factor going— Chris: or just do a much slower buildup. Oren: Yeah. Whereas with a short story, you can have a spooky thing and then the story ends like BOO! Story over. I have also personally found that spooky stories work well as short stories because if I’m going for a spooky ending, I often don’t have to figure out a way to get my character out of the trouble I got them into. Because they just die. Or some other spooky thing happens. And you still need a downward turning point or whatever to make it feel satisfying. But logistically, it’s easier. Chris: Big twists work really well with short stories. So if you’re like, oh, that would be a cool twist, you don’t have to write an entire novel just to be a vehicle for a twist. You can write a short story instead. And you don’t want it to be boring before the twist, but because there is less to get through, if you have a twist that really is surprising and works, there’s almost like less burden. You want some entertainment factor before there, but the twist could make the story more just because the story’s short. Oren: So we could address the elephant in the room, which is: Can I write a short story and then turn that into a novel? Chris: I think it’s interesting. The thing we usually see is, again, people making short stories out of their novel world and characters to advertise their novel. I feel like that’s an uphill battle right there, because things inherently need to be simpler and less complex and nuanced in a short story, so they come off strong right away, and you’re not overloading yourself with complexity. Whereas with a novel, if you make things more unique and more nuanced, that tends to pay off with a larger amount of space. So I feel like you would need to have some way to show something that is simple enough, and then be able to expand it into something more complex if you’re willing to just rewrite it. How canonical does this have to be? Oren: Yeah, the examples I was gonna bring up are that there are a number of books that are on lists as being based on short stories. And they are—sort of—but they’re also very different from their source material. Like Spinning Silver and Enders Game are apparently both based on short stories. And just based on the descriptions of these short stories, they were not available anywhere that I could read. Chris: Oh, that’s too bad. I would like to read the original Spinning Silver. Oren: But apparently it was about Rumpelstiltskin. Chris: You can still kind of see the Rumpelstiltskin element in the novel, but I didn’t realize it until I was told that it was a Rumpelstiltskin story. Oren: And then Ender’s game was supposedly different in some other way. I think Ender’s Game was really narrowly focused on the reveal of actually you were killing the aliens and you thought this was just a game. Bunny: Spoilers! Oren: So those are both very, very different. It’s not like you took the short story and then wrote a novel at the end of it. It’s like you took the short story as inspiration and then wrote a novel. Bunny: I’ve actually managed to do that. I turned one of my flash fiction pieces into a game. Oren: Oh, very cool. Bunny: A branching game, which seems to have been well received. I don’t know. It got one five-star review on itch. And the short story was basically about—I guess spoilers for the game—It was about a bride who’s about to be married and she’s turning into a bug. She’s gaining the characteristics of a mantis. The groom kind of sucks and she eats him at the end. But obviously, for a branching story, you have to have it go other places. Other than that, so it became much more fleshed out. I could not have kept it as simple as I did in the initial flash fiction piece. Oren: Oh, wait, wait. I read the game. Okay. That’s why it sounds familiar. Yeah. I’m beta reading on the game itself. Bunny: Yes, you beta read the game. That’s right. Oren: It’s a good game. Bunny: But yeah, I’d say it ended up being successfully fleshed out, but I needed an actual setting. I needed different ways that it could go. At one point I considered just calling her the bride the way I do in the original short story. But that didn’t really work for the purposes of a longer piece, what was functionally a novella. So I don’t know. It can be done. Oren: The one warning that I’ll give is that it will probably not work to just use your short story as chapter one of a novel. If it does work, chances are your short story wasn’t a good short story to begin with because that suggests you did not really wrap up the plot properly. And you can see this in the book The City We Became, which is based on a short story. And the short story basically just becomes the extended chapter one. But—spoilers for this book—the short story is the bad guy getting the shit kicked out of her and losing. And so the novel just has that as its opening and then at the end she barely manages to escape. Chris: That is not a good opening for a novel. Oren: It’s a bad opening and it makes everything else that comes after it feel way less interesting because the characters are slowly discovering their magic. But we’ve already seen like a giant magic city battle in the first chapter. So, none of this is that exciting. Yeah. So just don’t, just don’t do it. Also don’t take the epilogue and sell that as its own short story. I think it was Escape Pod which did that with like a Raksura book. You’re listening to it like this is clearly not a short story. Like this is the end of some other story that I haven’t read. And then I finally found that Raksura book and read it and I was like, Hey, guys, what the heck? Bunny: [laughs] Chris: If you’ve already written a novel and you have fans and you want tidbits for your fans, then it becomes more reasonable to write short stories with those characters and that world because they already know and like the characters. Oren: Yeah. I guess if your name is Lois McMaster Bujold, you can do it. Chris: Martha Wells has some short stories that are related to her that Raksura books with the same characters. They’re not bad if you know the characters. But there’s so many characters and she wants to put them all on her short stories, and it just wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t know and like those characters already, but as a way of something to give fans while they wait, for instance, for the next novel, then yeah, they’re pretty good for that. Oren: All right, well, I think we are gonna have to call this podcast to a close. We’re out over time, once again. I told you we couldn’t stay within the word count limit! Bunny: [laughs] At least it’s not two hours. Maybe someday we’ll turn this into the first part of a two-hour episode. Chris: And if you can spare a dollar for this poor podcast that has gone over time, please go to patreon.com/mythcreants and become a patron today. Oren: And before we go, I’m gonna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon 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. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.