The Mythcreant Podcast

Every story is made of countless little pieces, from characters and arcs to locations and magic powers. But if those pieces are scattered around randomly, they won’t amount to much. For a story to be as much or more than the sum of its parts, we need to make it cohesive. That’s what we’re talking about today, with discussions of fractured plots, random Cthulhu aliens, and diverging viewpoints. Did you think we were going to let this episode go by without grinding the multiple POV axe a little?Show Notes Whale Sounds  A Game of Thrones  Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters  Kaiju Preservation Society  Throughlines  A Memory Called Empire  Project Hail Mary  Wheel of Time  Rebel Moon  Travel Story  Voyage of the Dawn Treader  Lord of the Rings Center Your Darlings  The Next GenerationTranscript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: I’ve been thinking, what if we split the podcast into segments? So in one segment I’ll play the harp, in another you can talk about whatever video game you’re angry at the time. Maybe we’ll give a few storytelling tips and then we’ll just play a recording of whale sounds for the rest. Everybody likes whale sounds. Oren: Everyone does like whale sounds. More variety is better. They say it’s the spice of life. So I say: just put all the variety on there without any thought to the consequences. Chris: The podcast wouldn’t really be about anything anymore, but we can include whatever we feel like. Oren: Yeah, like a little cabaret number. Chris: Obvious bonus. This time we’re talking about making a cohesive story. First: What is that? Oren: It’s when the story sticks together properly. Wait, no, that’s an adhesive story. Chris: Yeah, so it’s where all the parts fit together. None of the story elements are easily extractable, everything has something to do with everything else, and it has things like foreshadowing and callbacks and references. Elements make more than one appearance. Basically, it’s the result we get after we consolidate the story. Similar to consolidation, it’s just that everybody uses the word “cohesive.” The verb for that is “cohere,” which doesn’t sound great. I don’t wanna talk about “cohering” story elements. So we talk about the process of making this happen as “consolidating,” making all of your elements work together more, which I technically consider to be different than simplifying or trimming, but that’s also necessary if you want a great end result. And it also kinda assumes that the story didn’t start that way, but I think that this is actually best when you start early as possible. Oren: If you get to the end of your story and then look back and are trying to make all of the different things you just threw in there cohesive, that’s gonna be a much bigger job than starting from the beginning. Chris: And so having the cohesive story is really important for kind of creating that feeling of unity, right? Which is also what we’re looking for when we create a throughline. If having a throughline is an important part of making the story feel cohesive, it’s really important for reducing complexity and keeping people engaged, ’cause if nothing has anything to do with anything else, they don’t have as many reasons to be interested in something. Whereas if everything is interrelated, then they can be interested in one thing, passionate about one character, for instance, and they’ll have a reason to care about everything else because that character is interacting with everything else and related to everything else. Oren: It’s the difference between the related POV chapters in Game of Thrones and the unrelated ones. You’ve got Catelyn, who is trying to figure out what’s going on with Bran, and who pushed him, and then trying to warn Eddard, and they’re not in the same place, but they’re clearly part of the same story. Then you’ve got Tyrion and Jon, who are going up to the Wall, and that’s not super related, but at least it’s establishing like the spooky, magical stuff, which is the backdrop of the political conflict. And then you’ve got Daenerys, who is off with the fantasy Mongols on a different continent, and it’s so weird how, even before Viserys dies, you can just tell that they’re never going back to Westeros. Like, Viserys confronts Illyrio and is like, “Where’s my army to take back Westeros?” And Illyrio is like, “Yeah, eventually, whatever. When we get to it, who cares?” And it’s weird because theoretically that’s Illyrio’s motivation, is to use the Dothraki to conquer Westeros. But man, I have never seen a character who cared less about that. Chris: Without making your story cohesive, later you’ll probably end up cutting and reworking a bunch of it because the story doesn’t feel right. The story elements start to work against each other or compete with each other. That kind of thing becomes overly complex. Oren: If you’re really unlucky, you end up with a studio-mandated project with two elements that just do not work together, like giant monster kaiju and human-focused spy drama. Chris: Talking about the Monarch TV show. Oren: God, that show. Chris: Um, to be fair, it is really hard to make things related to the kaiju. As they stomp human cities, they also stomp cohesion. Oren: I think the core issue with that show is that it is a kaiju story, and kaiju stories have the basic premise that nothing humans do matters. And also a human drama spy show. So the spy show isn’t about anything. They’re just running around being like, “What’s your secret?” No one has a secret that matters. Chris: Problem with the kaiju is that kaiju are very expensive for a special effects budget, so we need to fill in the time with something else. Oren: It doesn’t help that it’s a midquel, so it can’t disturb the precious canon of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, or whichever one comes next. Chris: Kaiju stories have this entire problem where they’ve got human characters that are hard to relate, make them interrelated with the kaiju. Kaiju Preservation Society did surprisingly well with this, and I think it really helped that they spent a lot of time in Kaiju World, so we could interact with the kaiju when they’re not stomping on cities. Oren: The kaiju were like a cool thing for the characters to learn about and not the reason we were there, ’cause that’s the awkwardness, that’s the creative pull of kaiju stories, is that no one is here to watch the human characters. We’re all here to watch Godzilla blow up a city. And that wasn’t the point of Kaiju Preservation Society, so it just worked much better. Chris: We got to be with human characters who also just wanted to watch the kaiju. I really think that, when you wanna make your story cohesive, get in the habit of doing it regularly, starting at the concept stage, starting when you have that little idea, start thinking about this. And when I work with writers who have a concept, I help them take all of the bits and pieces that they have that they wanna put in their story and make sure that they can actually work together. A typical writer might come with various ideas that they want, like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I had these crystals that gave off magic? Oh, and I really like Elder Gods. I want Elder Gods in my setting. I want a central romance. And oh, I just really relate to this idea: I have a protagonist who has to overcome their fear. Oh, and fake dating is so much fun. I wanna put that in.” We have all of these miscellaneous ideas that we wanna put in, and the question becomes, how do those things fit together? How are Elder Gods relevant to this romance? And how is overcoming fear important to the romance? There has to be a reason why they’re all there together at once. Otherwise, you just get competing story elements that kind of pull the story in different directions. If you have a bunch of little miscellaneous ideas like that, they will not all fit. You’re gonna have to shake things out and decide. Maybe having a bunch of cool, powerful crystal magic just doesn’t really work with the idea that magic is a dark corrupting force, ’cause that’s something that is strongly associated with Elder Gods, and that is supposed to be part of the danger that Elder Gods create, since we don’t usually have our protagonist fighting 1v1 against an Elder God. Oren: I just want to go nine rounds with Great Cthulhu! Chris: So maybe when you look at it, you would find that things don’t really work together very well. And so then you start sectioning off Crystal Magic Academy over here and these Elder Gods over here, I’ll have these characters do crystal magic and these characters do Elder Gods. And pretty soon you’re drawing like a divine line down the story. Maybe the only thing the crystals can do is help protect you from the Elder Gods, or they make you unseen by the Elder Gods or something. It might not work the way you originally envisioned this idea. Crystal magic is something that is just like super powerful and people just like blowing away their enemies, fighting the Dark Arts with them. It’s not very compatible with a cosmic horror setting. Oren: Spooky crystals maybe. That’s not impossible. Weird crystal growths, cosmic horror term, but they’re not gonna be like beautiful and sparkly. Chris: So it’s about: Okay, are you willing to change this idea? And then, if you can’t, which one is more important? Basically, the sooner you make the choice about what stays and what goes, the better off you’ll be, because most writers get really attached to their ideas. Especially once you’ve drafted, it’s hard to cut your draft down or discard ideas. Basically, you wanna nip anything that doesn’t fit in the bud so that you don’t cry over it later. And then you wanna build off of what you keep. So the next time you’re like, “Okay, I need to add something to the story. I want a sidekick, I need a character arc for this character,” then you look for something that you already have in the story to build off of. “Hey, I need a character arc for my love interest. That’s what I want. Oh, okay, I have Elder Gods.” So maybe the love interest has been corrupted by the magic and has to get free of that corruption. So now we have a character arc that is inherently related to the Elder Gods. We take what we already have and look for opportunities whenever we add new elements to build off of that. Oren: A common cohesion problem that I see is there’s some kind of setting or occasionally plot element that appears out of nowhere at the end. Thinking of stuff like A Memory Called Empire. Suddenly Cthulhu aliens, they just aren’t part of the plot for whatever reason, they just hang out in the background. We get an occasional interlude that hints to us that Cthulhu aliens exist. Chris: Do you think in some of those cases there’s an intended twist where it’s supposed to be like a big, exciting surprise? Oren: That can work under the right circumstances. Admittedly, those circumstances are a little harder to nail down intellectually ’cause there’s a difference between building up to something and then revealing a cool thing at the end, and your story going along and suddenly, “Ah, this random thing popped up.” I don’t know exactly where that is. Chris: It’s about having it present at some level to set expectations for what fits. Now, I haven’t read The Expanse books, but just judging on the show, we have a weird protomolecule alien presence that kind of builds up and feels epic at the end. But in the beginning of the story, it’s something that’s killing people and is weird, but is not like a huge thing. Somebody’s science experiment, it appears differently. Or if we take Project Hail Mary (spoilers here), but we start with a single alien molecule, the astrophage, and that sets expectations for alien life. But it’s still a surprise when Rocky shows up. Sapient, sophisticated aliens show up, but at the same time, the presence of the astrophage makes it so that fits, especially since we are as good at explaining the science and making Rocky feel pretty high in realism, despite being an alien who is intelligent. Oren: ‘Cause that was part of the main character story, right? I think the problem with A Memory Called Empire is that the Cthulhu aliens are not part of the protagonist’s story, but they are important for the ending twist. That’s where the interludes come from and part of the reason why I think they feel so random. I can imagine ways to make the protagonist’s story about the Cthulhu aliens, although I think that would be hard because the main story of the first.book is to explore the Teixcalaan Empire, which is this space empire that’s like a combination of Rome and the Aztec Empire, which is interesting, and they have a lot of cool stuff. So it would be weird to then also be looking at cosmic horror stuff that would diminish how weird and novel this human empire is. Chris: At that point we have a couple elements working at cross purposes. I think that you could still make the culture interesting and still have the Cthulhu aliens. I don’t think there’s enough focus, again, on these disappearances, ’cause there’s some ships disappearing. So if you set up a situation where the kind of nation the protagonist comes from has been losing ships, so we set up that there’s something kind of mysterious, set up that kind of cosmic horror mood, and then one of the reasons the protagonist has to go to this empire is because they need to sort of build an alliance and get help, but in a way that doesn’t subjugate their nation, then we could still make it relevant, but not front and center until we want it to be front and center. Again, I think setting up that mood, making it through that not only are ships disappearing, but there’s something that feels cosmic horrory about those disappearances, even if you have… nobody has laid eye on these cosmic horror aliens yet. Oren: What about having too many characters? Is this a cohesion issue or is this something else? Chris: It’s definitely a complexity issue, but it’s not necessarily a cohesion issue if all of those characters are together and working on the same plot arcs. It’s not necessarily a cohesion issue, but simplifying is still a good idea. Consolidating the story is one way that you reduce complexity, but it’s not the only way you reduce complexity. Oren: So Wheel of Time has a cohesion problem for its too many characters. ’cause every character has their own plot and they’re all off doing their own thing, whatever. Rebel Moon has too many characters, but not that specific cohesion problem ’cause they’re all part of the same plot, for lack of a better term. Chris: And certainly simplicity is also something that you want to get just in the habit of. Of never adding more story elements that you need, of thinking why you’re adding them, of not adding cool characters just because you came up with a new cool character concept. As hard as that is, it’s gonna be even more painful to cut them once you’ve had them. Oren: How do travel stories fit into this? Because the whole idea of a travel story often is to visit a cool new location every new section, and if you are visiting a new location and you then leave it behind, is that gonna create an issue? Is that gonna feel like, “Oh, we introduced this cool thing and then it didn’t end up being a big deal later?” Chris: Episodic stories do have slightly different expectations. So if we’re talking about the type of travel story that is really episodic, then I think we can get away with a lot more elements that don’t repeat. They’re just important to one episode. I had one client who thought… the characters were traveling, and thought they had to bring in all of the important characters they met while traveling back for the climax. You don’t need to do that, because people will understand if we have these adventures in different places. That’s a separate episode that’s a little bit more independent than a typical child arc is. Often, it still could be a child arc, but in that case, the difference is that the story in that one place is higher attention, right? and more important than the overall quest during that time, feels much more present. Like, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the quest is really just a motivation for traveling. They’re trying to find these guys who disappeared, and they’re journeying farther and farther out, so there’s a question of their safety. When they get to an island where, you know, the water turns things to gold, and then everybody gets greedy and starts fighting each other, that feels much more important, that they deal with this gold island, than it does their quest to find these people. As opposed to Lord of the Rings, which also has a little bit of episodicness to it, but is a little more overarching because we have this very important One Ring, and Sauron is hunting them, and that’s much higher attention. Oren: We don’t stop anywhere in Lord of the Rings any longer than we have to. Chris: Yeah. Even in Lord of the Rings we have various characters that come in and out. There’s a little bit higher expectations that they are interrelated with the big arc. Even when they go to Lothlórien, Galadriel helps Frodo with the main quest. Even as the elements change out, it’s still a little bit more focused on that big quest because that’s the structure that story has. Even so, though, where it’s still allowed for characters to come in and out, but if you had like the story taking place in just one city, the big plot arc was most important, that might be weird. It would have to feel a little more episodic for switching out characters. You could have an episodic story in one city. It would just be a little more unusual. Oren: It would be a little harder to justify, but not impossible. Chris: One thing that’s worth talking about, because it is really important, is just finding out what’s important to you. What I tell people is: You wanna start with whatever element you really care about the most, the one that is not acceptable to cut. Oren: Center your darlings. Chris: Exactly. And build everything else around that, and that’s the most productive use of your time. This works with plotting too, right? If you have an end, if you are driven to write the story, because you can just see this one moment at the climax or at the very end of the story that you’re really drawn to, sometimes it’s easier to just work backwards from that. Okay, what would need to happen for them to get there, instead of starting at the beginning? Whereas, if you’re really drawn in by a good beginning situation that you find compelling, then you can work from beginning to end. But regardless, I always think you should start with your darling, right? and fit other things around that, to make for sure that it’s saved and that it stays as central as possible. Oren: This is where starting with the throughline can help a lot because you really want your throughline to be the plot that you care about. Once you know what that is, then you can make sure that you add stuff that supports it and then just build a cohesive story around the throughline. Whereas, if you start with a throughline, and that’s not really the one that you care about the most, you’re always gonna have problems. Chris: When we look at, “Okay, what do you want to write about?” Like, in a general sense, do you love writing where your character is gardening? What kind of scenes do you enjoy writing becomes relevant here because the throughline determines what problem you have and the fact that problem needs to be resolved at the end, but there’s also choices for what type of conflicts do you have, right? What activities is your character engaging in? Those activities allow you to write about what you wanna write about. If you like to write about gardening, you have an excuse for lots of gardening because your character can solve the problem by gardening. Causality is often very useful here. If the problem, you know, if bad gardening causes the issue, which sounds silly, but let’s say the village doesn’t have enough food. There’s been something wrong with the field, there’s been flooding or rot, or potatoes have had a disease again and gone bad. The big problem is caused by that. Then you can focus on gardening all you want to solve that problem. Oren: The order of your scenes should matter to make the story feel more cohesive. And this is something that might sound obvious, but I have worked with authors who haven’t quite mastered it yet. Maybe because they were watching old shows like Next Generation, where you can watch a lot of the episodes in any order you feel like, because nothing changes between them. But with a single story, for it to be cohesive, it should feel like these scenes could only have happened in this order. If you can rearrange them, something’s probably wrong. Chris: You shouldn’t be able to just cut something out without making edits elsewhere because it all should be essential. Oren: Stuff should change. Plot should be different. Character relationships change. Even just the stuff that they’re using can change. It doesn’t always have to be a huge change, but, like, readers like to be able to track that stuff as they go. It’s why some TV shows, even though their plots are very episodic, they have more consistent character growth. Supernatural was like that. It had a lot of one-off episodes, but there was still like a feeling that the characters were changing over the course of time, at least for a while. And then they ran out of ideas, but no one’s perfect. Chris: Long-running show. Oren: 15 years old. That’s, uh, quite a while. Chris: Signs when you need to trim or change: If you have any story element that’s just standing alone, it doesn’t affect anything, isn’t affected by anything. A similar sign: If you find yourself going back and forth between elements, you can’t logistically put things in the same scene ’cause you have one plot and some side characters that have nothing to do with that plot, so you have to keep alternating back and forth between which one you’re writing about, that’s a really bad sign. Oren: If you have a story or if you have a plot line or something in your story that is more exciting than the one that your hero is on, that is a problem. And I have run into this a lot with clients that I work with: They set out to write a story that is about interpersonal relationships and character growth and working with an oppressive system, and then they also have a badass rebellion story, but the main character’s not part of that badass rebellion, but that badass rebellion has clearly captured their attention, and so we spend a ton of the story talking about it. Write whatever story you want. It can be about a badass rebellion. If that is what is in your heart, then that should be what’s on the page. You are not obligated to not write badass rebellions. You’re not doing penance. Chris: There’s also a place where input from others can sometimes do damage, is if you’re like, “Okay, I just wanna write my characters being cute together, right? and having a little personal time.” And then you’re like, “Okay, but I gotta do a climax.” So then you put in a villain who swoops in to give yourself an exciting climax, and then your beta readers read it and they’re like, “Oh, this villain should be in there earlier, ’cause you need your plot to be exciting.” So then you start adding that villain earlier, and as you go through revisions, you’re pushed by various people to start doing more and more about that exciting villain plotline, but that’s not actually what you ever wanted to write about. You just felt obligated to write about it. That’s fairly typical, and you wanna give some structure to your cute personal strings, but it should keep the focus on those characters and allow you to write the type of content you wanna write. Oren: This brings us to your regularly scheduled Mythcreants corner about how you shouldn’t really be taking revision suggestions from your beta readers. In most cases, they don’t know what the stories should have. They can only tell you what they liked. Unless they’re an expert, what they like might not be what’s best for the story. Chris: In that situation, adding more of those villain scenes could lead to a story that some readers would like, but if you don’t like it, that’s gonna cause problems because the way that you write it is not gonna fit, right? and also you’re gonna be unhappy and unmotivated. It’s not good for you or for the story. The last thing, of course, is: Anytime two elements are clashing, especially if there’s two different themes, if you want it to be about folklore, but then you are also putting in superheroes, those things, again, just have very different feelings, and so those are things that typically do not… It’s not that you couldn’t do folklore/superheroes, but usually you would really have to work hard to integrate those elements with each other. If you’re… when you’re thinking about that stuff, you’re like, “I like the Witcher. I wanna give it an Eastern European feel,” you gotta commit to that. You wanna make everything an Eastern European folklore feel. If you just, “Oh, I’m now excited about a superhero,” you gotta let that go so that you can keep that theme that you wanted. Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this episode to a close. Chris: If you’ve got some useful tips, please support 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 Callie McLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing music] This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We all love the classic spec fic genres like space opera and cyberpunk, but have you noticed that they can get a bit… stale? Genres change over time, but some are more difficult than others, which results in a bunch of stories that all feel the same. Join us for a discussion of why that happens, how to break into new territory, and perhaps most surprising: why high fantasy isn’t on the list.Show Notes Legends and Lattes  The Wandering Inn  The Expanse  The Space Opera Was Dying  The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet  Revenger  Sisters of the Vast Black  Rebel Moon  Ahsoka  Warhammer 40,000  Crescent City  Always the Harvest   The Witcher  Fallout  Gently Down the Stream Transcript Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: We’re doing a podcast today and it’s nice, but those are pretty mundane these days, right? We all know what to expect. We get two to three hosts bouncing ideas off of each other with occasional obscure references that no one else will get. Wraith McBlade for life. Maybe we could spice it up by adding some music or some sound effects… [music plays] Chris: …or die. Oren: …or would that just destroy what makes a podcast cool to begin with?  Chris: [sarcastic] And this has nothing to do with our topic today, of course. Oren: No, this is just random hypotheticals. So what I wanted to talk about today was how to add novelty to classic or possibly stale genres, depending on how nice you feel like being. Chris: I do find over time most genres have to change, right? If they’ve been around for a significant length of time. Not solarpunk, because solarpunk only kind of exists, but many of the others have changed. Oren: Yeah, solarpunk is also very new, right? Like it hasn’t had a lot of time to establish what a base solarpunk is, and I’ve definitely noticed this problem in some genres more than others. Like ironically, the one everyone is always complaining about, which is high fantasy, I actually find that one to be one of the least stale spec fic genres. Chris: I think it’s really helpful for stories to be in other world settings. I think it makes it feel like there’s a lot more possibilities and people then tend to embrace more variation. Don’t get me wrong, I have still seen my fair share of stories where there’s just elves and orcs by different names but they feel exactly the same. But there’s still quite a bit of high fantasy that has branched out at this point. Oren: And I think that’s because the things that people want in high fantasy are actually pretty loose. So you can call something high fantasy, still give people what they want, but also give them something new because we live in a constant war between a desire for the familiar and a desire for something new at the same time. Chris: Yeah, I do think that there is an exception though, and that makes me wonder if the actual issue is just that there’s not a lot of Middle Earth-like high fantasy settings anymore, because that’s not where the popular zeitgeist is. That’s not what people are most enthused about anymore. But the thing that I am seeing a lot of is D&D-style high fantasy settings. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because D&D has become really popular, right? And people have had some great games, or they’ve been watching their, you know, these roleplaying sessions shows. Oren: I did not think that was gonna take off. Probably nine years ago, maybe longer at this point, I first started hearing about these and I very confidently said, that’ll be a flash in the pan. No one would just watch roleplaying games. Oh boy. Chris: Turns out people do. I do think there’s something fun, especially when they get like celebrity actors in- Oren: Yeah. Chris: -is that they get that like personal connection, that parasocial relationship, if you will. Oren: Yeah. The runaway success ones all have professional voice actors or comedians. Those are the two, but there are a bunch that don’t have either of those that do okay. They aren’t super famous. Most people wouldn’t have heard of them, but there are enough people who just listen to these or watch them to get by without having famous voice actors or comedians. And that is the part that I just did not see coming. I did not think that was gonna be a thing. Chris: But in any case, now when I see something that’s more Tolkien inspired, it’s actually through a D&D lens. And I do think that causes some problems because again, all the Tolkien tropes that D&D uses are fairly stale. But also there’s another issue, that if you take all the conceits of D&D, we’ve got something that’s really low realism, but it’s also popular to have very like, gritty, high realism / grounded – since grounded is the hot new term for this – settings, and having a bunch of of adventurers running around. This is not very compatible with creating a gritty atmosphere. Oren: Especially not adventurers who are at all like D&D characters, right? Because D&D is, it is so weird that D&D is now inspiring a lot of fantasy fiction. Obviously D&D has always had fantasy tie-in fiction, that’s not new. But just the amount of it is new. And it’s weird because D&D is already a weird blending together of a number of different fantasy tropes into kind of odd extremes. And so then you have, we’re taking that and running it back into the fictional medium from which it came and it’s weird. It is creating some odd issues. Chris: Yeah. One of the issues with D&D-inspired settings is usually there’s just nothing to make them stand out. They really could use more novelty. D&D, but the typical settings people run – I mean, people can run D&D in all kinds of settings, of course – but if we just look for the standard Tolkien inspired setting, it is fairly generic. It’s a mishmash of tons of different things, right? Without often very strong theming other than being Tolkien-esque, which is pretty stale. So those settings by default just don’t have that much novelty to them. But I do think that it’s interesting to see, I think some of the best D&D inspired settings, like stories with novelty are actually focusing on the personal level, and not focusing on those adventure stories. So like Legends and Lattes and The Wandering Inn are two examples. Oren: I feel like those are really interesting because you don’t need to have read a lot of D&D-inspired fiction. You just need to be familiar with the tropes of D&D. And so it’s then it’s like, yeah, we can have a story about an orc who retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop and that clicks without having to read a bunch of, shall we say, less than inspired D&D novels. Chris: So I think that is basically how the successful stories have been adding novelty to the D&D setting, is simply by looking at a different part of it, looking at those personal stories, looking at the urban areas, right? Instead of just doing the typical adventuring activities. Oren: Yeah, like “what’s it like to run a potion shop in a D&D world?” that sort of thing. Yeah, the one that I have the most trouble with is actually space opera, which is admittedly a very broad subgenre, and people argue about what its definitions are more than they do with most genres, but in my experience, what it boils down to is settings with big space countries and ships that you fly around and shoot stuff in. That seems to be the important part. The last time that I found anything new in space opera, it was The Expanse. And by anything new, like on a broad scale. I’ve seen some exceptions since then, but the big change in space opera is The Expanse. Chris: Which stood out because it has very high realism, but also did interesting things with it. Like that sweet spot where everything feels realistic, but it’s also very novel. Oren: And like every other new space opera story I pick up is basically the Expanse again. Chris: Because of course it is.  Oren: It’s like The Expanse-punk. It’s like it’s completely taken over. And Charlie Jane Anders has a piece in Esquire saying basically the same thing. And you know how weird it is when Charlie Jane Anders and I agree on something. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Something is going on at this point. Chris: A lot of genres have these trends, right? This is the hot new thing. Everybody’s really inspired by The Expanse. Also, publishers are like, wow, The Expanse sold really well. So give us more of those. I think the danger though, at this point, it’s not that there aren’t necessarily people buying Expanse-like space opera. There probably is. It’s just that with all of these trends, there’s a peak at some point, and then as soon as the demand cools, as soon as people start getting tired of it, then suddenly what you have is a glut of storytellers writing these stories because they were excited about it. And then publishers don’t want any of them. And you could still publish yourself, still indie publish if you want to, but the demand is gonna cool. So I feel like if you’re going to try to do a trend wave, you gotta jump on it as soon as possible. And since it takes years, usually, to write a novel, at this point, I wouldn’t recommend an Expanse-type story. Oren: I think the Expanse-punk subgenre is probably not the greatest thing to start in right now – would be my opinion based on the works that I’ve seen. Although one, even though I didn’t really like this book, as far as novelty goes, I thought it did a decent job, was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Chris: Yeah, it was good at the alien races that were not just, it didn’t feel like Star Trek Forehead Aliens, but they were still close enough, like human enough that they could share a ship together. Oren: That’s like the sweet spot that the author managed to hit very well was, okay, these aliens are not just Klingons, whatever, but they’re not so weird that we can’t work with them. Chris: Yeah, and I think it did help that it was, again, a lighter story because that kind of allowed it to not be too rigorous about this idea of these other types of strange aliens that can all communicate with each other. Oren: And then another one that had some interesting elements was Revenger, which is a part of a series. It’s pretty popular, I’ve forgotten the name of it off the top of my head. But it had an interesting dynamic where the ships were like sail powered in space. They were using basically sailing ship dynamics instead of either what was the previous dominant force in space opera, which was World War II naval ships, or the Expanse paradigm, which is more realistic ships that generate gravity by shooting their engines, basically. This one was different. It was, the ships fly around using solar sails and the physics of it was a little questionable, but whatever. That part was neat. Although that book also, to me, demonstrated the potential weaknesses of just trying to add new stuff, because a lot of it just didn’t feel like it made sense. It wasn’t cohesive. It was just like, okay, so here’s a setting. They have solar sales. All right, that’s neat. They have, they seem to exist in a world full of ruins from much older civilizations. All right, that’s cool, that provided us with a sense of adventure. And they communicate with these weird skulls. Do they use weird bones for anything else? No, just the skulls. Those are, that’s the only one. Chris: So would you qualify that as a space fantasy? ‘Cause it does feel like space fantasy is having a bit of a moment. Oren: Yeah, I mean, it is certainly on the edge. It’s hard to say if I would call that space fantasy or not. Like it seems like it should be when I describe that they communicate using skulls, but the skull communication is so mundane that I hesitate to call it space fantasy. Chris: Yeah. As bad as Rebel Moon is- Oren: Oh, Rebel Moon! Chris: -yeah. I mean it does, I think, show a little bit of where people are going with this right now, where Rebel Moon is a space fantasy, right? Similar to Star Wars. Star Wars, the IP itself has been struggling obviously because it has been mishandled. But we did see in Ahsoka that they brought in more fantasy, even more overt fantasy elements, and we had witches, basically, were spell-slinging now pretty much. And do you feel like that’s compatible with what people wanna get out of a space opera? Oren: I mean, probably? The issue that I think that would create is just that Star Wars is so omnipresent that if your story looks at all like Star Wars, that will be all people can think about. And that certainly happened with Rebel Moon, even though I would argue that Rebel Moon is aesthetically much closer to Warhammer 40K than it is to Star Wars, it is close enough to Star Wars, that is the connection everyone made. And of course we also know that it used to be a Star Wars script, so that didn’t help. But I think Space Fantasy is viable. I would almost, I would be hesitant to recommend doing space opera fantasy just because Star Wars is so dominant in that specific sub-genre that you would have to do something real different to not immediately be compared to Star Wars. Chris: I guess the question is, is being compared to Star Wars bad? Oren: I mean… [question noise] yes and no? Chris: It just depends on how much demand there is for Star Wars material. Maybe Star Wars has embarrassed itself so badly that anything looks bad by comparison, right? It hasn’t generated excitement in space fantasy. Oren: Yeah, and I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way because when I am looking at it, I’m thinking about it in terms of people saying it as a negative, “it’s just Star Wars again.” But I don’t know, maybe people will buy that anyway. So if you’re looking at it from a sales perspective, maybe that’s fine as long as you don’t mind a bunch of reviews saying how this is just Star Wars. But I wouldn’t want that, right? If I was publishing a book that was Sci-fi, I wouldn’t want people to look at it and be like, “it’s Star Wars.” I would have a hard time writing that if nothing else. Chris: I mean, I think it might be possible to break away more from Star Wars by having it more overtly fantasy-ish. Like having a magitech space setting perhaps. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Magitech is a good option, ’cause Star Wars doesn’t really have much magitech. It has technology, which I mean admittedly is pretty magic, but not explicitly. And then it has the Force, which is always separate. So yeah, magitech is probably a good way to go. Chris: Another genre that I find interesting, right, that has big trends is urban fantasy, which I felt like had a lot of settings that were disappointingly the same. Because the idea is that we’d have the relatability of an Earth protagonist with fantastic creatures, but everybody was using the same blend of like, folklore filtered through pulp culture creatures, right? We got the vampires, the werewolves, and what have you, and the settings tend to be very eclectic and not really have a strong identity and strong theme. And now it feels, and this is not entirely urban fantasy exactly, but it’s all fae all the way down. The kind of portal fantasy, somebody gets kidnapped by the fae or humans with fae. I mean Sarah Maas is just so dominant in some of these, her influence is so big. Oren: I believe that is the “romantasy” genre as it is known by the kids these days. Chris: But a lot of like, there was a lot of overlap between romantasy and urban fantasy, typically.   Oren: That’s true. Urban fantasy is definitely one of those ones where I know that the things that I read before are stale now. But I don’t know how to update them without losing the part about urban fantasy that I wanted, which is, I want a bunch of different monsters to live in factions and to fight each other. That’s a thing that I want. Chris: I think that Crescent City was important in having basically urban fantasy, but other world urban fantasy, right? So we have relatable, very relatable earth things like cell phones, but it is technically not Earth anymore. But we can use all the same quips that were used, language that’s more like Earth language, all those things, so that we could basically have that urban fantasy feel in a different world, and that opens up a lot more options. Oren: Yeah, no, that’s true. I did think that was like, the one cool thing about that story. Well, that’s not true. The other thing was the lost human civilization. There was a lot of interesting stuff there. Unfortunately, the humans were the villains in that story. That didn’t go anywhere. Chris: Yeah, that was not great. But yeah, again, with the fae being so popular now, that’s another thing that I wouldn’t, novels take years to write.  Even if they’re selling right now, I still wouldn’t recommend jumping on that bandwagon at this point. Oren: Lemme put it this way. I have seen multiple YouTube videos where they’re like, “tropes we’re sick of.” And fae come up on those lists, which confused me because I don’t read a lot of romantasy. So I had no idea what was going on in that subgenre. And then I looked at it and found out, I was like, okay, I get it now. I understand why you guys are sick of fae. Chris: I personally really like fae, but a lot of times it feels like the fae that is being depicted right now is just not that fae-like. Oren: Which does, I think, create an interesting situation where you could probably get novelty by writing more actual fae. Fae that feel more fae-like and are not just jerk dudes with superpowers. Chris: I do think that generally that’s something that storytellers find more challenging. So you could get novelty if you wrote fae, but like, better. Oren: Although you would have marketing problems at that point, right? Because how are you gonna market that? It’s like, “it’s got fae.” Everyone’s like, yeah, we’ve seen that. We know what it’s like. “No, I promise. Mine are different!” Another genre that I have had this problem with is cyberpunk, and I could be mistaken, but I suspect that one of the reasons that a lot of recent cyberpunk fiction has been video games is for this exact same problem, because in video games it’s not as big a deal if you’re doing stuff people have already seen before. Because A, they can actually see it with their eyeballs, so that has a benefit of its own, but also they get to play it and they get to immerse themselves in their favorite oeuvre, if that is the right term, their favorite milieu. So that has a benefit that you don’t really get to the same extent in written stories. And the biggest one that I don’t know how to overcome is this inherent contradiction where it is increasingly desired that cyberpunks be actual punks, be on the fringes, on the margins of society – this is the roots of cyberpunk, it’s a thing people really like – but also have cool cybernetic implants that with any kind of logic would cost a lot of money. Chris: You know, they’re commodities in the future. They’re all created in whatever country creates all of the cheap products. Oren: I guess everyone has implants, but like your characters have the cheap knockoff versions. Chris: Personally, cyberpunk feels so retro now, and maybe for some people that’s okay. I feel like we’re at the point where we should update all of our technology tropes in sci-fi. Oren: Yeah, I mean, there is that too. Chris: So I guess seeing, there’s definitely an opportunity for people to change cyberpunk to reflect what people are currently – machine learning, I’ll say – what people are calling AI, but it’s not actually AI as we’ve always defined it, at least in science fiction. Oren: Yeah, that’s certainly hitting pretty close to home. Nothing says you can’t do that with your sci-fi stories there. One interesting cyberpunk story that I liked the concept of quite a lot is Always the Harvest. It’s a short story by Yoon Ha Lee, and in this story, the premise is that the story takes place on an alien colony, I should say, a human colony on an alien world. And the implants that they use are like weird bits of lost technology that they’ve found that are left over from the aliens. And so they don’t really understand how they work. They just know that they can use them in certain ways, and that creates some interesting plot ideas and it allowed for them to look weird and different, which I thought was neat. I also just, I’ve been thinking about it more and I honestly think putting it in space would be a cool way to spruce up cyberpunk. We’re used to cyberpunk happening on planets in dingy cities, but you can have cool implants in space and then that would also bring some new novelty to space opera, which is typically- the people are more or less unaltered in space opera. Chris: There’s no reason you couldn’t do cyberpunk space opera. Oren: I think you could feed two birds with one hand that way. I just think that would be neat. And while you’re at it, you could add some cosmic horror! Chris: Add some cosmic horror!  Oren: A little bit, just a little cosmic horror. Chris: I dunno. I feel like that might be, I don’t know. My instant reaction is maybe, I’m not saying it’s impossible to integrate those things, but I already have a lot going in there with cyberpunk and space opera, but I’m just imagining a Star Trek ship where instead of a holodeck, there’s virtual reality. That just makes perfect sense. Oren: I did that for a Star Trek campaign once because I just didn’t wanna deal with the holodeck. Chris: Didn’t want players to be like, and now I make this holodeck character sapient and aware, and now let’s make holo-emitters so they could leave the holodeck. Oren: I was worried that was gonna be a problem, and I later ran Star Trek campaigns where I was just like, whatever, holodeck exists, it’s no problem. I never did a holodeck malfunction episode because I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. Chris: There’s a lot of existential problems with the holodeck, right? Because all of the characters of the holodeck certainly feel very real. And once you start being like, oh yeah, Moriarty now is self-aware and wants to leave. Then you gotta start asking about all the other characters that you are creating and erasing on the holodeck. Oren: Yep. I also start all of my Star Trek campaigns with a little primer about how in this setting the transporter works by opening a small wormhole and pushing you through it. Chris: Yeah. So we don’t have murder clones. Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna have an argument about whether or not you die every time you use the transporter. I would rather skip that, please. Chris: So, one that I find really interesting is sword and sorcery, because when I think about sword and sorcery, I always think about Conan, right? Which is like the classical sword and sorcery and Conan’s title stories have been out for a long time, much too stale. At the same time, The Witcher is basically today’s sword and sorcery. The idea is that we’re focusing on a very hack and slash story with a lot of action, but that typically focuses on smaller scale battles among various lords or kings and not really doing the huge epic fight of good versus evil so much, which has some of those elements too. But for the most part, we’re talking about “monster of the week” as it starts and things like that. And it makes it different ’cause we don’t have the desert barbarian anymore. We’ve swapped out the aesthetics so that we’re using Eastern European folklore and it just looks very different and has very different aesthetics. But I think it delivers the same thing, right? They’re still- the people who are interested in the Witcher today, I feel like were probably the same type of people who would’ve liked Conan back when Conan-style stories were really popular. Oren: Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, sword and sorcery is a mood of high fantasy. Like, the meaningful differences between them are so subtle that I would almost consider them the same genre. But I agree that I think that The Witcher brought new novelty to that concept, and I think that much like with high fantasy, because what people want from sword and sorcery is a kind of dingy, perhaps morally gray adventure where the badass protagonist fights things. You have so many options with that, that it’s hard to imagine that you couldn’t come up with something even newer and weirder to add to it. Chris: In general, folklore is in right now, and fairy tales generally too, although most people are doing dark spins on them, except for me. So, because that’s much broader than for instance fae, hopefully that will, that trend will stay true for a while. We’ll see, of course. Oren: And the nice thing about sword and sorcery is that if the current blend of Witcher-likes, for lack of a better term, does get old, I think you could modify it pretty easily. I just, honestly, I have been really impressed by the variety of fantasy novels that I’ve picked up recently. They haven’t all been good. They’ve had other problems, but as far as settings go, yeah, this isn’t something I’ve seen before. This is neat, okay, cool. And some of them are using non-European cultures as their origin and some of them aren’t, and it’s just, there’s a lot out there. We have a lot to choose from as far as high fantasy goes. One more that I wanted to talk about before we finish up is the post-apocalyptic genre. Because similar to Star Wars, anything that looks like Mad Max is going to be compared to Mad Max. And it’s hard to be better than Mad Max, at least in people’s minds. A lot of the Mad Max movies – hot take, not actually that good – but people think they’re very good and Fury Road is very good. So that’s a hard road to climb, and it also can just feel derivative, even though the tropes being used are very broad. Chris: Yeah. I think with post-apocalyptic, it’s almost like the sword and sorcery angle where we’re so used to post-apocalyptic with these increasingly very desolate environments where it’s very deserty, right? Or otherwise just, you know, all the environment has been destroyed, all the plants are dead, and again, a very barren environment. Oren: And of course the alternative to that seems to be Fallout, which is also not new, but is a similar concept, but way zanier, right? It’s like, yeah, this is the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and we got all kinds of monsters around these parts. Because that’s what radiation does, it turns everything into monsters in this world. Chris: I still remember watching The 100 again and just, oh wait, there are monsters in this show? I had completely blanked them out ’cause they don’t have anything to do with anything. Oren: Yeah, just a random gorilla attack. Chris: I just like, I had forgotten about the random, giant gorilla and just… wow, okay. There’s random monsters in this show just because we’re on a radiation-filled Earth. Oren: But I will say that, I think the biggest thing you can do to make a post-apocalyptic story fresher is to change the nature of the apocalypse. There’s the green apocalypse, that one’s pretty popular these days, but there’s also the frozen apocalypse and the alien invasion apocalypse. You’ve got a lot of options and you can do a lot of the same stuff, a lot of the stuff people like in post apocalyptic stories, and still feel new and fresh. Chris: But not zombies. Oren: Yeah, I don’t know how to make zombies feel new and fresh. I’d have to do a whole podcast about that. Chris: I think we could keep the zombie dynamic of having an overwhelming thing, force, out there, perhaps even overwhelming by the numbers. I think at this point, they have to just not be zombies anymore because other than people who are just zombie enthusiasts, I think we’ve just been oversaturated with them to the point that we just have to go back to hordes of vampires or something. Oren: Okay, but what if I call them something other than zombies? Chris: Infected? Oren: Yeah, it’s gotta be a new word. Every new zombie thing has a new word, so mine’s gonna be groaners, I’ve decided. That’s what my zombies are gonna be called. Chris: Very unique. Oren: With that, I think we will call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this novel, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Coulton. ​ 

From wholesome pipe-weed to shady ThreeEye, spec fic writers have a long history of inventing new drugs for their stories. Sometimes these drugs are a metaphor for something else, but other times, something else is a metaphor for drugs! This can get pretty confusing, so today’s episode is all about getting to the bottom of things. We’re talking about mushrooms that are literally magic, Super Soldier Serum, and the world’s most 90s video game. Plus, why lightning is drugs, but levitation isn’t???Show Notes Force Lightning  Willow’s Dark Magic  The One Ring  Spice (Dune) Spice (Star Wars) Lucy  Super Soldier Serum  The Velocity of Revolution  The Magicians  Perdido Street Station  Dreamshit  The Game  Risa  The 100 Mountain Men ThreeEye Naloxone TrainingTranscript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny… Chris: …and I’m Chris. Bunny: And I hear some straaange music.  It’s like snare drums and the harpsichord, and it’s really funky. And there’s a strange filter on us, Chris, and we’re cross-faded in a kind of rainbow way. And I’m hallucinating that Oren’s gone. What’s going on? Chris: Oh no. It’s like in a fish eye shape and everything. Bunny: Yeah, and every time I move there’s like a weird shhwhshh sound. I think we’re trippin’ on fantasy drugs. Chris: The big question here is, by being on a fantasy drug, does that mean we’re also on magic? Or is there, are we having magical visions that will become real? Bunny: Yeees? Or maybe nooot. I dunno, we’re on drugs, it could be anything. Who am I to say? Chris: Maybe we’re on drugs so that some hero can come and find out who is selling drugs to us and put them in a room. Bunny: Maybe we could be like, maybe we’re goofy, like maybe we’re on drugs, but we’re on drugs in a kind of goofy way, where we’re like stumbling around and it makes spring noises whenever we bump into something. Chris: Or maybe this is a deep metaphor for drugs. Bunny: That’s true. It could also be that, although probably not, if it’s also comedy. Chris: Maybe we’re high on metaphors. Bunny: Yes. We’re high on metaphors. Metaphors for magic, perhaps. But, yes, today we are talking about fantasy drugs, which we may or may not be on. Chris: Which may or may not be magic. Bunny: Which may or may not be magic. [laughter] Chris: The question is, is magic drugs, or are drugs magic?  [laughter] Bunny: A lot of fantasy drugs seem to just be magic. Like, you get addicted to magic. That is certainly a very large trope. Chris: Right. I think Willow in Buffy is the most notable and the most ridiculous one. Because they clearly want there to be magic in Buffy, and they want characters to cast magic. But then, because everything has to be terrible in season six, suddenly Willow is addicted to magic, and magic is drugs, and then she has to get over it. But they don’t actually want to just give up characters casting spells, because that would be no fun. So then they have to retcon and be like, oh, well, you know, it was the black magic that was addictive. Now Willow’s fine, and she’s super powerful, and she can cast tons of magic now, and it is no longer a drug, for reasons. ‘Cause she’s attuned to the earth, I guess. Bunny: Yeah. The moment you make magic into a drug, but you still want magic to be cool, it ceases to be a drug metaphor. Like, it doesn’t make sense if you try to apply it to drugs. So, like, what? You were addicted to cigarettes. And you got off of cigarettes, but now you can smoke good cigarettes, and it’s fine. Chris: It’s also just very unclear, because in many fantasy settings, a number of them, their evil, magic, or dark magic, is supposed to be addictive. But there needs to be a clear line between what is good magic and what is evil magic. It’s like Star Wars. Dark side. Light side, basically. But in Buffy, it’s just we, we have not previously made that distinction, so it’s just very unclear. Good magic is attuned to the earth, guess, maybe. And all of these like spells that have nothing to do with the Earth are apparently attuned to the earth as far as we know.  Bunny: [laughing] It’s whatever you say it is. It’s like in the drug metaphor, you can eat apples, and that’s fine. But if you have bananas, you’re gonna get addicted to them, and they’re dark fruit. Chris: Or in Star Wars, you can kill people by throwing them off a cliff. And that’s fine, that’s good magic. But if you kill them with lightning, that is bad magic and that will screw you up. Bunny: They should just start calling them “side A magic” and “side B magic”. There’s nothing really light or dark about that. Chris: Lightning is very dark. You can see how dark it is. Bunny: Of course, if we’re gonna talk about those, and we’re already touching on this, we have to answer the question of what is a drug, which is ontological, and in my opinion, very family resemblance-y, like, I don’t know. It looks like a drug, so I think it is, in this case The dictionary says that it’s “a substance that causes a physiological effect, or that causes addiction, habituation, or a marked change in consciousness”. Thank you, Merriam-Webster. But that is quite broad. Chris: In stories, it really seems to be the addictive component that the stories usually focus on, especially since it’s such good fodder for plots, right? To have a character get addicted to something. And so usually, as soon as something becomes addictive, it becomes an analogy for drugs. Everything to, like, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, for instance, even the One Ring, it starts to change people’s behavior because they have to have it. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t think of the One Ring, but I guess that is the hot take of the episode is that the ring is a drug. Chris: [laughing] Right? Their precious… Bunny: Getting high on ring, man. Chris: Where characters start acting in destructive ways just because they want the One Ring. And it does extend their life, right? It does have, if we’re going for a physiological effect of some kind… Bunny: You can look at Gollum, and it’s definitely had a physiological effect on that guy. Chris: Right. But. It makes them live longer, but it’s like too little butter spread over too much bread, as Bilbo would say. Bunny: It makes you invisible, too. Life extension and invisibility. Chris: And besides magic being addictive and therefore quickly becoming an analogy for drugs, we of course have drugs that are magic. Not to be confused. Bunny: [laughing] Not to be confused. Chris: I think the spice in Dune is probably the most iconic one there. Bunny: That was definitely the most well-known fantasy drug if I had to pick one. Um, and I learned today, looking at your notes, that there is a spice in Star Wars, too. Why did they do that? Chris: Okay, that’s a weird one because I think spice had pre-existed, like had been a thing that had been mentioned in one of the Star Wars stories, and then later they decided it was a drug. And that created some weird effects [laughting] because I had been talking before about, I think, that Owen had claimed that Luke’s father was like, had been working in spice trading, and then they made spice a drug.  So it means that… Bunny: Look, Dune was out by then. Why did they call it that? They could have named it anything? Chris; I think that the word “spice” really indicates its value in trade, right? Because the spice trade in the real world is so famous. Bunny: We should call it silk. That doesn’t sound as cool. [laughter] Chris: Well, yeah. I don’t know. It’s a good word for a valuable substance. And you can imagine somebody calling something “spice” that’s not actually a spice, as we would know it. I don’t know, maybe it is a spice. Maybe it’s a spice that gets you high. Bunny: We have weirder names for drugs. We have, like, drugs named, “tweezers”, and “sunshine” and “big chief”. Chris: Big chief? [laughing] Bunny: Yeah, big chief. “Simple simon”. I looked up some of these and it’s like, I can’t believe anyone actually calls them that, but okay. Chris: I will say that when the drug is illegal, people have a lot more incentive to make up names. Bunny: And it also means that if you give your fantasy drug a goofy name, people might accept it, because we do that too. Chris: There’s lots of things that are goofy in real life that we probably still shouldn’t do in our fantasy because it’ll sound goofy. [laughing] Bunny: That’s fair. That’s fair. We talked about pykrete a while ago. I’ve got a bit of a list here about why people use the drugs. Chris: Ohh, let’s hear why people use the drugs. Bunny: [laughing] Why authors put the drugs in their stories, shall I say? To be more specific. I think the first and foremost one, although maybe this is disqualified, if we’re defining it as needing to be addictive, is it gives you powers. It makes you super. It’s a serum you put in your body, and now you’re a Spider Man, or you’re a Hulk. Chris: Right. And, which brings up the question of are we talking about any medical treatment that includes a substance that somebody imbibes as a drug? Bunny: Yeah, those ones I think are on the edges if we’re putting addiction as like our main criterion. But there are, there’s like, the villains deal in drugs. I guess that makes it a bit more central, because those are usually bad because they’re trying to get people addicted, and the villain in Catwoman’s got the evil face cream that makes you wrinkly if you stop taking it, which I guess is a little like addiction. And then they have thematically appropriate ones. Joker can’t have a normal drug. He’s gotta be cool and have one that makes you laugh to death. Chris: Mm. I do think that making up a non-real drug is just very convenient, because then you don’t have to worry about accuracy. Bunny: Yeah, no, that is certainly one of the highest appeals of it, I would say. It can also be like mysterious mixtures, and they cause weird events that you can’t explain, and you can’t explain it anyway because it’s a fantasy drug. But like it explains why you can’t replicate a fantastic event or something if, again, this is mostly in regards to superhero origin stories. There’s one that I noted here was Lucy. I think that counts, because it does give her superpowers. It’s also labeled as a drug specifically, but we don’t see Lucy get addicted to it. She just becomes telekinetic, or whatever. Chris: Yeah. It’s like a one-time drug. So it’s more like a treatment, one-time treatment… Bunny: Yeah. Chris: …than an addictive drug. Bunny: Apparently it’s something that one of the villains explains is produced by pregnant mothers in like very small amounts. So I don’t know why they bother trying to explain that, because that makes it even sillier, like our baby’s low key telekinetic. Chris: Yeah, that’s real weird. Bunny: I don’t know why they did that. Another reason is because there are settings that want to be grittier than there being magic, but they want something that’s basically magic. So they make it a drug, or a chemical, instead. Chris: To give it that gritty atmosphere. Bunny: Like it’s, it feels airy-fairy if you’re like, “this is my gritty setting and [silly voice] add magic in it.” But you can say, “this is my gritty setting and it has drugs” and that feels a lot more in theme. I read a book recently called The Velocity of Revolution. And the drug that features prominently in there is myco, which is a mushroom, it’s like powdered mushroom. And it gives them heightened…if users are using the same strain, then they can communicate and, like, sense people who are nearby. And I was like, okay, that all makes sense. This is a dieselpunk city. And it would be a little weird if it was just, like, “and also there’s magic.” Like it’s clearly going for a different tone. Chris: Yeah, that reminds me of The Magicians. Because The Magicians, the thing that story does is take fantasy tropes that are normally in stories of average or light tone, and then make them very dark and gritty and depressing. And apparently the series tagline is, “Magic is a drug”.  Bunny: Noo. [Chris laughing] All right, just hit me over the head with it, I guess. Chris: But this is the one where people can turn into geese, [Bunny laughing] but you can’t cure any sickness or ailment with magic. That’s not allowed, but you can turn into animals, but arbitrarily you’re not allowed to do anything good with it. Bunny: What if I turned into an animal that had like superhealing, though? Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. Bunny: Or what if I broke an arm, and then I turned into a snake? Problem solved. Chris: This is also the one that has grimdark Narnia. And they travel to grimdark Narnia. [Bunny laughing] Bunny: Why didn’t they just make it a drug then? Why call it magic? Just call it a drug. It’s the goose change drug. Chris: No, because they specifically want to subvert traditional fantasy tropes, by making them super dark and gritty. So you gotta have something that is obviously Narnia, but is also very dark and gritty, where everything is bad and wrong. You have to have the magic school–because it contains a magic school–but just have the magic school be horrible. Just that’s the shtick for The Magicians. Bunny: Sounds like a very, I don’t wanna say…I feel like that would get old. That’s what I’m trying to say. Chris: It did for me. Other people like it, of course. There are always people who like things that are very dark and gritty and edgy. That has its audience. I’m not among them, but they exist. Bunny: I don’t think I’m among them either, but I think that also points to a potential with this, like the magic drugs thing, which is that if it’s taken too far, it can become silly. At some point you are just, like, “your drug is magic”, but at some point it just is magic and you are taking magic via a pill. Like the myco at the beginning of The Velocity Revolution is like, it’s got great internal consistency. I really liked how it was used. It makes sense that they’re, like, “they can communicate”, and I can buy that. People on the same strain of mushroom can communicate with each other. And then they expanded a bit and they’re like, “if you make this extra special mushroom by mixing different strains, then, you know, you can take over someone else’s body who’s on the myco.” Which, because the myco lets you share sensations, I was like, okay, that’s a bit more of a stretch, but I think I could still buy it. And then by the end of the book, they’re like seeing God and broadcasting memories into each other’s brains and…. Chris: But just using the mushroom? Bunny: Yeah, and like hijacking people’s, like, radio waves. Chris: If you take enough spice in Dune, you transform into a weird creature that can teleport ships.  Bunny: [laughing] That’s silly! Chris: [laughing] Don’t remember what the mechanics are, but there’s these navigators in Dune that are very powerful ,and they are basically created by imbibing tons of spice, in which case they actually transform. And they have like huge brains that can do whatever is necessary to do faster than light travel in this setting. Bunny: I feel like that’s more acceptable in Dune, because Dune already has a much lower, like… Chris: Lower realism? Bunny: Yeah. But The Velocity of Revolution is like, it’s about class conflict in this fictional city in a fantasy world, but it’s clearly trying to be, like, it’s not trying to be space opera. Chris: The realism is high, and that’s why they use a drug for the magic. But then when it becomes more and more stretched that mushrooms could do all of this, [laughing] that starts to break down, right? And then just starts to feel silly, because it clashes with the realism of the story, I assume. Bunny: Yeah. And then the problem is that, and like the story is very centered on myco, like it’s all about the myco, the plot revolves around it, so you expect it to be a big feature of the climax, and it is. And they do, to be clear, they do a really good job with the myco for three quarters of the story. The problem comes once things start escalating and becoming ridiculous. I cannot buy that a mushroom could do this. This is how they resolve the climax–spoilers for Velocity of Revolution–but basically because the myco, this particular strain of myco, is native to their continent, one of the of the characters–and myco is, its strength is increased when you go fast. One of the characters goes really fast with this other person who’s been experimented on with the myco, and that makes all of the foreigners violently sick. And they leave. Chris: What? So wait, let me get this straight. They take the magic mushroom. The magical mushroom somehow becomes more potent if you, like, run while it’s in your system. [laughing] And this character has like super-speed running. And by running around the planet, they managed to enchant all of the foreigners to make them sick.  Bunny: [laughing] That would be even worse. So, this is dieselpunk, so they have motorcycles. They’re not just like running really fast. They’ve got trains and stuff. And to be clear, the speed thing, I was on board with, I was like, okay, it’s cool that this gets stronger when you go faster. It’s a story where everyone rides motorcycles, and they’re a big part of the setting. So I’m like, cool, I’ll buy that. But then if you’re looking at the myco at the beginning of the story, even though there’s this whole element where it’s this person that has been so experimented upon by fantasy evil Nazi doctor, she’s got all these different mushrooms and has weird powers, I still don’t buy that a mushroom could let you hijack radio waves or make a bunch of foreigners sick, no matter how fast you go. Chris: If it was explicitly a magical mushroom… Bunny: But it’s not. It’s a drug. Chris: But it’s supposed to be…but this is supposed to be a scientific explanation for this. Bunny: Yeah. Like, it’s not trying to be magic fantasy, if that makes sense. Like it’s using the myco instead of magic, and they don’t call it magic. Chris: There’s supposed to be an underlying scientific explanation for how this works, and we see that a lot, right? In a lot of settings where they’re not explicitly supposed to have magic. They’re supposed to have science, and then the science gets more creative. At some point, it doesn’t really fit science anymore. Bunny: And they’re definitely trying to make this science, because you’ve got fantasy Josef Mengele experimenting on people with mushrooms. You’re making this very clearly science. It’s a science. Yeah, anyway. I like that book, but that was ridiculous. Chris: Going for something that I think works better but is pretty trip–so, the book, Perdido Street Station has very animalistic themes and is kind of absurdist, and it has this drug called “dreamshit”.  And it comes from this moth that basically is predatory towards sapient beings by having these wings that hypnotize them, and then it sucks out their like mind, sucks out their dreams. And so the dreamshit is literally the shit from this moth… [laughing] Bunny: Oh my God. [Chris laughing] That’s memorable. Chris: …that has the remnants of all the dreams it like sucked out of people when it ate them. [laughing] Bunny: I’ve never heard of something like that, so that’s unique. Chris: Yeah, that’s unique. Again, very wild, but because it fits the actual setting of the book, which is very animalistic and very absurdist. Bunny: And it sounds like it’s a book where things are magical. Chris: Yes. Bunny: It’s a setting where you have a moth that sucks dreams out. Chris: Everybody’s like animal people in that book, and they’re like living in the carcass of a giant being. That had giant rib bones left over. Or, that’s where the city is. So yes, it all fits. And it sounds like there was a theme clash with those mushrooms that was really the problem.  Bunny: And the mushrooms could have been really cool. They were really cool. They just had power creep. Chris: Yeah. In many stories, drugs are used as a means of control by antagonists, and that’s part of the plot. Bunny: Dystopian vibes. Chris: Yeah. Or there’s a lot of vampires, right? There’s a lot of vampire drug stuff, where it’s like people get addicted to vampires’ saliva, or whatever it is, and that’s how vampires control their victims. Star Trek has some really funny drug episodes. Probably the funniest one is this TNG episode called “The Game”.  Bunny: [laughing] Oh, I read about this one. Chris: Yeah, Riker goes, I think it’s Riker, goes to Risa, [laughing] which, for anyone who is not familiar with Star Trek, Risa is like the tourist pleasure planet. [both laughing] Where everybody goes, and we assume has lots of sex with the Risans, but… Bunny: …but they play games, like a bunch of neerds. Chris: There’s just insinuations about what happens on Risa. So he comes back and he brings “the game”, which is this little device, and they show them playing the game, which is supposed to be really addictive, and it is the most awkward, worst nineties CG you have ever seen. Bunny: Oh no, I’m looking at it now. Terrible. Chris: It just looks hilariously bad. The CG… Bunny: It looks like pancakes. Chris: …that appears when they play the game, and they just get this like funnel, and they just toss discs in the funnel, and just seem to get a high from that. And the entire ship, the game spreads around the ship, and the entire ship becomes captive to the game. And I think Wesley saves the day or something, because of course he does. Bunny: Yeah, I think I remember reading about that. But they chase him around and try to force him to play the game. I don’t even know if that’s supposed to be more a metaphor for drugs, or if it’s a metaphor for video games, by way of drugs, or if it’s like two layers deep, and it’s trying to say, “video games are a drug because of this game”, so it’s a metaphor for the metaphor of video games being a drug? Chris:  [laughing] Unclear, unclear. In a better use of this, in The 100, there’s this group, and they’re like the Reavers in Firefly. They’re just a bunch of people, and they look like they’re designed to be disposable villains that you can just kill off, right? That they’re all like cannibals, and really aggressive barbarian types. And then it’s revealed that they’re actually all captives to a more powerful, privileged group that has kidnapped all of them, and then has given them this drug that they inject that is very addictive, and also makes them very aggressive. And so then we have a protagonist that actually gets captured and joins them briefly before escaping. So, I definitely liked that, because I’m pretty tired of groups where everybody’s just evil, and it’s an excuse that you can just kill people without remorse. And so it was nice to see that kind of turnaround, and the drug was used as an explanation for why they weren’t just evil cannibals like they first appeared. Bunny: No, that’s a good way to use it. That’s one of those things where–this was The 100, right? That’s one of those more grounded shows, too. Chris: Yeah, when the monsters aren’t there. It’s so funny, because I had–after watching The 100 for the first time–I had completely forgotten that there were random monsters. [Bunny laughing] Like I somehow, I had just clipped them out of my memory, because they’re so anomalous, and they make no sense. But then when I went back and watched a second time, oh wow, there was episode that randomly had a giant gorilla. Bunny: What? Okay, so it’s 85% grounded? [both laughing] Maybe not as grounded as I gave it credit for. Chris: And I had completely forgotten, because they’re just so random and one-off, that that existed in this show. This show tries, definitely tries, to be more gritty and higher in realism. There are some things that I have to bleb out, like they keep saying that people evolved radiation resistance in only a hundred years. Every time, I just put my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la. I can’t hear you.” [Bunny laughing] No, I’m just going to pretend it’s been a thousand years, instead of a hundred years, at least. But they made a conlang. That’s the other thing, it’s supposed to be only a hundred years, but the people on Earth have evolved a new language, but they still speak English. [laughing] Bunny: Ah, we accept that for weirder things. Chris: So yeah, it has its foibles, but certainly it is trying to be grittier. Bunny: And you could believe that a drug would do that, too. Like you can buy it, even though it’s still a fantasy drug. Chris: Star Trek: DS9 did something similar with the Dominion. The Founders of the Dominion, they have various races under their control, and some of them they control with the drugs, although that one was a little strange, because they also just–a lot of these races they had actually created through genetic manipulation, and were so loyal that it didn’t really seem like they would even need the drug to keep control of them. But… Bunny: Just in case. Chris: Just in case. Bunny: Yeah. So those are some funny examples. I will say sometimes the coward’s way to do this, in my opinion, the least interesting way, is when you want basically heroin or cocaine in your setting, but you don’t wanna call it that. That’s not a fantasy drug. You’re just giving it another street name.  Chris: [laughing] Do something weird with it. Bunny: Let them trip balls! Chris: Give people visions! Bunny: Yeah, make them turn into fishes when they’re on the drug or something, I don’t know. Chris: Like ThreeEye in Dresden Files, people get second sight, which apparently is very bad, because you can’t forget anything that you see in second sight. So their mental wellness goes rapidly downhill as they take this drug. Bunny: What do they see? Chris: You know, I don’t remember specifics, or I’m not even sure how much there were specifics in the book, but the idea is that they get visions that they can never forget. Bunny: Huh. And they also get addicted to the visions? Chris: To the drug, yeah. So it’s an antagonist that is making this drug, and Dresden has to track them down, and finds out that it is made by somebody who is magical, who is creating a drug that actually has magic effects and gives people a kind of magic ability, but one that is not good for them. Bunny: It’s interesting, because that one is one that I think would work in a setting that’s trying to be non-magic? Chris: Right. Because it’s very similar to the hallucinations that people get on many drugs. Bunny: Yeah. It’s just like a hallucinogen, and I can buy that they can’t forget it, for whatever reason, for some technobabble-y reason. Chris: But what if it gets more potent if they run fast? Bunny: [laughing] Let’s keep the Flash out of this. So before we sign off, I did also wanna talk about a couple ways of making them work, which we’ve also gone over here by examining positive and negative examples. So, I think many fantasy things, like magic, whether or not the drugs are magic, or magic is drugs, they need to have an internal consistency, which was the problem with the myco, is that it started with having a clear set of rules that I could buy. And then spiraled out of control into like time shenanigans, and radio wave control, and that kind of thing. So that’s perhaps an obvious one, but I think bears mentioning. Chris: I think I would like to add is if you’re going add an addictive substance to your setting, it’s good to think about what you were saying about real-life drugs, in particular, narratives where a character just has to use their willpower to stop taking the drug that they’re addicted to, is not a good idea. Because in real life, that’s a method of blaming people who essentially have a disease, and they need treatment, they don’t need blame. So I would just be very wary of any of those types of narratives that really put the onus on the character to just use their willpower to not take a drug they’re addicted to anymore.  Bunny: And yeah, be careful too–drugs in the real world obviously have huge and racialized histories, so if you’re using it as a shorthand for someone’s moral character, or that there’s a place that’s inherently bad and backwards, probably shouldn’t do that. Read up a bit on the history of drugs, specifically Black people’s incarceration and marijuana. Also, just in general, go get trained in Narcan, people. That’s just a good thing to do in the real world. That’s the lifesaving drug nasal spray. I think perhaps maybe the last one, if you’re trying to make them a huge and obvious stand-in for something else, maybe you should just be doing a story about the something else, like that weird Star Trek video game thing.  Chris: [laughing] The game. Bunny: The game. Yes, the game. You can use them to explore some really interesting issues, but if it’s just, “Don’t do drugs, kids,” that’s not the most interesting thing you can do with your fantasy drugs, I gotta say. Chris: All right… Bunny: With that, our high is fading. We’re coming back into focus, and we’re gonna have to wrap this episode up. Chris: If this episode gave you a high, or at least didn’t make you feel like you were going through withdrawal, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And, before we go, I also want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek.  Until next week! This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton. ​ 

Writers often stumble with dialogue, misusing it as exposition rather than letting characters speak naturally. The hosts discuss the art of crafting villainous lines that feel authentic instead of forced. They explore the quirks of character dialogue, noting how some traits can lead to confusion or ineffective humor. The episode dives into the sensitive topic of representing accents, advocating for thoughtful representation over phonetic spelling. Get ready for a lively debate on the do’s and don’ts of dialogue in storytelling!

Careful with that podcast tuning dial: you might end up having to make impactful choices on a haunted island full of spooooooooky ghosts! This week, Oren and Bunny nerd out over the Oxenfree games – both because we just wanted to talk about the game, but also because it’s an interesting exploration of how branching narratives work in practice. Which choices do you make, and how much do they matter? More importantly, who is the best NPC to take with you, and why is it Nona?Show Notes Oxenfree Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals  Armored Core 6 Alex Riley Jacob Ren Nona Jonas Clarissa MichaelTranscript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Bunny [opening theme] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and today with me is Bunny. Bunny: Hi. It’s me. Oren: It’s just the two of us. We’re giving Chris a break, especially ’cause we keep getting weird radio signals from… ghosts? Bunny: Oh wow. I didn’t realize we were recording this over the radio. Oren: Yeah, I know. It’s real creepy. We gotta do a fun little radio tuning game. Bunny: [spookily] Woooo. Oren: Because the only other controls are to walk around. There’s not even a jump button. Bunny: No, you gotta walk around and look for the little circle, and then you can interact with something. You can push a thing with your back. You can push a dumpster with your back. In fact, I’m pushing a dumpster with my back right now. So there. Oren: Really? Oh, exciting. Very good. So today we are talking about the video game Oxenfree because it is a game about branching narratives, at least to some extent, and I find that interesting. We will probably also talk about Oxenfree Two at least a little bit. I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to it in detail because we only have half an hour. But spoilers for both of those games. They’re both quite good, so if you haven’t played them and you care about spoilers, I’d recommend going to play them first. Bunny: Yeah, go play them, especially the first one. Oren: So first, Oxenfree. The basic premise is that you’re a teen. You go to an island to do a fun teen party and then spooky stuff with ghosts, radios, and time starts happening when you’re there. Bunny: Yeah, you show up and the party is really sad, but then the ghosts come in, and a spooky triangle shows up and everything gets weird. Oren: Yeah. They save you from an awkward party, I think is really the thing we should be thanking these ghosts for. Bunny: Yeah, that’s the thesis of the game. If you have an awkward party, summon submarine ghosts. They might possess you, but it’ll be interesting. Oren: And as we were hinting at, the gameplay is very minimal. You walk around in a 2D environment. This is not a fighting game, or a 3D adventuring game, or Dark Souls. It’s very basic in what you can actually do. Bunny: A gorgeous 2D environment, don’t get me wrong. You go left to right and you go right to left and you walk. Do you walk, man? Do you walk? Get walking. Get steps in. Oren: There are cars, but you’re not allowed to use them. In the second game you get a car, but it’s broken. Bunny: It’s broken when you get there and you have a whole conversation about how you can’t fix it, so get walking. Oren: It’s impossible to fix this car. No one in this town has the Lyft app. Bunny: No. You get to walk along a highway. There aren’t cars there either. Oren: Yeah. I have so many questions about that highway. Bunny: Yeah. Camina isn’t even, like an island, right? Where is it? Oren: Because the first game, you’re on the island, but on the second game, you’re on the town next to the island. That’s like somewhere on northwest Oregon. So the first kinds of choices that you make in this game are dialogue options you’re gonna pick, including none. Bunny: Yeah, that’s a cool addition because some dialogue games, you have to pick one of them. They won’t go away unless you pick one of them. And in Oxenfree you can be completely silent, except for one, the crucial end of the game decision that you have to make. That’s the only one that you have to speak for. And admittedly, Alex, when you interact with the environment, Alex or Riley will be like, that’s an interesting thing, or, gosh, I’m gonna jump this fence. The dialogue is better than that. I don’t remember any of the specific ones. But they will speak when you interact with things. But you do have the option of going through almost the entire game silently. Oren: You can get a cheeto for that, I guess. Although I could never play the game that way. It makes, it’s too creepy, just never saying anything. Bunny: Aawkward. Even the radio ghosts can’t save you from that awkwardness. Oren: Of course, I have to give the games’ writers and actors credit for making the dialogue sound very natural no matter which option you pick. Bunny: Oh yeah, for sure. If anyone is looking for a great case study in how to write naturalistic dialogue that doesn’t have stereotypes and it doesn’t feel easy, like the author was just recording something, like it’s all got very strong characterization that it does very well. This is a good case study if you want to look at how to write good dialogue or how to voice act, but that’s not so much Mythcreant’s wheelhouse. Oren: Yeah, I was just thinking about how in a lot of games there are instances where you’ll pick a dialogue option and it feels like that wasn’t the one you were supposed to pick. And the response that the person gives feels like it was supposed to be for the other dialogue option, and I never felt that way in the Oxenfree games. I thought that they just made it a really good job of seamlessly integrating what you say and then how there’s a response, and it just felt like it always made sense. Bunny: I’ll say that, I think I mentioned this in a different podcast, that Alex would often be meaner than I was trying to make her be.  Oren: Yeah.  Bunny: I would choose what I thought was the nicest option and she’d just spit out some sarcastic response and I was like, [indignant] Alex! Oren: No, Alex has sick burns to hand out. You don’t control Alex. You can just nudge Alex in different directions. Bunny: That’s true. Alex controls you. Oren: And of course, with many of these dialogue options, there’s always the question of does this dialogue option matter? And the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. Most of the time, no. But occasionally, yes. Bunny: Yeah, most of the ways in which it matters is the way it affects your relationships, and I don’t know enough about the mechanics behind the game to know what sorts of tally systems are going on. Oren: There’s some kind of scoring happening, but it’s in general, if you want to be friends with an NPC, you say nice things to them. And if you, then I think the other big one that’s determined by your dialogue choices is whether or not Nona and Ren get together at the end, which is always tough for me because I do not like Ren as an NPC. I just find him really irritating. But him and Nona getting together is clearly the good ending. They’re supposed to be happier together. So I’m always really torn about that. Guys, I don’t actually think you’re good together, but the game is telling me you are. Bunny: Yeah… There’s also like one big event, which which can ruin one of your relationships, which actually happened to me the first time I played it through. I ruined my relationship with Jonas because I decided not to take him from the tower when we have to break off and leave two of the characters in the tower. Apparently the good way to do it is to leave Ren and Nona together because- Oren: No, I refuse. Bunny: They like each other or something. And then you take Jonas and your bestest step buddies. Oren: No, Jonas can deal. I wanna hang out with Nona. Bunny: I know. The real question here is why can’t Alex date Nona? They would be better together. Oren: Not allowed, sadly. But he, but like dating aside, look Jonas, I spend most of the game hanging out with you. Okay? I finally get a chance to hang out with another MPC. That’s not Ren. I’m gonna take it. Bunny: You can have other friends, Jonas. I was salty about that. I was like, okay, so I chose Nona over you one time, and I get the ending where we’re estranged. Thanks. Oren: I’m pretty sure you can make up for that because I always picked Nona, all three of my play throughs. I’ve picked Nona and I have also always managed to get a good relation with Jonas. Bunny: Okay. Maybe I was just being too mean to him earlier in the game. I don’t know. Oren: I think a big one is actually whether or not you let him talk to his mom ghost. Bunny: Oh, yeah. Oren: Which is weird because that’s, again, one of the issues with branching games that they have sometimes, which is designer moon logic, because that does not seem like the right choice. Bunny: It seems highly sketch, I gotta say. Oren: All of the ghosts that you’ve met so far have been at best amoral, and at worse outright evil, and they’re all trying to steal your bodies. And the implication is that being a ghost, which is apparently very rare in this setting, just messes you up over time, and you become more and more hostile, and less and less caring about other people. Bunny: And also the mom wasn’t on the submarine. What’s she doing here? Oren: Yeah, it definitely feels like a trick by the ghosts. And even if it’s real, it feels like the mom is probably gonna be just as evil, because why would the mom be special? It seems like this happens to all the ghosts. In the second game, it even seems to be happening to the ghost of Alex. Bunny: Yeah. Oren: She seems to be evil now, although she’s less evil than the submarine ghosts because she hasn’t been dead as long. But she’s still definitely more selfish than she was in the first game. Bunny: I have some issues with how they handled Alex in the second game, but I thought the first game did pretty well with its ghosts except for the Jonas mom, because that definitely seemed like a trick, and also it showed up like right before the conclusion of the game. So it just was like, Jonas, you can’t come with me. Shuffle Jonas off to his own side quest. Oren: It’s definitely a thing where I let him do it because it seemed like that’s what I’m supposed to do, but in my own head I was like, this is an obviously a terrible idea.  Bunny: Yeah. Oren: And then there are a few other choices that affect your ending a bit. There are some interesting flashbacks that turn out to be actual time skips where you can change the outcome and make Alex’s brother be alive or not. Bunny: I only recently found that out. With me trying to be all nice and enjoy my time with my brother, I was like, go do your thing. And I only realized later, I put together that you’re supposed to realize that him leaving is what led to his death. So I haven’t actually saved Michael yet because I haven’t played the game since I learned that. Oren: Yeah, saving Michael is a fun little Easter egg. I do- it would’ve been really nice if saving Michael made the next loop different. Speaking of which, this is the big ending, which is that no matter what happens at the end of the game, the game suddenly starts again. And it is implied that you are now doing the same events another time because you’re stuck in a time loop. And Alex starts to imply that she can remember previous time loops, although that does max out after a while, the game doesn’t have infinite content. But at least your second and third play  throughs have some minor differences to indicate that you’ve done this before. And it would have been really nice if saving your brother made it so that he was alive in the next loop. Bunny: Yeah, no, that’s actually a really good idea. Oren: Yeah, and I get that they can’t, like, they have limited resources, so this isn’t even necessarily the thing that I’m saying they should have done this, it just would’ve been cool. Gimme the DLC, gimme the Brother is Alive DLC. I’ll pay for that. Bunny: That would’ve been like, I did actually, I wanted to talk about like how to fix the loop ending, which didn’t bother me as much as it bothered you, I think just because I thought it was cool, that built-in reason to replay the game, Also, it seems to be responding to the fact that you’ve played it before and I thought that was cool, but having an actual way to escape the loop and every time you go through it learning new things or remembering more or whatever, that would’ve been cool. Oren: [sighs] The loop was… Just, it was a really bummer ending for me. It’s implied that there’s no way to escape. You can tell your past self to just not go to the island, and that maybe breaks the loop. The game’s kind of vague about whether it breaks the loop or not. It’s a non-canon ending though, because in the second game, you are still in the loop. As a result, I felt really sad at the end. I was not really hyped for the next game, even though I love the first game. Bunny: Yeah, that’s fair. Oren: And the different loops were not different enough. Recently I played Armored Core VI, which has a similar concept where you’re supposed to play the game several times, and when you do, you unlock new content each time until you get to the true ending. But Armored Core VI had an advantage in that first, Armored Core VI is a combat game. It has a lot of mech fighting, so I’m not just watching the same story again. I’m also having action scenes that entertain while I’m doing that.  But even then, even in the story, events are different in a way that the story events in the loops of Oxenfree just aren’t. They’re pretty much the same.  Bunny: Oxenfree should have had a level where you beat up the radio ghosts, is what I’m hearing. Oren: In a giant mech. [laughter] Bunny: Yeah. It turns out the tower, it’s actually a giant mech, because it just steps out of the ground and Alex goes and punches him. Oren: I’ll play that version. How much for that DLC? Bunny: There’s that part in the second one where she’s talking, the characters are on the tower and Maggie Adler’s friend shows up and becomes giant for two seconds. Oren: Yeah, that happened. Oh man. The scavenger hunt is a really interesting quasi-choice.  Bunny: Yeah, I like the scavenger hunt. Oren: The first game I missed that was a thing. I just didn’t understand what it was when I got it, so I just didn’t do it. And nothing is different if you don’t do it right. Again, the endings don’t change. Your main actions don’t change, but you as the player have very little idea what’s going on if you don’t do the scavenger hunt and find all the notes. Bunny: That’s funny. I didn’t actually – I’m just a sucker for lore, so of course I did it. I’ve done that every single time I went through. But thinking about it since then, I think you’re right that it would be a bit disorienting to not have that context. Oren: Yeah, it’s just odd like this. My second play through is definitely my favorite because my second playthrough, I knew more what I was doing. I did all the stuff, I got all the extras, and I had the most fun doing it. The third play through was a little bit out of obligation because I wanted to get the technically escape the loop option, which in itself is disappointing, because what you’re basically doing is saying, actually we’re not going to have any of the character development that happens on the island. So Alex is just gonna be a different person. Bunny: I mean, obviously they couldn’t have done this, but wouldn’t it have been cool if once you found, that you kept playing and there was an entirely different game going on. It becomes Life is Strange or something. Oren: If only they had infinite resources while making this game. Bunny:  If only. Oren: Yeah, of course. This is the, just because I know someone’s gonna bring it up in comments somewhere, I know this is the promise that various large language model advocates are making for games, and let’s just say I’m skeptical of how that would work.  Bunny: If infinite resources means large language models, then no.  Then I object, actually. Give me my limited Oxenfree, thank you very much. Oren: Doesn’t seem as enticing anymore. You gotta leave us wanting some more, apparently is the answer. Bunny: Yeah.  And boy, it did leave me wanting more. Oren: Yeah, it did. And then Oxenfree Two came out, which I also really liked. Bunny: Yeah, Oxenfree Two was fun. I’ve admittedly only played it once, and I’m now on break and therefore separated from my computer with all the games on it. So a lot of this is just me recalling. This is gonna be a lot of my first impressions, I’ll put it that way. Oren: I certainly didn’t really feel the need to replay it. I’ve replayed Oxenfree One, mostly because the first time I missed some important stuff that I wish I hadn’t. I would’ve liked the game more if I’d seen that the first time. So the second playthrough was just to get that stuff. And then the third time it was because it had been a while and I wanted to replay it before I played Lost Signals. That’s Oxenfree Two – Lost Signals. So that’s the only reason I played Oxenfree One multiple times. I don’t usually replay games that much, whereas Oxenfree Two feels like a very complete experience. Like the first time I did not really feel the need to play it again. Bunny: Yeah, I think I feel the same way. I’ve replayed that first game quite a lot. The first time I played it was on a really long trip and my dad needed the iPad I was playing it on, which I did not take offense to, not at all. [Oren chuckles]  And then I played it more, and then I went back to it this summer, both to play it again before the sequel release and also because I was doing a project on it. And then I played Oxenfree Two and I was like, hmm,  good experience. And I went on to other things. Oren: Yeah. And Oxenfree Two is much bigger, which is neat. There’s a lot more to explore. I think you have a jump button in Oxenfree Two. Bunny: Can you jump on command though, or is it still that you have to-? Oren: Specific places where you’re allowed to jump. They also gave you more minigames in Oxenfree Two. Bunny: Oh my gosh. The minigames. Oren: [laughing] There’s so many minigames. Bunny: So the first time you were spinning the thingy to make the music play right, like that was the main minigame. Oren: Yeah, I still don’t know how to do the waveform minigame. I’ve played through the whole game and every time the waveform game came up, I would just randomly fiddle with the controls until it eventually solved itself. Bunny:  Yeah, there’s not really any method to it. You get on there and you spin the thingy until it becomes not a sine wave, and then you have to align the thingy with another thingy, and it’s all very abstract, and I’m not sure what I’m actually doing in the game. Oren: I had no concept of what the relationship was between the commands I was entering and the thing that was happening on the screen. Bunny: Yeah, and I get why they did it. Like, they want it to feel more consequential. You’ve earned what you’re getting from this, but I’m not sure that was the completely right way to go about it because the story also can’t advance until you do the minigame. Oren: Yeah. The minigame with the radio in the first game, which is still there in the second game, where you basically tune a radio to access a plot point, is fine. Bunny: Yes. It’s okay. Oren: There’s nothing really to write home about, but it works. Whereas the one in Two is like, this is certainly more complicated. I don’t think I would say it’s any better. Bunny: It did feel, well, I don’t know. It was definitely different from the first one. I don’t know if it was more or less tedious. I didn’t mind the tuning thing. It was just spinning a dial back and forth. But this one, you actually gotta hope the sine wave cooperates. Oren: Yeah. Come on, sine wave. Help me out here. Oxenfree Two also had some interesting choices around the walkie-talkies that you have. Bunny: I did like what they did with the walkie-talkies. Oren: Yeah, I enjoyed the walkie-talkies quite a bit because you end up with a walkie-talkie first, and at first I thought that was gonna be your only tool for the game. It gave me this weird impression. In the first game you had the slow buildup to the radio, and then the second one was like, no, here, use the walkie-talkie. You don’t have to tune it. We did that for you. Bunny: The second game really just throws you right in. It’s like you get to the island, you get a little bit about Riley. Riley meets Jacob in his broken-down car. You start walking and then boom, the spooky triangle is here and you’re doing spooky things and everything’s just gone wild and there are ghosts everywhere, and you gotta deal with it. Oren: Yeah, the supernatural heats up much faster in the second game, which I think is fine. You already played the first game. You know what’s happening. Bunny: I kept reading reviews that were like, it can stand on its own. And I was like, it’d be very hard to parse this game if you had completely no knowledge of the first one. Oren: You would have no idea who Alex is if you played this without having played Oxenfree One. And Alex is a really important character in Oxenfree Two. Bunny: Maybe too important. That was one of my critiques of it, is that first of all, they didn’t know what to do with the non-Alex characters from the first game. Oren: They were around. Bunny: When it ended, I guess they just don’t remember it, even though it’s been five years. What are they gonna experience once they walk off screen? Oren: Yeah. About that, who knows? Bunny: But then Alex shows up in a kind of confusing twist where there’s actually been two sets of ghosts. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: And it’s not clear who was doing what. I’d have to play it again with that in mind, I think. But I remember I was talking to you on the Discord about that, and you thought it was just Alex the entire time when you were playing it, and I don’t think it was. It’s also the submarine ghosts.  Oren: Yeah, they’re still hanging around. Bunny: And then Alex shows up and then Riley gets led around by Alex for a while, and Alex seems a bit more like the main character in some scenes. That was – well, I love Alex – a bit annoying. Oren: Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t remember thinking about that as an issue. My main problem with that section was I was just so bummed out by it because I was already sad at the way the first game ended, and then in the second game it was like, my hero from the first game had turned evil because she didn’t wanna be dead and was trying to take over someone else’s body. And the game strongly suggested that there was no way around this because in the first game, you tried to help the ghosts from the submarine and it’s like, nope, sorry. There’s no way to do it.  And so in the second game, I just assumed that was still true because I have no in character reason to think otherwise. And I was so sad that I stopped and I looked up the ending to assure myself that no, there is a way out. You just have to get there. And then I finished the game and had more fun, but if the internet didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have finished that game. I probably would’ve just stopped. Bunny: Oh no, they’re not gonna leave our girl trapped like that. Oren: They might. They did it the first time. Bunny: That’s true’s. I mean, that’s one of the awkward things about doing sequels to interactive narratives is again, limited resources. You have to canonize one of the endings and remaining in the loop is the dominant ending.  Oren: Which makes sense. That’s fine. That part I don’t mind. It’s just that one game already ended on a really sad note, and it’s not like they knew for sure they were gonna be able to make a sequel when that happened. So they were clearly okay with ending the game that way, which made me have to seriously consider they might do it again. Bunny: Yeah, that’s fair. Oren: And it turned out that wasn’t the case and I was very grateful, but it was tough. I was emotionally very attached to those characters and it was a rough ride with the idea that they might just be stuck as ghosts forever. Bunny: No, maybe that’s the curse of Oxenfree, is the characters are too well written. Oren: Yeah. They build up a lot of attachment except for Ren. Ren can stay in oblivion forever I guess. Bunny: Maybe if the ghosts had taken over Ren instead of Clarissa, just leave Ren in the void.  Oren: Which is weird because objectively Clarissa is… Bunny: Clarissa’s a jerk. Oren: Clarissa is pretty awful. But I didn’t dislike Clarissa the same way I disliked Ren. I dunno, call me a hypocrite, but I found her more interesting. Bunny: She was, I think it’s because you were annoyed at Ren, and Clarissa you were angry at.  Oren: There were also just a few scenes where, I don’t know, maybe this wasn’t even intentional, but it felt like Ren seemed like he felt entitled to Alex’s affections. I wouldn’t even say if it was romantic exactly, but Ren definitely gave me really strong ‘you owe me because we’re such good friends’ vibes, which is always weird for an NPC. I don’t know. It’s like, I’ve never met you before, Ren. I don’t know what’s happening here. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I will say I think the first game was better served by establishing that these characters already have relationships, then the second game was by having Jacob and Riley be complete strangers. Oren: They do share a lot of personal details for complete strangers. Bunny: Yeah, I think they should have had maybe they’re cousins or something, some connection. I think that the Jonas and Alex connection was well done because they’re getting to know each other, but they also already know each other. Oren: Yeah. They have a connection. Whereas with Jacob in the second game, it’s like, yeah, he’s a guy that I met. Bunny: Yeah, he is a cool dude. He’s got a nice hat. Oren: You bond really fast when you’re putting up radio transmitters. Bunny: It’s the best team building activity. Oren: But I mentioned that there are some walkie talkie choices in the second game, which I find really interesting. There’s park ranger and boat guy.  Bunny: Boat guy! Oren: I don’t remember boat guy’s name, but in retrospect, it’s funny because you can convince the park ranger to not die, but is again, that’s one of those developer moon logic problems where what the actual choice is, you’re convincing her whether or not to go out and do her rounds when it’s storming. And sure that sounds dangerous, but also, she was gonna do that for a reason, right? What if someone needed help? And so it feels kind of weird that convincing her to stay in is just the right choice and there are no consequences to that. Bunny: Yeah, they probably could have made a different dilemma. Also, I think she was gay, which is cool. Oren: That is cool. Appreciate that. So I’m glad I made it so she didn’t die. Bunny: Yeah, it’s good when she doesn’t die. Oren: But I did look up the answer because again, I hate game developer moon logic. I have trouble following these things. Boat guy was more straightforward, because with him you can convince him to sail his boat into a big dimensional portal. Bunny: I don’t think I had him do that. What happens when he does that? Oren: Yeah, no, he goes to a portal, and godspeed boat guy. I dunno what you’re seeing on the other side. But have a good time man. Bunny: Live your best life, boat guy. Say hi to the ghosts. Oren: I told him it was okay to go and do that because, you know, nobody can charge you boat taxes on the other side. Bunny: This is true. Oren: So we’re near half an hour. We should definitely talk about the main difference between the end of the two games, at least mechanically, is that the end of the first game, there is a choice, but it’s not strictly a different, here are your three endings. It’s more like the ghosts have made you an offer, are you gonna take it or not? Bunny: Yeah, I found that a whole lot more interesting than whether you pick one, two, or three.  Oren: Yeah. Again, I didn’t mind the ending so much, just again because I didn’t want bad things to happen to these characters, and this was a way for fewer bad things to happen, so I was more okay with it. But yeah, I agree. It was certainly much, it felt much more natural in the first game. Bunny: And then the first game, you could also influence the ghosts if you’d read the letters and learned more about them. You could bargain with them and get them to release Clarissa on their own, which was just a lot more engaging, I think. Oren: That’s cool. I actually, I guess I didn’t realize that was a thing. I think that’s what happened in my games. Interesting. Bunny: You can call the name, you can name one of the crew members, and that makes them start remembering themselves and they let you go. Oren: Whereas in the second one, there’s a very clearly a pick your ending moment where the narrative kind of stops. And there was definitely some foreshadowing that you would’ve to pick someone to go through the portal, but it wasn’t very strong. Whereas with the first game, it was very obvious, you’re gonna have to make a choice, do you bargain with the ghosts or not? Whereas in the second game, it was a little bit like, all right, here’s the ending. Pick which one you want. So it was definitely less immersive. Bunny: And it did feel like there was an obvious choice in that one of the characters wants to go through the portal. Oren: Yeah, you’re supposed to feel more hesitant about that because she’s a teenager, but at this point it’s like, whatever. She wants to go, that’s fine. She can go live in holodeck dimension, I guess was the implication. Bunny: Yeah. Another ghost parents thing, I’m not sure how that works. Oren: I think the idea is that she’s gonna be reliving a stretch of time with her parents forever, is what I think it was. Bunny: Oh, okay. I guess I didn’t pick up on that. Oren: Whatever. I don’t really like this character. This character was really obnoxious for the entire game. I know I’m supposed to feel bad for her because she has dead parents, but it just didn’t quite click. So for me that was a pretty obvious choice. Bunny: Yeah. I didn’t love her either. And I will say, I wanted the cult to be more. I wanted more cult. I’ll just say that. Oren: There’s a weird bait and switch where you thought there was a cool cult on the island and it turned out that they were nothing. They were just hippies. Bunny: Astrologer neopagans. Not actually a ghost cult. Oren: And it’s like, oh, the thing turned out to be less interesting than we thought. Bunny: Yeah, never a good twist when it turns out to be less interesting. Oren: Okay. I think that will be it for our discussion of Oxenfree, unless the time loop resets and we have to do this all again. Bunny:  Oh, no. Better just listen to it again, or you’ll be stuck. Gotta wait for part two.  Oren: Or send yourself a message to not listen to it in the first place. Bunny: Yeah, and just never go on Mythcreants ever.  Oren: If you found this to be an interesting time loop to go through forever and ever, you can support us on Patreon, which will help us continue to put you through the Mythcreants time loop. You just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

The hosts dive into their most annoying language pet peeves, sharing humorous grievances about common word misuse. They tackle the quirks of evolving speech patterns and the confusion that can arise from turning verbs into nouns. Personal frustrations like the misapplication of 'penultimate' make an appearance, as well as critiques on narrative techniques such as exaggerated character descriptions. They emphasize the power of subtlety in metaphors and highlight the importance of thoughtful editing for better storytelling.

Dive into the chilling art of crafting a mysterious atmosphere in storytelling, where context is rich with intrigue! The hosts explore iconic works like 'Lost' and 'Stranger Things,' sharing insights on how to balance mystery with character development. They dissect the eerie ambience of spooky settings and perplexing bureaucracies, revealing the thin line between captivating suspense and convoluted plots. Tune in for a lively discussion filled with humor and a sprinkle of supernatural speculation!

Lucy Carlyle, an author known for her storytelling expertise, dives into the fascinating world of unreliable narrators. She explains how these narrators can shape reader perceptions, exploring examples from classics like 'Dracula' and 'Piranesi.' The discussion reveals the delicate balance between personal bias and objective truth, highlighting the fine line between engaging storytelling and narrative confusion. Carlyle also emphasizes the role of memory in creating compelling, memorable characters that captivate audiences throughout the narrative.

Choo choo, the steam train is leaving the station! Everyone check your top hats and gears, which will serve as your tickets to this podcast. All abooooooooard! This week, we’re talking about steampunk. What is steampunk? Why is steampunk? Can you even have steampunk without airships? Obviously the answer to that last one is “no,” but we have a whole bunch more to talk about! Show Notes The Guns Above  The Origin of “Steam-Punk”  Howl’s Moving Castle  Castle in the Sky  Nausicaä and the Valley of the Winds  Warmachine  Girl Genius  Wild Wild West  His Dark Materials Carnival Row  Mortal Engines Rising Tide  Paddington  The Effluent Engine  The Black God’s Drums Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is… Chris: …Chris. And… Oren: …Oren. Bunny: And I hope you’re wearing a top hat right now. And if you’re not wearing boots, put them on and stick some gears on them, because we’re going to talk about steampunk today. Chris: Yeah, the key to steampunk is just gluing gears everywhere? On everything? Oren: Do the gears need to do anything, or can they just be aesthetic gears? Bunny: No comment. [Oren laughing] But there do need to be gears. Chris: We need to pretend that they do something, but they don’t actually have to do anything.  Bunny: Yeah, they can clink and rattle a bit. That could be their purpose. Who needs laces when you can tighten up your shoes with gears? Oren: Yeah, just put a little coal in the little boiler you’ve got in your heel, and yeah, what could go wrong? [general laughter] Bunny: Put on your shoe, and it’s a nice panning shot up your leg, and it’s going like, “Shhh…chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk.” And it’s the coolest way to put on your shoe ever. It’s like those shoes that have like a goldfish tank in them, but cooler. Oren: That is one of the unstated, or sometimes directly stated, conceits of steampunk, is that steam technology is way lighter than it actually is. Bunny: Yeah, it’s kind of gotta be. Oren: Here’s a big robot with a giant boiler on its back. That thing would collapse under its own weight. Boilers are heavy. [laughing] Bunny: [stage whisper] Shut up, Oren. Shut up. Stop talking. [laughter] Oren: That was the part that I found very funny about The Guns Above which is…it’s arguable whether it’s steampunk or not,because it has airships, but its airships are hyper-realistic in how they’re made, except for the fact that they’re powered by a steam engine. There have been steam-powered airships. It’s not completely made up, but they were very limited and immediately abandoned because steam engines are too heavy to make practical airship engines. Bunny: Yeah, isn’t that the one where they’re very particular about how they have wicker gondolas hanging underneath the airship. Oren: They have to save every fraction of weight. A big part of the story is that they can’t bring any extra people on board, and they need to know when anyone moves around, because the ship is that sensitive to weight. Admittedly, I’m not an engineer. I haven’t done the math. Maybe they could save enough weight for a steam engine, but I just feel like it would probably be too heavy. Bunny: It does sound like having a unicycle, then putting a combustion engine on it. [laughter] So I suppose this does raise the interesting question of what is steampunk? Is it an aesthetic, or are there certain tropes and plot requirements? I think it’s both, but a lot of it is aesthetic. Not gonna lie. Oren: First, I’ll have you know that it should be steam-punk. I see y’all spelling that as one word.  Chris: Steam-what? Bunny: Punk! Chris: No dash. That’s an atrocity. Oren: Look, when it was first coined, supposedly, in a letter by Kevin Wayne Jeter to Locus magazine in 1987, he spelled it steam-punk. Bunny: Well, they were also spelled cross-words when they were first invented, so… Chris: Yeah, a lot of compound words started with dashes. Oren: The line must be drawn here. This far, no further. [laughter] Bunny: So you have to say “steam”, and then you have to teeter on the edge of it for a loong time, like you’re Dr. Frankenfurter. Oren: The etymology is generally accepted to be that it’s an evolution of cyberpunk, which, of course, by then, the term cyberpunk was already in circulation. It’s interesting, because cyberpunk, the “punk” part, comes from the fact that these early foundational works of the genre tended to focus on characters who were on the extreme margins of their cybernetic society. Not universally, but enough that that became what the genre was associated with. Chris: A lot of them were punks. [laughter] Oren: Yes, they were punks, and that’s where that term came from. But, steampunk never had that, as far as I can tell? Of course, nowadays steampunk and cyberpunk are both primarily aesthetics. You can have a cyberpunk story that’s about punks, or about rich CEOs, and it’s equally cyberpunk either way, but I do find that interesting as an evolution of the term. Chris: I do think cyberpunk has a bigger legacy of having certain types of plots, but those plots still aren’t essential for it to be cyberpunk. Steampunk, you can argue some plots are common, like exploration plots are popular in steampunk, but it’s clear that the aesthetic is the most important thing. Bunny: Yeah, and there are certain character archetypes that, you know, some genres don’t have so particularly specific character archetypes. Steampunk definitely has the mad scientist, with lots of wacky inventions and vials bubbling in their labs, and steam hissing out of the corner, and stuff like that. Oren: And of course, like most genres, steampunk is a collection of associated traits, rather than any single hard-defined group of them. We tend to associate steampunk with Victorian. We tend to associate Victorian fashion and all that. But there’s a lot of very famous steampunk that isn’t Victorian, at all. A lot of Miyazaki movies, for example, we would consider those steampunk, but they don’t have Victorian aesthetics at all. In that case, it’s the steam tech that is the glue that holds them together. Bunny: That’s probably really Howl, though, right? What other one is there? Oren: The other ones are Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Bunny: Castle in the Sky seems pretty sci-fi to me, but I guess some of it’s got that brown… Oren: I mean, the place where they explore is not steampunk. That’s alien robot tech. But the place where they come from is steampunk. The airship pirates have a steampunk ship and Air Destroyer Goliath, the big old government ship that rolls in, that’s very steampunk. Chris: If Howl’s Moving Castle isn’t Victorian, is there a specific period that it’s supposed to be? It doesn’t look that far from Victorian to me. Bunny: Howl’s Moving Castle was playing in the background at some point over the summer, and I was doing other things. So I was walking in and out, and watching it when I was in the room. And to me, it seemed kind of World War I, but I could be completely wrong about that. Oren: I think World War I is roughly accurate. I don’t think it has a specific time period, but if you look at the way they’re dressed, they’re in “old-timey dress”, as far as I can tell. But I wouldn’t categorize anything they’re wearing as specifically Victorian. But granted, I’m not a fashion expert. Maybe a fashion expert would look at it and be like, “Ah, that’s actually completely Victorian. You just don’t know anything about Victorian fashion, you”. Chris: Maybe they’re just not fancy enough. But you don’t see a lot of corsets, for instance, in Howl’s Moving Castle. Bunny: There are people with top hats, though. Oren: There are top hats. And some of the aesthetic of steampunk is just the aesthetic of engineering. If you work around machines, you’re going to expect to see things like goggles, and leather safety equipment, and big gloves, stuff like that. Most of the Miyazaki movies have those, because it would be weird if someone was working in this big steam-powered engine room and was wearing a light sundress. That would just be odd. [laughter] Chris: So, Oren, can you describe the difference between steampunk and dieselpunk? Bunny: Oh, I’ve got three more of those, but go ahead. Oren: Does it go steam, or does it go gasoline, or oil or whatever? They’re very similar. Very often you have stories where they overlap. I think Bunny had some specifics that I thought were interesting. Bunny: Yeah, so it’s really hard to tell how these intersect. As I was looking around trying to research these–so there’s dieselpunk, which is steampunk, but internal combustion engines, or electricity. So, I don’t know a lot of dieselpunk stories. I think it’s probably less common than steampunk, or at least less well-known. But I would categorize it as kind of grimier, and more 1920s, just from what I’ve seen. And then there’s the two that are closest to steampunk, and I can’t tell what the difference is. One of which is clockpunk, and the other of which is gaslamp fantasy, which is not punk, but it is… Chris: The only story I know that’s been called gaslamp fantasy is Girl Genius, in which the creators of this comic like to call it gaslamp fantasy. I felt like that was just another name for steampunk. Oren: Did they make that up? Is that where that term comes from? Because I used to work at Privateer Press, and the people in charge insisted we call it “full metal fantasy”. Bunny: What? Oren: Which was just the most absurd… Chris: [laughing] Full metal fantasy? Oren: Full metal fantasy. Bunny: That’s terrible. Chris: Is that named after Fullmetal Alchemist? Oren: No, it’s named after nothing. Bunny: They’re trying to be special… Oren: As far as I could tell, it was named after branding desires. [laughter] I could be wrong. My deep suspicion–they never told me this, so this is just me guessing–but my deep suspicion was that someone did some market research and found out that steampunk is not popular with the target audience of 18 to 35 year old white male gamers that they were trying to reach. [laughter] And so they were like, we gotta call it something else, guys. But, I don’t know that. I’m not saying that’s actually where it came from. It was just so weird to be told we had to call it “full metal fantasy” when we were talking to customers. Bunny: No, that’s so bulky. A lot of these are very much splitting hairs. I think gas lamp fantasy… I’ve heard two things called that by now. I think it’s just that there are explicitly magical elements. But Girl Genius doesn’t acknowledge that it’s magic. I mean, it is magic. Chris: In Girl Genius, you have some people who have the Spark. And that Spark basically makes them wild and chaotic inventors who make contraptions that can do impossible things. But steampunk generally has contraptions that scientifically couldn’t actually do those things. That’s the fantastical element. Girl Genius is only different in that there’s this sort of inborn Spark aspect to it that is much like inborn magic in a lot of stories. But other than that, it just seems like wild or low realism steampunk. Oren: TV Tropes is claiming that this was specifically coined to describe Girl Genius by its creators. And supposedly, their reasoning is that they were trying to avoid confusion with another comic that was actually called steampunk. And because they wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t any kind of setting where the word “punk” would apply because their characters aren’t punks. Chris: Yeah, you look at Girl Genius and you’re like, that is a steampunk comic. [Oren laughs] I guess I can’t blame them, since apparently I made up “light stories”. Bunny: They’re not light stories, they’re “sunshine fantasies”. It’s not a light story unless it comes from the light story region of France. [laughter] Chris: Otherwise, it’s a sparkling fantasy. Bunny: Yes, exactly. So, that’s gaslamp fantasy, which I guess is very niche in that it only refers to Girl Genius. Chris: It’s steampunk. Let’s just be honest, it’s steampunk. Bunny: It is steampunk. It just is steampunk. Sorry, guys. But then there’s clockpunk, which I’m having trouble squaring because a lot of steampunk also involves clocks, and clocks have gears. But I think the main point there is that it’s not powered by steam? Like, you need to wind it with keys. Chris: I feel like that’s steampunk without the steam, and people are like, “Hey, this doesn’t really fit.” Bunny: But it’s like a very similar aesthetic. Oren: Yeah, it’s similar to dieselpunk in that they’re very similar. And you could easily have a story that is both. But eventually, if you really lean on the clockwork elements and don’t have any steam at all, eventually someone might start to think maybe this needs another name. Bunny: Yeah, I just feel like I haven’t seen a story that’s pulled that differential enough to merit it. Chris: I think this is people trying to make genres less chaotic. But I just think genres are inherently chaotic and you should just embrace the chaos. “Steampunk” can refer to a story that has neither steam nor punks. Bunny: Yeah, punk is just kind of a tack-on by this point. Chris: I think if we were to go with the meaning of “punk” in genre names, I definitely think it’s an indicator of the aesthetics being important. Similar to “core”, though. [laughing] Bunny: Oh, no, not the punk versus core again. Chris: Aren’t they the same thing at this point? Oren: Technically, we all have to call it “steamcore” now. [laughter] Chris: Cottagepunk. Bunny: Maybe you need to call it “lightcore”. No, no, no, that sounds dirty. Never mind. Chris: [laughing] Oh, no. Bunny: But yeah, there’s a reason my notes have a whole section which is just like, “What are these other punks? I don’t know.” Oren: Yeah, similar to, but legally distinct from. Bunny: Yeah, exactly. The one other one is cattlepunk, which is a weird way to put it, because they might not have cattle. It’s just Wild West steampunk. And apparently, again, according to TV Tropes, this genre, not by that name, but it predates steampunk. I couldn’t really figure out more details on that. But if that’s true, it’s interesting. I’m actually in the middle of my own genre confusion writing a story that’s set in something like the American Southwest and features steampunk-ish technology, but it also does not have cattle. So what do I do? Chris: Maybe it’s a weird Western. Bunny: Maybe it is a weird Western. Chris: So, I was looking up some steampunk stories for this. There’s a lot of things that are, “Is it steampunk?” An example, for instance, is Wild Wild West, which is a Western, but with steampunk technology in it, that people would often call “a weird Western”. But it’s also, I think, appropriate to call it steampunk–unless it’s diesel punk. Does it have steam? Every time, I have to check, “Does this have steam, or gasoline?” Bunny: I feel like the thing with steam is that steampunk is not so much about steam, as it is about gears. Chris: Mm hmm. It’s true. Bunny: It should be gear punk. Oren: Look, are you telling me that a nuclear submarine isn’t steampunk? [laughter] Because that is a steam-powered vessel right there. The steam is produced by nuclear fission. You don’t tell me that’s not steampunk. Bunny: Oren, that is radioisotope punk. [general laughter] Chris: But yeah, if you want, you can call it a weird Western, I guess, or just call it steampunk. It’s fine. Bunny: It’s not steam powered. It’s powered by an energy source I made up. So I don’t–I guess it’s “made-up punk”, “made-up energy punk”. Oren: That’s a good one. You should copyright that while there’s still time. Bunny: “Cattle made-up energy punk”. Chris: [laughing] Trademark. Bunny: Copyright trademark. Oren: Do not steal. Bunny: [laughing] That’ll sell. Chris: Okay. So here’s some questions about, “Are these stories steampunk?” [laughing] Because these are things that I saw online listed under steampunk. The Dark Materials trilogy. Oren: Little bit. It’s a little steampunk, because it’s got airships. Chris: Isn’t it mostly just a fantasy that’s kind of Victorian-ish era? Oren: It’s also pretty light on fantasy for most of the book. It’s like alternate history that’s…a little bit magical? Like there’s the daemons. I’m not calling them demons. Quiet you. [laughter] The daemons that they have are the most magical thing about the book for quite a long time. And they don’t actually play a huge role in the story, as weird as that seems. It seems like a setting where everyone has a magic animal following them around would be different. But it’s not. But they use another word for electricity. I noticed that when I reread it recently. I forget what it is. But instead of saying electric, they say something else. They say “galvanic”, or something. Which I think is just a synonym, but not one that is in common usage. And they have a lot of airships. So that feels a little… Chris: [interjecting] Really? I just didn’t remember the airships. But again, I didn’t finish the series, so…  Oren: Because the good guys don’t have them. They’re bad guys. Chris: [laughing] Only the bad guys have airships. Bunny: Way to ruin your airships. Oren: Well, because it’s a travel story. Right? It’s hard to do a travel story when your main characters can fly. Not impossible. Avatar exists, but… Chris: And there’s like a couple magic gadgets in it. But altogether it’s not very big on gadgets, which is what I would expect in steampunk. In general. Oren: I get why it is classified as that. I would not classify it that way. I think if someone is looking for a steampunk story and they picked up The Golden Compass, they would probably be disappointed, like this is probably not what they were looking for. Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it needs to have some focus on gadgets to be properly steampunk, and those gadgets should have gears in them, I’m just saying. Oren: It does have the actual golden compass, which does have some gears, so that’s some gearpunk. Bunny: Yeah, that’s one thing. Oren: Yeah, but it’s pretty important. It’s pretty central to the story. Bunny: It’s also not a compass, Oren. Oren: Yeah, it’s an alethiometer, I’ll have you know. Bunny: The golden alethiometer. Chris: Okay, how about Carnival Row? Oren: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Chris: [surprised] It is? But okay, so it’s fantasy Victorian. Where is the steampunk part in there? Oren: There’s also airships in Carnival Row. Chris: So if we have any Victorian setting and you add airships, then it’s steampunk. I just, I feel like the airships aren’t enough. Oren: The airships are doing a lot of the lifting, you could say. [general laughter] Chris: I feel like maybe there’s a divide between the pro-airship camp and the neutral airship camp. [laughing] Oren: You see more of the steampunk elements in the war flashbacks. Not just the airships, but there’s at least somewhat more advanced tech. But not much. Chris: I just feel like if the story doesn’t have any kind of gadgetry, it doesn’t feel like it qualifies as steampunk to me. It’s just Victorian fantasy. Bunny: I think this is more gaslamp fantasy than Girl Genius. If we were to slap a label on something as gaslamp fantasy, it would be this. Oren: When I first heard the term “gaslamp fantasy”, I thought that meant like a fantasy story in a place that had gas lighting. And so I assumed it was for stories that are vaguely historic, but that don’t have the high tech to qualify them to be steampunk. So that’s what I thought that term was, and then I found out it was for Girl Genius. And it’s like, that’s the opposite of what I thought that was. Chris: This is our new hot take. Like, Carnival Row is gaslamp fantasy. Girl Genius is steampunk. [laughter] Bunny: I gotta say, these Carnival Row snapshots that they put on the internet are not very good. Oren: Well, it’s not very good. So that’s truth in advertising. [general laughter] Bunny: Apparently there’s also people who have horns for eyebrows. Okay. Oren: Yeah, that’s just some good clean Tiefling fun. Bunny: [laughing] Fair. Chris: Okay, how about Mortal Engines? Oren: Oh, yeah. That one’s the most steampunk. Bunny: Does it run on steam? Oren: Yeah. Chris: That one is so odd. Because it’s post-apocalyptic. And they have computers in it. So it has, like, more modern…but I don’t know. I guess it’s not technically Victorian. But it definitely has weird gadgetry and retro-futuristic technology. Oren: Yeah. And in the movies, it definitely has a very steampunk look. And they actually look pretty Victorian in the movies, too. It’s not Victorian. It’s post-apocalyptic. But apparently there’s like a retro fashion trend going, where after the bombs fell, everyone started dressing like the 1890s. [laughter] So, yeah, that one is more obviously steampunk. Because it has, like, these really advanced technologies that are powered by boiling water somehow. Don’t ask how they do it. It’s just a thing, okay. Chris: Disney’s Atlantis is another one that is commonly–I think that one’s hard because all the pics you look at are just in the Atlantis part. But it’s got the whole, “we make contraptions so that we can go explore,” your traditional Victorian explorer’s outfits, and everything like that. Oren: Yeah, it’s got some elements of it, I would say. It’s got some elements of steampunk. I don’t know if I would call it a steampunk story, if it were up to me. But I can see why people call it that. So that is one of the appeals of steampunk, is that you can create some pretty advanced tech to do some pretty high speculative stuff, like have giant robots, or replace limbs with robo arms, and stuff like that, without having to get into the emergent qualities of that technology. If you were using, say, obviously advanced stuff like cyberpunk or more sci-fi, or if you were using magic–you don’t have as many implications. So it has a value for that as well. Chris: I do think that maybe one of the reasons why aesthetics is so important is because if aesthetics weren’t important, there would be less reason not to have a futuristic sci-fi setting instead. Because usually when we have fantastical technology, we’ve got that white and chrome minimalist futuristic look, which can be fun. Bunny: Look, steampunk is not allowed to be sleek. Get your chrome out of here, heathen. Chris: So if you’re not going to do that, then it’s because you want these other aesthetics that are associated with the historical period instead, and therefore the emphasis is on them. So that might be one reason. Oren: I mean, there is the Victorian aspect of it. People like Victorian fashion, or at least riffing on Victorian fashion. Bunny: It’s often pretty Gothic, I will say. Oren: That’s true. Various historical fashion trends, people like those a lot. And so that can have a really cool aesthetic to it. Steampunk dovetails really nicely with spooky stories, because a lot of common traits in steampunk are either spooky on their own, or can be made spooky, because you got stuff like gas masks, very common in steampunk, incredibly spooky. You got vials of various colored liquids, very spooky. Steampunk robots are easy to make spooky, because they’re big and hulking and they move in awkward ways. Again, makes that easier to make that spooky. Not to say that you can’t have spooky, sleek cyberpunk robots, it’s just you have to work a little more at it. Bunny: I have a question for this very obscure property. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. I just want to know whether you think it’s steampunk. It’s by some guy, it’s called Rising Tide. [laughter] Oren: Hmmmmmm. I don’t know, sounds like a weirdo. Bunny: Yeah, I think it’s a little spooky. Chris: Some weirdo decided to make an expansion for Torchbearer. Bunny: Very strange. Oren: Yeah, that was a weird choice. Bunny: Oh no, maybe it’s another alternate-energy-punk one. Oren: I mean, it does have, Rising Tide does have a magical material that changes the laws of physics, which is different than coal. It also has coal. But in Deadlands, a popular RPG that uses steampunk horror, they’ve got this stuff called ghost rock, which I didn’t know about until after I’d already published Rising Tide, and someone pointed out that it was basically the same thing. Bunny: Oh no. Oren: It’s like, “Oh, all right, great job, me.” [laughter] Bunny: Ghost rock… Oren: So yeah, Rising Tide is definitely an example of where I was using the steampunk aesthetics to be on the spooky side. Bunny: I do like spooky steampunk. Perhaps because Lovecraftian horror was, I guess, from around the time that some of steampunk tries to emulate. He was later, he was 1900s. But maybe that’s why. Lovecraftian steampunk is a thing. Oren: Yeah, that’s a very popular cross genre. Oh, I should have also mentioned steampunk is really useful, because it’s much easier to get audiences to believe that you’re mixing swords and advanced technology with steampunk. If you’re doing that with cyberpunk, it basically has to be katanas. [laughter] Bunny: People won’t buy anything else. Oren: Because audiences will accept mixing machine guns and katanas only. Any other melee weapon and they’ll be like, “No, this is too silly. Why are you doing this?” Bunny: I can’t bring my club? Oren: No, no clubs, no spears, no great swords. Get that all out of here. No one would be using those in a world where everyone has easy access to guns. Only katanas specifically. [laughter] Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning that there’s quite a few stories that just use elements of steampunk. The Paddington movie of all things has this one… Oren: Really? Bunny: Yeah. No, there’s just this one–the Geographer’s Guild. This might be Paddington 2, actually. I forget. Which is also good. It’s one of the rare sequels that lives up to, or perhaps exceeds, the original. I like Paddington 2. But they go to the Geographer’s Guild, and it’s all pneumatic lines and stuff like that. It’s very retro. Very Victorian. And I think that kind of qualifies as steampunk. But Paddington is emphatically not a steampunk story. Oren: Yeah, you can get little elements of that showing up at some point. We’re getting close to the end here. But I should also reference that there are some inherent problems with steampunk, too. They don’t have to be there, but they crop up a lot, similar to any kind of historic genre. But this one gets extra problems, because it’s about the British. And people who write steampunk uncritically tend to get very enamored of Empire, and think that’s really cool. Because Victorian Empire, pretty big deal. So that can be a thing. You can also get people who just are like, “Hey, restrictive gender roles were actually great! Because women could nag their husbands.” So that was a thing. I’ve read steampunk stories like that. It’s unpleasant. I don’t like it. Bunny: I will say a good subversion of that–although this isn’t like a heavy steampunk–this is a very light steampunk story. But it’s a story called N.K. Jemisin. By N.K. Jemisin. Oren: It’s a story called N.K. Jemisin? [laughing] Bunny: Yes. It’s just Self-Titled N.K. Jemisin Steampunk Story. No, it’s called The Effluent Engine, and it’s about the racism of the time. It takes place in New Orleans, and the main character is trying to, I think–it’s been a bit since I read it–trying to get an important technology in Haiti working. To free Haiti from Empiric rule. So that’s good. I like it when they subvert it, or embrace the troublesome history of these things and do something new and good with it. So good on you, N.K. Jemisin. That was a good short story. Oren: N.K. Jemisin and P. Djèlí Clark should team up. Because he also has books that are similar to that, in a similar time period, with a similar aesthetic. And they could do like a crossover between them. That’d be great. I’d read that. Bunny: There you go. Name it after both of them. Oren: Yeah. It could be called N.K. Clark. That’s the title of the story now. [laughter] Bunny: Oh no. It sounds like we’re shipping them now. Oren: Eugh. Alright. Moving on. Bunny: There’s a couple of just the original steampunk writers that I suppose are worth mentioning, like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. They’re kind of like Tolkiens, in that sense. I saw someone refer to, I think, H.G. Wells as the first speculative fiction writer. And I don’t know if that counts. [Oren and Chris “hmm” skeptically in the background] I don’t know if I’d go that far. Oren: You’d have to define speculative fiction extremely specifically for that to have even a hint of relevance. Bunny: [laughing] Yeah. But, burrowing into the ground with a big old steampunk drill that you can ride in, as I think happened in Journey to the Center of the Earth. So those big giant mechanical drills go with airships and stuff. Just saying. Oren: That’s true. Alright. Now that we have successfully established that airships are the true mark of whether something is steampunk or not… Bunny: Yes. That’s what you should take away from this. Oren: Yeah. You should probably call it airship punk, to be perfectly honest. I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcastpunk, [laughter] please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Bunny: [ironically dramatic voice] We’re such outsiders. Oren: And, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Unravel the mystery of crafting compelling story openings! Discover how to strike the perfect balance between clarity and engagement without overwhelming readers. Find out why excessive character names can lead to confusion and how thoughtful prologues can enhance reader connection. Explore tips to avoid 'spoonfeeding' while ensuring your narrative remains deep yet accessible. Plus, enjoy a whimsical tale wrapped up in a playful song about a dragon and a princess. Your storytelling toolbox just got a lot heavier!