The Mythcreant Podcast

Most people have encountered language barriers at some point in their life, but they’re rarely a problem for fictional characters. And when an author does include a language barrier, it’s usually overcome in short order. Is this the right way to do things? Maybe. Sometimes. It’s complicated. Good thing we’ve got an entire episode to talk about it! Show Notes The Universal Translator  Star Wars Languages  Ark: The Animated Series  Shogun  Mariko  Lingua Franca  Prima Facie  Michelle Yeoh  Project Hail Mary  Esperanto  Trigedasleng  Darmok  Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: And for the rest of this podcast, I am going to be speaking entirely in droid beep boop sounds. boop boop boop… Bunny: Oh yes. Oren: beep boop Bunny: Of course. Chris: That’s no problem. I’ll just use my magic autotranslate technology that’s never sampled this language before. And it’s a completely unknown language, but it can, you know, know exactly what you’re saying. Oren: beep boop beep Bunny: Oh, that’s a great observation. Oren: I think I made a good point, and thankfully, now that you have a magic translator, it can translate what I’m saying for the convenience of anyone listening, but in character, I’m still speaking in beep boops, just so we’re clear. Bunny: This is going to be true for the rest of the podcast’s mortal life. Chris: Somehow the technology also silences all the beep boops and has audio to create a new voice for you, and we just can’t hear the beep boops anymore. Oren: Yeah, and if I occasionally want to do something just in beep boop for emphasis or as an idiom, it will know to let that through. Bunny: Well, now you’ve gotta start punctuating your points with very loud beep boops. Oren: Yeah, I will definitely remember to do that. We have a history of keeping our opening bits going like that. I think everyone can agree. So today we’re talking about language barriers in fiction and whether or not you should have them or not. Maybe you don’t want them, ’cause I’ve seen stories that have them and don’t handle them well. And then of course there’s the running joke of “everyone speaks Common.” Chris: Somehow I miss this running joke, maybe ’cause I’m not on social media really. Oren: It’s mostly a D&D joke. Common is the language everyone speaks by default in D&D for some reason. Chris: Is it really called Common? Oren: Common. Chris: It comes from the country of Commlandia. Oren: RPGs have it a little harder because they have to actually tell you what’s going on, whereas a lot of settings just don’t say anything, but if you look, you can still tell that the languages in the setting don’t make any sense. Like in Star Wars, everyone speaks Basic, except for, I guess, Hutts for some reason. There are two languages in Star Wars. No, three: there’s Hutt, Basic, and Wookie. Bunny: And I guess droid, but everyone just… See, I feel like in Star Wars everyone just understands what everyone else is saying, and then the dialogue from the characters speaking in English convey to us what they have said. Oren: Yeah, it’s real… They can all basically tell what their droids are saying. With Wookies it’s weird because Wookies have names that Wookies cannot pronounce. So it’s just the languages in Star Wars are just a mess. None of them… they don’t make any sense. Chris: The Wookie thing is a metaphor for how people of other cultures are assimilated into the Basic culture. Bunny: They’re all so basic. Oren: I would accept that as an interesting explanation if Star Wars at all explored it. But it’s… Anyway, I understand why people don’t want to do language barriers, because if you’re not interested in them, they are a huge pain. Like they just get in the way, your characters can’t really do anything complicated if you have a bunch of language barriers and they can’t understand each other, so it’s just easier to be like, “No, everyone just speaks the same language. It’s fine, whatever.” Chris: No, no, but there’s a solution to this. You just have the characters look into each other’s eyes, and then you could describe, “Well, he gave me a look as though he wanted me to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish while eating pretzels.” We know eye contact can communicate anything in fiction. Bunny: That’s the real common. Oren: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen magic hand gestures. Like, don’t get me wrong, hand gestures can communicate, and people have used them to communicate, but there’s a limit to how complicated information they can get across, especially in short periods of time that tend to be relevant in high-stakes fiction. Sure, if you have plenty of time and you don’t share a language, you could use gestures to arrange the sale of something, right? You could point to the thing and then point to the money, and you could work that out, right? That could take some time. But in a high-stress situation, are you going to be able to communicate “A flanking maneuver over the third ridge,” like, when you only have 30 seconds? Probably not. That’s just not going to work. And I’ve seen stories that do that because the author clearly just got tired of the language barrier. And at this point, I would rather there just not be one. Chris: The essential problem is that at first a language barrier makes it feel real that people come from different cultures and adds realism. But as you continue, that gets old and it’s still in the way of the plot. Oren: Yeah. Your mileage may vary on how much of this you tolerate. Chris and I were watching Ark, the animated series recently, and the premise of that show is that people get grabbed from across time and space and brought to the magical dino island, and so they speak different languages from wherever they’re from. That seemed like it was going to be realistic, and the first time we met a guy who didn’t, you know… The first person we met was from the United States, so he spoke English. Then we met a Roman guy who had recruited like a British scientist, so he had a reason to speak English. But pretty soon, everyone they meet just happens to speak English, except for one Finnish woman. She’s the only person on the entire island who doesn’t speak English. Chris: The Finns famously cannot comprehend English in the slightest Oren: And it’s like it just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for English to be the common language everyone speaks in the context of the show. It probably should have been Latin, ’cause that seems to be the biggest power block on the island, is from Rome. But instead it was English. And honestly, for me, I wish they had just said the island has a magical translation field rather than doing that, ’cause to me it just called attention to how silly it was. But it was also cool to see the multiple languages. So your mileage might vary there. Chris: I wonder if there was… I don’t know much about the techniques using kind of visual media for this, but to do the premise where they are actually talking in Latin, but then still express it to the viewer in English. Because if we have a conqueror who speaks Latin, and we’d have a main character who speaks Latin, you could say that, well, everybody was forced to learn Latin. The main character already knows Latin, and then still have the occasional character who hasn’t managed to learn Latin and then use the language barriers there. It would just be easier in prose, because in prose you can just say they’re talking in Latin and express in English. It’s a little stranger when you’re watching something and hearing audio, because they’re obviously speaking English. And if the entire show takes place in another country, you can go with the premise that they’re all speaking another language, but when you have language barriers built into it, that’s a little weirder. Bunny: What if they spoke English but with an accent? Oren: With a Latin… What is a Latin accent in English? Bunny: I don’t know. You put like eus at the end of most words. Chris: I guess it’s a dead language, right? So we don’t know. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. Oren: Maybe in Pig Latin. The character’s constantly talking “ex-nay on the upid-stay” sort of situation. But okay, so they could have done what Shogun does. Shogun, of course, is the poster child for integrating language barriers into the story, both the book and the show. In Shogun, Japanese is Japanese on screen. Portuguese is English on screen, and no one speaks English in the entire show. Technically, Blackthorn presumably can speak English, but he never does. So they could have done something like that, right? They could have had a character who is not an English speaker, but I don’t know, starts off speaking her own language, whatever that is, maybe she’s from… I don’t know, maybe she’s from China, she speaks Chinese, and then, when she gets to this island, we translate Latin as English, which is the one that everyone is speaking. I think that could have been done. The transition might be a little awkward, but I think we could manage it. Bunny: Yeah, that would be one way to do that. Oren: Speaking of Shogun, the way that Shogun uses its language barriers is, uh, first is it has translator characters and it works them into the plot. Having a translator character in a story where you’re not taking advantage of them is awkward because it basically means that your main character has to have an extra character with them all the time, and that can be logistically difficult. Protagonists tend to go through pretty high-stress situations in which an extra character may not fit. Chris: Can I just say, though, that Mariko is a terrible translator? Oren: But she’s so great for drama! Chris: That’s just the funny thing, is that in a show, it would be a little different. Again, ’cause in prose you can handwave things that you can’t if you are watching, you know, film or watching a video where you have to see what’s happening. In prose, you could just be like, kind of summarize that somebody is translating it first. You can spell it out and then you can handwave it and just have the conversation happen with the assumption that there’s a translator there, but not really narrate all the translation. But in video we have a translator there who’s literally translating every line. And if she was actually a good translator, it would be really boring, because we’d basically be hearing, ’cause we can understand what the main character is saying. ’cause he’s, you know, it’s supposed to be Portuguese, but he’s speaking in English for us. And so then she would just say the same thing and it would just be really dull. So instead, she’s just this terrible translator who is always summarizing what he’s saying and always adding her own agenda. Bunny: So for story purposes, never have a translator unless they’re a bad translator. Chris: Well, it makes it interesting, and again, this is a person who doesn’t understand Japanese etiquette, so he says things he really shouldn’t say, and then she smooths it over, right? By paraphrasing or even changing what he says. Oren: Yeah, which has given us a beautiful new meme format where you have Blackthorn say something like, “Tell Lord Toranaga that I currently run three podcasts,” and then Mariko translates that to, “The Anjin says he is unemployed.” I love it so much. It’s my favorite new meme format. And in most cases Mariko has pretty good reason when she is altering the translation. Not 100%, there are a few points where I wonder, “Mariko, why did you change that? That’s an odd change you made.” Chris: There are also places where she’s actually called out for inserting her own agenda. So she’s not supposed to be a perfect person. Oren: And there are also some instances, you see this more in the book, they had to cut some of this from the show for time, where Blackthorn’s translators are just straight up hostile to him. In the show you see the little bit of this where they call the Portuguese Catholics to translate for him and he doesn’t like them, so they translate what he’s saying badly or sometimes just make up stuff and claim he said it. Uh, so that also adds some drama. Shogun also takes place over a long enough period of time that Blackthorn can slowly begin to learn Japanese, whereas if your story takes place in a short period of time, the urge to have your character magically learn the language really fast is strong. Chris: I’m also thinking, okay, what if you wanted a situation like Blackthorn and Mariko, where you can… the readers understand both of them? You’d probably need to use either omniscient or it would be from the translator’s perspective. So you’d have a character who’s like, “Oh gosh, this person who doesn’t understand our culture is constantly being rude to really powerful lords, and somehow I have to translate in a way that makes it better.” Oren: I mean, a translator having to manage a rambunctious VIP sounds like a fun story. I’d read that. Chris: That does! Oren: I don’t know if it could support a novel, but by the same token, it doesn’t have to. Language barriers don’t have to be all or nothing. They can come up sometimes, so that could be like a thing they have to do for a little while and then the story advances. Bunny: Right. I’ve noticed that, and this is unsurprising that in stories where the language barrier is handwaved away by a universal translator, the universal translator then breaks. And hence shenanigans. Oren: Yeah, they like to do the occasional episodes where the translators break. That’s fine. Chris: I do like reminders that, if we’re going to… if there is supposed to be a language barrier and it’s downplayed a lot, by using technology or something, I think it is nice to get reminders that people are actually speaking different languages, but I think it’s really hard to keep that consistent, because every time Star Trek, “Oh, the Universal Translator breaks,” it just feels very contrived when it works and when it doesn’t. Oren: Yeah, especially since if you’ve stopped thinking about it for a second, most of the human characters would be speaking different languages. Like maybe they all learn multiple languages in school, just ‘cause. I suppose that’s possible. Chris: But would Picard be speaking English, British English, or French? Oren: No, we’ve established that Picard’s family are actually an émigré family from the UK and they live in a little enclave in France and refuse to learn French. That’s the backstory on the Picards. I do think that the Star Trek-style universal translator is similar to aliens with bumpy foreheads in that it’s something we let Star Trek get away with, but it would be pretty hokey to do that in your novel. I think you would want something a little more believable than that. Chris: Yeah, if you have a really advanced space opera setting with really high technology levels and you want to just handwave language barriers, I don’t think that’s a terrible way to do that. I think you could just state it once and then not call attention to it again. Oren: Yeah. That, maybe. I do think, if you want to try something that’s a little bit more immersive, we made fun of Common earlier, but the concept of a lingua franca. That is perfectly legitimate. You can definitely have a language that people learn as their second language for the purposes of communication. You just want it to make a little more sense than “every fantasy species has one language, and the human one is called Common.” Chris: That’s a little funky. Oren: Typically speaking, a lingua franca is going to be the language of some powerful group. And it can be as simple as whoever the most powerful state around is. Their language is the lingua franca, and maybe they even enforce learning it. That’s the thing that can happen. It can also be a state that is not militarily powerful, but has a lot of commerce. Arabic is a lingua franca and has been historically, because Arab traders went around all over the place, so speaking Arabic was a good way to talk to people you’d otherwise wouldn’t share a language with. Chris: I do understand the impulse to call some language Common or Basic because, again, it’s avoiding adding one more word the readers have to memorize. But if you already have a powerful country, empire, or another well known name in your setting, then you can just potentially reuse that, as long as it sounds similar enough that people can guess, “Okay, that word is for the language that people in this place speak.” So people don’t have to learn, “Oh, what is that again? Oh, that’s the name of the language.” Especially since people don’t necessarily talk about the name of their languages that often, so it’s hard to remember. Oren: First, you need to introduce the concept of a lingua franca and then explain that the lingua franca is not French. It used to be, but now it’s a different language. Bunny: And Picard does not speak it. Oren: And, of course, depending on the scope of your setting, you can probably just handwave it and say that whoever the main character runs into happens to speak whatever language they speak. That might get hard to believe if your character is going, you know, is well traveled and goes around a long way, but if your character stays relatively close to home, that’s fine. Even if they meet a foreigner, it’s reasonable that foreigner would know the language of the country they’re traveling in. Chris: Yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do if your scope is smaller. Like the issue with the Ark show is, of course we’re taking everybody from around the world in all time periods and putting them together, which is a really difficult position to be in when it comes to language barriers. But if you just have a few travelers going to a different country where they speak a different language, then you can just be like, most of them learn it, or a few people are fluent, one person has it rough but can get by, and you’ll be okay. Or if they’re just going to one place, you can have a local pidgin that everybody uses that works well enough. It’s when you’re doing a lot of combined people from all over the place that it just gets hard. Oren: Yeah. Oh, and also, I’m sure we should have mentioned this with the Ark thing. I’m sure there’s also a group of people who wouldn’t mind if most of the dialogue was in Latin with English subtitles. That would probably have reduced the show’s audience, so I suspect that’s why they didn’t do it. Chris: I just think that would be hard for the all the voice actors. Oren: Sure. But on the other hand, how many people know Latin and can tell they’re messing it up? Bunny: You haven’t met the Philosophy Department. Chris: Think of how hard it would be to memorize your lines if they were in a language you didn’t know. Oren: They do it. They don’t do it at wellness. Chris: I mean, I just don’t think that’s how you’re going to get the best acting. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: Philosophy is how I learned, through one of my philosophy professors who used to be a Classics professor and studied Latin, that philosophy pronounces the phrase prima facie wrong. It’s actually like prima fak-ye or something. So that’s a… prima facie is a good way to get Latin enthusiasts annoyed if ever the need arises. Oren: Look, there are a lot of actual Latin pronunciations that sound pretty silly by modern English standards, and so we’ve massaged how we say that. Bunny: I would just say that if we had to go with only actors who knew Latin, we wouldn’t get Michelle Yeoh in there. And that would be very sad. Oren: That would be sad. Bunny: Hey, maybe she secretly knows Latin. Oren: She could. We don’t… we just don’t know. Chris: Michelle Yeoh is really having a moment right now, I gotta say. Oren: So let’s assume that you… instead of doing all that, you want to have bridging the language barrier be part of your story. A prime example of this is in the novel Hail Mary, where our protagonist meets an alien and has to figure out how to talk to him. Chris: Yeah. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Oren: Yeah, that is real challenging. And Hail Mary manages it. It’s like decent, but it did at the time strike me as a little handwavy. Like they do a lot of work. He figures out some computer programs and assigns sounds to it and that’s neat. But it just… it did feel like he probably accomplished that much faster than he would actually be able to do it. Chris: Yeah. I’m okay with a little fast forward. On something, I think for practical reasons, stories do that for all sorts of things. The training montage, for instance, whenever a character learns how to fight, they somehow do it really fast. And languages take so long to learn. I think a little fast forwarding, a little bit, is not going to throw too many readers out. But he really did put a lot of emphasis on it, and I think it did help that there was computer software that was programmed to do the translation for him also involved. Again, not perfect, but that’s probably, besides Arrival, that’s probably the most I’ve seen a story focus on translation. Arrival is neat because it has an actual linguist who actually has to figure out how to speak with aliens that, again, you can’t just translate, because it’s a completely new language. So even a universal translating program doesn’t have the ability. There’s no data. So she has to go meet these aliens and start working with them to develop a vocabulary. Um, and that’s also what happens in Project Hail Mary. It’s just… I don’t think she gets all the way there. I don’t think it needs her to get fluent with them in the same way that the main character has to get fluent with alien in Project Hail Mary. Oren: Right. Like she doesn’t have to construct complicated engineering devices with these aliens. She does have to learn time travel though, so, but that’s like a function of the language apparently. Chris: That’s… yeah, she just gets that as a bonus. Oren: Yeah, strong bonus power. Bunny: Yeah. The harder you think in the alien language, the more time travel you get. Oren: One other thing with lingua francas I forgot to mention, which is that, especially in a sci-fi setting, you could probably manage it so that everyone speaks a constructed language. Space Esperanto. That’s more believable to me in a sci-fi setting than in a setting that’s more historical. Chris: So here’s a question: if they had Space Esperanto, would they just call it Common or Basic? Oren: They might call it Basic. Okay, I’m willing to believe they might call it Basic. Bunny: They would call it Esperanto, no matter the context. Chris: So maybe in Star Wars they’re just speaking Esperanto, which is called Basic. Oren: If you go into the Extended Universe… Bunny: Well, let’s not go into the Extended Universe. Chris: Oh, no! What have I done? I have podcasted too greedily and too deep! Oren: I do not remember what the origin of Basic is in the Star Wars Extended Universe. Chris: Gosh, I remember our early podcast episodes, when Star Wars would come up, and then you and Mike would just go off onto long tangents about the Star Wars EU. Oren: Let me tell you about the time Han Solo kidnapped Princess Leia and took her on a romantic vacation to rancor planet. Chris: I had to interrupt and be like, “Let’s talk about Buffy now.” Oren: Hmm, I think it’s time to talk about rancor planet, Chris. I’ve got an essay prepared. Bunny: So, for the purposes of say, the odd person who might be writing their language barriers in written medium that does not have sound, do you think, and I think I know the answer to this, but do you think it’s ever worthwhile to write down the actual sounds that the other language is making, or do you think it should always be description? I don’t know, “She spoke something in a low voice.” Oren: As opposed to writing the phonetic spelling? Bunny: Yeah. Chris: I do have a couple articles on this, if you want to have a conlang in your story, for instance, but that’s where it tends to come up a lot, because people make their conlangs for their worlds and then they really want to show them off. Naming is usually the best place to do that. So you can name places or things like that after words in the language, but I think there are other things that are like repeated phrases, like greetings, for instance, a standard greeting or a standard goodbye. If you want to show that off, it’s a good place to do that. Things that are like repeated phrases that your readers can slowly learn. But just like a normal dialogue, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reason to do that. Oren: Yeah. Especially ’cause this is not like a language that some of your readers might know, right? This is a made up language. No one reading this book will know it. And it’s just a very high barrier. And if you don’t know how to do conlangs really well, there’s a good chance it’s just going to come across as silly, so I’m not going to say there’s never a period where you might want to do more of that, maybe you are really good at con languages, in which case that could add some fun novelty to it, but the authors that I’ve worked with who’ve tried this have not been at that skill level and have honestly not been interested in committing the time to do it ’cause they just want to tell their story. Chris: Yeah, I would think of using it for proper nouns, like place names, and then maybe you could teach your reader 10 words during the course of the whole novel. Something that’s just… really, you gotta set your ambitions a lot lower, and writing an entire dialogue line in a language the reader can’t understand just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just not going to be a good experience. Bunny: Yeah. I will say I’ve seen the stunt quite poorly, where it feels like the character starts unlocking words because suddenly certain words are in English, but we’re meant to be understanding that they’ve just realized what those words mean, which is really awkward. Chris: Speaking of which, we haven’t even talked about The 100, which is one of the more interesting uses of conlangs in a TV show, where the funny thing is, the characters have been in a space station since the apocalypse, and they come back down to Earth and they meet people who have been on Earth, and technically, it’s only supposed to have been 100 years, but every time they say that, I just plug my ears and go, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.” It’s ridiculous. So then they find that the people there have developed their own language called Trigedasleng. But they also speak English, because that would be too much for them to have the language barrier. But I have to say, I still like the language. During the course of the show, you learn a lot of words and then later, when they travel somewhere else, by that time, all the characters who used to be in space have learned this language, and now they can use it, so that the other people can’t understand them, which actually makes it useful in the plot, whereas it was never useful in the plot before. Oren: It was so goofy, though, when they were talking to this guy and trying to understand his language, and then he just switches to English. What? Chris: I mean, yeah, there’s multiple things here. Like how do they develop a language so fast? If they were going to develop a language so fast, how is it that they still know English? Yeah, that was interesting. Oren: It’s cool later on, when they actually use it for something, but I don’t think that was worth the cost at the beginning, is my hot take. As opposed to my favorite language barrier that doesn’t make sense: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Chris: Yeah, Darmok and Jalad! Their arms open! Oren: Where they all speak in memes. Nothing about that makes any sense, but I love it anyway, and therefore it’s perfect. Chris: Shaka, when the walls fell. I’m probably getting all those words wrong, I don’t know Darmok very well. Oren: Look, it’s fine. It’s a meme. What’s important is the meme, okay? That’s like… the fact that you speak in memes, you can also say things like, “Surprise white guy, his eyes blinking,” and there, now you’re in the spirit of things. Okay. Speaking of which, I think we are about out of time for this episode. So remember I’ve been speaking in droid bleeps this whole time, so if it sounded like English, it’s just ’cause that’s how great our translator is. Chris: And if you would like, or to continue speaking in something that sounds like English instead of beeps, we need to keep that universal translator working. So consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

We all love to exercise our imaginations in the infinite land of storytelling, but what if we can’t just do whatever we want? What if we were limited by things like our previous choices, poor special effects, or our inability to kill off a major villain? This week, we’re talking about the kind of constraints that stories get put under, from the famous movie examples you’ve probably heard of to the more mundane kind that we novelists have to deal with. Plus, how nice it feels when your next story isn’t under a bunch of constraints. Show Notes We’re Alive Sylar  Jaws Animatronic Differences Between Filmed and Prose Stories  Human Cylons  The Problem With Multiple Points of View  Furiosa  Mortal Engines  Follow the Sound of Snow Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.   [Opening theme plays} Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is: Bunny: Bunny, Chris: And: Oren: Oren. Chris: You know, I think this episode will be more successful if we meet some additional requirements, don’t you? Oren: Yeah. Bunny: I mean, heck yeah. Oren: They could be very logical and not at all arbitrary. Bunny: What if we didn’t say the word “the?” Chris: Great, great idea. Also, I should mention we have a sponsor, Wraith McBlade, attorney at law. And so we do have to mention Wraith McBlade three times during this episode and very naturally. Has to be worked in a conversation. Oren: He’s a very real lawyer. Bunny: I mean, with a name like that, I think you just walk in and they just hand you an attorney certificate. Oren: He’s on the cutting edge of the law. Chris: Ooh. Bunny: Ouch. That cut me deeper than the Wraith McBlade did. Chris: Also, I was thinking the Goddess of Podcast, Podcastia, absolutely has to be happy. And she doesn’t like it when we mention books or movies because that’s competing entertainment media so we better not do it. Oren: It’s all right. I listened to a lot of audio dramas back in the day. I’m ready. I’ll complain about We’re Alive, the zombie audio drama.  No one alive today, ironically, remembers that show. But I’m ready. I’m ready to talk about it. Bunny: I don’t wanna risk anything and then get smited, so maybe I’ll just be silent. Chris: Alright, let’s go. This is gonna be a great episode. Sponsored by Wraith McBlade, attorney at law. Oren: Very natural. Chris: Very natural. Number one, down.  So anyway, talking about constraints and storytelling, firstly, why constraints? When I was thinking about this episode, I did not realize that Bunny loves constraints. [laughter] So we may have to do battle. But no, really, I wanted to talk about it, because in many cases it does feel like it’s the invisible force sabotaging your story and making your job hard, and you may not realize that it’s there. Bunny: Yes, we’ve established pretty firmly that I’m the villain of this podcast, and even though I was reformed a couple weeks ago, I think this is my villain turn again. Oren: So you’re just Sylar then? Bunny: Yes, exactly. Because I do think constraints, I think they’re a net good, but Chris, elaborate. Chris: So it’s not that constraints are necessarily, like any constraints are bad, but I do think that stories inherently have lots already. You know how to tell a good story; there are certain things that the story needs to do just to keep readers entertained, and so that already comes with a lot. And if you add tons more, then it just becomes a problem and you may not realize that you’ve, added constraints or how many. And I think new writers are especially vulnerable to this because they’re usually very ambitious and like to take on big challenges, but are also sensitive to feeling like failures because they don’t have lots of stories under their belt. Whereas a more experienced storyteller will realize, oh, this particular project is just really tough. When it’s your first project, you just assume that’s how it always is. And it means you’ve written yourself in a corner in some way. So this is the reason why sequels and prequels, as a rule, are not as good as the original. They can be. They can, and sometimes even be better, but even in the best of conditions, if you were to average it out, I think you would always find that originals have an advantage over sequels because they just don’t have so many constraints that they’re working on. Oren: I mean, you could say that the fundamentals and best practices of storytelling, or the rules of storytelling—spooky—are constraints, depending on how you wanna define the term. When I heard the topic, I assumed we were talking about constraints that are not for the purposes of making stories better, but you could say that having a throughline is a constraint. Because now you can’t tell a story that doesn’t have a throughline, if you’ve decided that your story needs a throughline, which it should. Chris: Yeah. My point is mostly that storytelling is hard enough without adding additional requirements. Bunny: I see. Okay. Maybe I was tracking… Chris: …or prescriptions. We wanted rules, prescriptions. We are prescribing things like some prescriptivists. Bunny: [jokingly] No, not the constructivists. Oren: If you zoom out really far and someone doesn’t know what they wanna write a story about and they’re told to write something, and it can be about anything. Well, right now I have analysis paralysis, but usually by the time authors get to the stage where they’re seeking out our kind of writing advice, they at least have some concept of what they wanna write their story about. The alchemy of their brain has produced that set of constraints. But we do occasionally get people who are like, we have, I have no idea what I wanna write about, what should it be in? The only thing I can tell them is they have to go figure that out for themselves. Bunny: I guess I was thinking about this more along the lines of what Oren mentioned, but as someone who does get analysis paralysis and blank page syndrome quite a bit, I think on the whole constraints can be quite helpful. Chris: Yeah, certainly there are times when they provide writing prompts. For instance, a lot of the structures that I would call pseudo-structures that I don’t think actually provide good plotting advice; I do think that one of the reasons that people enjoy them is they give them ideas for what to do. Oren: Yeah. I mean that they can be useful for that. The problem is that, again, they tend to either be so specific that they’re just counterproductive, or so vague that they’re not really restraining anything. They’re not really constraints at that point. Chris: I don’t think the point though, is necessarily to constrain. I think it’s to give ideas. It gives something to start with. Bunny: It might help a moment here to define constraint because I feel like we’re working with two different parallel, but both definitely constraint-y definitions. So one form of constraint is like you’ve written, this is the one you mentioned, Chris, you’ve written a story and now you have to write a sequel that the constraints are, you have to follow from the first one in a way that makes sense. But a different kind of constraint could be something like a production constraint, which, maybe it was more along the lines that I was thinking, like famously the shark animatronic in Jaws was a piece of crap. And then the director had to use it pretty sparsely, and then that ended up being good because it turned out using it that way ended up creating better feelings of tension and ominousness. And then another form of constraint could be bickering in the writer’s room, right? So there’s a couple different types of constraint, and I feel like some of them might be medium specific. Like you probably won’t have bickering in the writer’s room if you’re not writing a TV show or a movie if you’re just sitting alone in your room. But yeah, maybe we need a little definition here. Chris: I would think of constraint as any requirement that your story has to meet, and it can be imposed by you. So if you’re writing a sequel, for instance, a requirement would be you need the same main character. That main character has to be in the story after, in the timeline, after the previous story, for instance. That would be a constraint. If you have an animatronic that’s bad and you’re not supposed to show it, that certainly removes your options. And I think that’s what constraints largely do, and that’s a situation where I think it’s really rewarding for somebody to come up with a good solution to a problem that they have. Okay, I can’t show this shark, right? And here I did something clever, and that’s really rewarding. At the same time, we don’t necessarily know that if the effect had looked better that would’ve been worse. Bunny: That’s true. However, consider the million Jaws knockoffs that slap the shark across the screen like it’s a dead tuna. Chris: But this is one instance and I think that a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction over, hey, I had all of these constraints I had to work with and look what I came up with. And that’s a really satisfying thing to do. But in many of those scenarios it may not turn out better. Oren: And there’s a certain amount of survivorship bias when we’re talking about production constraints because we tend to hear about the ones that turned out well, because those are the ones the creators wanna talk about. Bunny: That’s fair. Oren: We hear about the shark one. We hear about the cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Because the human cylons was not part of the initial conception of the 2004 reboot of that show. That was something that they did pretty late in production because they realized that having robot cylons on screen all the time would be really expensive and look bad. So they were like, aha, there could be human cylons, and that was pretty cool. But also they didn’t have any idea what was going on with that. And so it turned out when they told us they had a plan, that was just a lie. Because by, by the end, it was just like, why are there human cylons? [mumbles] I don’t know, God maybe. Chris: [ominously] There’s cylons, they have a plan. Hear that every episode. It’s like, they don’t have a plan. Oren: Then you also hear about it with the new thing people love to talk about is the constraints of practical effects make the movie look better. And I’m not really convinced that’s true. I think it’s that special effects are cheaper. And so you get, you know, there’s this idea that you can do anything with CGI. I should say now special effects, that’s too broad, but you can do anything with computer animation and that’s something studios want you to believe because it’s much cheaper to do it that way. But as a result, it ends up not looking as good as if you had used more expensive practical effects. Chris: I’ll say, here’s a couple examples of where constraints are really helpful. And not that you necessarily couldn’t go without them, but that you have to use much better judgment. ‘when we’re talking about, for instance, point of view. One of the reasons we’re really critical of multiple points of view is because having a single point of view is a constraint that is usually very helpful because it encourages good practices. It encourages you to keep things focused on your main character and keep your plot tight, and not jump around and fragment your plot all over the place. So that does mean less freedom. And you can use multiple POVs to great effect, but it comes with a lot more judgment calls. You have to be more disciplined. Same with having a limited point of view versus omniscient. If you’re using a limited point of view, that just sticks in the character’s head and you can only write what that character knows and their perspective. Again, it, it encourages you to stay focused on them and stay focused on the story and not go into diatribes. And so that’s a constraint that is really helpful and helps you make good choices. Whereas, once you’re writing an omniscient perspective and you’ve got a narrator who knows everything and could tell the reader about literally anything, at that point, you have to make more judgment calls. You know that [dramatically] freedom and power comes with responsibility. So yeah, in those cases, I would call those in many cases good constraints. Not constraints you’d want for every story, but helpful. Oren: Yeah, and it’s interesting looking at which types of story give you constraints in exchange for something, because a sequel, for example, is going to have some constraints. You’re going to need to address whatever happened in the first one, or leave a really unsatisfying story, I guess you could just not address it. And you’re going to need to work with the same characters and stuff like that. But as a trade off, you get more attachment because the readers or the audience has been with these characters for longer. You can build a more complicated story than you could in just one installment, so you can build up to an even more satisfying ending. So you have lots of benefits there as well. Now, some stories will impose so many constraints that the sequel is basically impossible, but on the whole, sequels can work decently, especially if this original story was set up with sequels in mind. Prequels… [laughter] Bunny: I was like, when is this coming? If he doesn’t mention it, then I am jumping on this one.   Oren: We gotta talk about prequels, because prequels have even more constraints. And few, I would argue none, of the benefits in most cases. Bunny: Yeah. I think a world without prequels would not be a worse timeline than the one we’re in. Oren: Yeah. It’s not that there are zero good prequels, but I’m not sure I can think of any stories that were better for being prequels. Chris: I think the reason to do prequels is because you’ve already exhausted all the potential storylines in the sequels, but you wanna tell another story about the same characters. Oren: Yeah. Or not even the same character. Sometimes it’s just a different character who we saw once in a frame somewhere and it’s like, hey. Chris: That’s not really a reason to do a prequel. [she laughs] They will do it, but at that point you might as well just use the same world and setting with a completely different character that hasn’t appeared. Bunny: Look, you two can stop dancing around it and just say money. [laughter] Chris: Yes. The benefit of prequels is money. You got the constraint, which is that the story is awful, but the benefit is money. Bunny: That’s the trade off. Oren: It’s sometimes money. Although, I’m not sure it’s always money. Some of these projects really look like passion projects. I could be wrong. Maybe Miller thought that Furiosa was gonna make him a ton of money. I don’t know. But from the general reporting I saw around this movie, it just really felt like this was a thing he wanted to exist. Chris: But didn’t he make it in conjunction with Fury Road originally? Oren: Yes.  Chris: Right, so I don’t know. Did he make it as a prequel or did he make the story about Furiosa and then write Fury Road, and then end up making Fury Road first? Oren: As far as I can tell, Fury Road did come first, but this was made at about the same time. It’s not really clear which script they wrote first, but I think it was Fury Road. But some version of the script for Furiosa existed while they were filming Fury Road. Charlise Theran, excuse me, Charlize Theron, yeah— is on the record saying that she looked at the script for Furiosa for inspiration on how to play her character and a deeper understanding of her character, which suggests to me that either A, uh, she’s a bit of a fibber, or B, the script has changed at some point because I don’t know what insight we were supposed to get on Furiosa from watching the movie Furiosa other than some of the things they suggested happened, happened, I guess? Chris: Maybe she looked at it for insight on her character, but she didn’t actually get any. [laughter] Bunny: That could be. Chris: Then she glossed it over for a press meeting. Bunny: It’s not a lie, it’s misleading. Chris: I did look at it for inspiration and insight. Oren: It’s really weird that Furiosa— the one thing about Fury Road that suggests a prequel, and I’m not saying this would’ve been a good idea, but it does suggest one, is that Furiosa talks about needing to atone. So that kind of raises the question, atone for what? And according to  Furiosa the movie, the answer is nothing. Bunny: Well, yeah, I feel like this project was, I mean, I still think it’s like… To be clear, I liked the movie, but I think it was also kind of doomed from the start by the fact that we understand from the original that she’s done bad things. Oren: Hang on, hang on. I should put a spoiler here for the movie Furiosa. I forgot to do that. [he laughs] Bunny: Oh, that’s right. Yes. [sing-song] Spoilers. Oren: I haven’t actually given anything away, I just mentioned a thing that didn’t happen. Okay. So we’re good. Bunny: So we’re continue knowing this is spoiling Furiosa, but yeah. We don’t do see her do anything truly morally reprehensible, like she killed Dementus, but we already knew that was going to happen, or she planted him in her tree. Oren: I don’t quite know what to make of that. Yeah, that was just, okay, I guess that happened. Maybe. It’s not actually clear if it’s supposed to have happened! It was a little too cartoonish for this world that they’d set up. Chris: So I think it’s worth talking about—okay. It’s beyond… We can talk more about prequels and sequels. There are plenty of things that can be dissected there, but it’s worth talking about what imposes tons of constraints besides that, because that’s not the only one. One thing is a work that you are adapting. Any adaptation is dealing with all of the constraints of the original, depending on how faithful it stays is original. In some movies that are adapting books, for instance, if you’re adapting a whole novel into a movie, it’s actually a much shorter story. So you have to take some level of liberties. I think we saw Mortal Engines that was trying to stick very closely to the book; did not work out. Yeah, that one can be a big one. I’m just having finished a retelling of a fairytale. I will say that now that I am plotting a novel that is not an adaptation, because I did stick fairly close to the original fairytale, it’s amazing how much easier it is to plot than when I was doing an adaptation and trying to figure out how to stay close to the original fairytale while actually making it work as a plot. Because fairytales, they’re usually summarized, and that makes a huge difference. You don’t really have to have engaging conflicts, and a lot of those things don’t work as well when you expand them. Or some future cool scenes that you are want to add that you first dreamed up and you haven’t added yet. Those can, again, kind of like the prequel effect. There are some premises we can talk about that inherently hem people in a lot, and are just hard to pull off. Bunny: I have suffered from this, I must say. As much as I think constraints can spur creativity, I have been trapped in a locked room with ideas that I want to carry out and cannot figure out how to get to. Chris: Is this something you haven’t written yet? Bunny: Yes and no. It’s something that I’ve plotted, but that I spent a long time banging my head against because of part of this. Okay, so this was the thesis I wrote as part of my senior project, and I wanted a twist at the end. Spoilers, but maybe I’ll change this. I wanted this reveal that there’s been a spooky cult essentially. And as this is a mystery and a speculative fiction, I feel like I can lay the groundwork of there being spooky, supernatural things. But some of my readers were like, oh, this seems like a story about the relationship between these two characters. And then suddenly spooky cult comes outta nowhere. Now granted, this was just them reading my outline and being like, that seems contrary to the rest of the story. But looking at it, I’m like, okay, I can see why this slow burn mystery suddenly having this flipped switch into this cult plotline. I can see why that would feel strange and like I hadn’t set it up properly. So it’s partially a question of setup and partially a question of whether it’s the type of story where that sort of reveal would feel satisfying. Chris: Yeah. Any storyline that relies a lot on withholding information or secrecy or has a big twist, those generally come with more constraints, because if you’re trying to withhold information, you have to figure out how to plot the story without revealing things. And that can become a problem if, for instance, that information is needed for a good story, but you also want it to be a twist. Or a lot of twists and reveals, they rely on a double interpretation, right? So you have to look at it before the reveal and be like, okay, I’m looking at X. And then after the reveal, you have to go back and think back on it and be like oh, that was really Y. And what that means is when you’re writing it, it has to fit the requirements of both X and Y. Or like stories where, this could be, this magic is real, or it could be imaginary. Bunny: Oh, I also caught that issue with that same thesis. [laughter] It’s ambiguity. I want ambiguity in the room for spiritualism, but also… Chris: Any time you add an interpretation because you’re doing a reveal or you want ambiguity, you have to then extremely carefully maneuver everything so it can be interpreted in multiple ways. That adds a lot of constraints to the project. Or just antagonists that are just misunderstood, and aren’t actually bad. Those ones… I have written some plots where people just needed to work it out, and there’s always so much harder because I just can’t have an antagonist that’s really malicious. That means they can’t do a lot of the things that they would normally do to create tension in this story. And it becomes so much harder to plot. Anything where the plot is spoiled if two people just talk to each other is the worst. Or you can have characters that are too powerful, I think is another one that makes the premise hard. You know, a powerful ally that you have to constantly keep them away, or a villain that you have to constantly come with reasons they don’t squash the protagonists, or worse yet puppeteers and string pullers where oh look, now I have to make it so all of these events could be masterminded by some character. Those are all things that just make the whole process of plotting have to fit additional requirements. That makes it hard. Oren: Yeah. You can do the same thing with any villain you want to do a redemption arc on. Assuming that you want the redemption arc to be satisfying, you’re now operating under constraints. Because you can’t have them do anything too bad, because if they cross the moral event horizon, that’s just gonna be upsetting if you try to redeem them at that point. Chris: Yeah. How many times can I have them just toss people to the side? And then just have them roll. I trying to remember what show we saw where they were just throwing people off of buildings and being like, no, really, they’re okay. Oren: Everything’s fine. They’re fine. Bunny: Don’t worry about it. They’re all rubber people made of rubber. Chris: Okay, but here’s the big one actually, as far as constraints that we work with all the time, is your existing draft. Bunny: [dramatically] Noooo! Chris: Your existing draft that you were revising. [she laughs] Bunny: My enemy. Chris: But this is a big deal for if you’re working on a big project for a number of years and you get better as you go, but you made your entire, like all the ideas from your story and how you constructed it and all the events, you made those when you knew nothing, oftentimes, or you knew less than you do now, but you are attached to all of it. And you’re trying to make it work, and you’re trying to make the story better while changing as little as possible. That’s a huge one and it can be really crushing. And again, if this is this first work you’ve worked on, you don’t realize just how crushing it is. Bunny: It’s also, again, speaking from experience, really hard to go back to old projects that you were once super duper into, but knew way less about. You can just feel like it’s better to cut that one loose than it is to edit it. Oren: That’s the reality of most of the clients I’m working with, is that’s one of the reasons why I spend so much time asking them questions and getting their buy-in; because you can give someone the best recommendations in the world to improve their story, and if they’re not able to make those changes, then that’s all useless. A large part of what I work on is, what changes can we make to improve this? And at the very least, what lessons can I teach you so that you’ll know better next time? It happens all the time. Chris: So I, I think that this episode wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t at least mention the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Bunny: You knew it was coming. Chris: I mean, everybody of course has ranted about them, but this really is just the epitome of how constraints can sink something. Not that the directors were making great choices on their own, but there was no way for that third movie to be good. It was impossible. Oren: Yeah, by the time you get to the end of the Force Awakens and it’s like this isn’t a great place for to start a second movie. It does not open well, and then you get the Last Jedi, which is just, I’m taking my ball and going home, I don’t want to deal with any of the things that were in the last movie, and then you get Rise of Skywalker, which at that point I don’t know how to fix Rise of Skywalker. Given the constraints of the previous two films, I’m not sure it can be done now. Obviously that movie also takes its ball and goes home even harder. [laughter] Bunny: Goes home with a vengeance for sure. Chris: The biggest constraints, the biggest problems that it was put under, was the fact that the villains had been completely destroyed, and then Rey had then been given powers. Oren: Yeah, she has more powers now, but her powers were super vague. Bunny: She makes rocks float. Oren: The villain thing is the biggest constraint. The villains have been all destroyed, but also so have the good guys, like the Resistance is completely gone. What are we supposed to do with that? Chris: Because usually each story in a series is going to increase the scope to make things more epic than before, and at least definitely in a series like Star Wars, that’s what people expect. You would have a big Starship battle. But if you’ve destroyed all of your starship fleets,  that’s hard to do. Bunny: But Chris, you could just raise some up out of the water, fully crewed. Chris: [laughs] Yes, you could do that. Which is, if you’ve ever seen, oh, there’s a big time jump right in between seasons of a show, especially, one of the biggest reasons that people do that is to give things a soft reboot to try to get rid of constraints. Because if we just made it so, okay, five years passed, now more things could have happened in between that time and it feels more realistic to change up things more. If the last Star Wars sequel film took place 20 years later, then it’s more realistic for them to have fleets again. Oren: Yeah. But no, instead everything’s fine. We’re back. Don’t worry about it. Bunny: And they did that. They did jump forward for the Last Jedi. Oh, wait. Oren: The Force Awakens? Bunny: Yes. That one jumps ahead to an identical scenario, which is about the most disappointing thing you could do with a time jump. Oren: The Force Awakens was definitely the least constrained of them other than constrained by the fact that its director just seems to want to have done Star Wars again. But even it was under some constraints. It was clear that people wanted the original characters, but also clear that the original characters could not convincingly do a Star Wars movie because they’re all much older now. So that was the biggest constraint that the first film was working under. And that’s a challenge in its own right. And then it decided to just do A New Hope again. Because why not? Chris: I do think though, that as we’re talking about the sequels. We should probably praise Obi-wan the show. It’s not a perfect show, but it’s a mid-quel. And considering the fact that it’s a mid-quel, I think they did a really good job. Yes, if you watch A New Hope, you’re not gonna believe that Leia and Obi-wan have ever met before. Oren: Not only met, but gone on this bonding adventure. It’s like, no, that is, that did— no.  There’s no way that happened in the New Hope timeline. Chris: But honestly, that’s the kind of minimum thing that they could do, is to fill in things that we didn’t believe were there, but at least aren’t directly contradicting really huge parts of the setting and storyline. Oren: Yeah. Obi-wan being as good as it was is frankly a miracle. I was really not optimistic when I heard the premise. Bunny: I noticed that neither of you have mentioned our sponsor since the beginning of the show, which was one of the stated constraints. Oren:  Call now, Wraith McBlade, good legal advice. Chris: Yeah. If you’d like to save us from Wraith McBlade, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want thank a few of our existing patrons, which is technically a constraint. We do have that in our Patreon rewards, but we like to do it, so it’s not really a constraint. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [closing theme plays] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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