The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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Curiosity in fiction can be a double-edged sword. The hosts explore how it enhances tension and engagement but also risks neglecting fundamental storytelling principles. They discuss classic mysteries and the importance of fulfilling audience expectations. Balancing intrigue and resolution is crucial, as unresolved plots can frustrate viewers. They also compare the narrative crafts of novelists and TV writers, focusing on how each medium approaches conclusions differently. Finally, the conversation highlights the art of surprising yet logical plot twists.

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Swords? How droll. Guns? Completely unfashionable. Aren’t there any weird weapons out there to satisfy our thirst for novelty? You know what we’re talking about: the kind of completely bizarre contraption that’s as much a danger to the wielder as to the enemy. Fortunately, there are actually quite a few of those in both fiction and real life! Show Notes Mass Effect Weapon Heat Transporter Gun  HL Hunley  The Claw of Archimedes  Greek Fire  Point of View Gun Air Rifle  Mancatcher  USB Arrow  Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber  Laser Bow  Lirpa Bamboo Cannon  Panjandrum 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, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Music] Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is…  Chris: Chris Bunny: …and… Oren: Oren! Bunny: And I’m just so tired of this sword. I’m tired of this gun. They’re so basic and chunky. I want something unique. I want something that makes you scratch your head and ask who designed it, and I think the best way to do that is to stick two other weapons together. So I’ll go first. I’m going to have a gun, but it shoots nunchucks, and when the nunchucks are shot, they unfold into scissors. Oren: That’s pretty scary. I’ll admit I would not want someone shooting that at me. Bunny: What about you Oren? What weapons are you gonna jam together? Oren: Okay, so obviously it’s gonna have to be a whip and a shield. ‘Cause we’ve already seen whip swords, right? For some reason, only sexy characters use whip swords. So I tried to think of what the opposite of that was. So a whip shield is like the least sexy weapon you could possibly use. Bunny: Captain America and Catwoman. Chris: Okay. I think I want a gun that when you pull the trigger, it actually dissolves into a bunch of nanites that fly over to the person you pointed the trigger at, which really begs the question of why you did the whole trigger thing and just attacks them. Oren: Also, you better hope you don’t need your gun while the nanites are over there. Bunny: Usually you confuse them. It’s psychological. They thought they were gonna be shot with a gun, but they were shot with nanites. Chris: I mean, it might be cool if you had like a big gun that got smaller every time you shot it, as some of its nanites flew, and then those nanites would return and recombine with the gun. Oren: That was the idea of the guns in Mass Effect. Not quite, but the idea of Mass Effect was that there wasn’t any ammo because the guns fired by shaving off little bits of metal from basically a bar of metal inside the gun and then accelerating them up super high. And so the idea was that in theory you could run out of material, but it would take so long that there was no reason to track bullets. So instead, it tracked how much heat your gun generated, which was a cool mechanic, but it turned out to be too hard to balance. And so in the second one, they invented heat clips, which are basically bullets.  It’s just very funny to be Shepard and wake up in Mass Effect 2 after you’ve nearly died and had your near death experience and everything… and it’s like, “Hey, Shepard, while you were asleep, we invented bullets!” Bunny: It’s the future, in which they have bullets! I think I didn’t get far enough in that game to encounter that particular lore, but what I do remember is that you can turn your gun into healing goo. Which is not a feature of most guns. Oren: Oh, yeah, obviously, just shoot people with healing bullets. There’s some weird lore in Mass Effect if you read the in-game text, if you’re a nerd. Bunny: Unfortunately, I’m just a nerd and not a very good gamer, so I could not get to the actual nerd stuff. Chris: One weapon that I was surprised was not introduced earlier is the transporter gun in Star Trek because transporters are literally death-clone machines. So I’m surprised that nobody weaponized them earlier. Oren: So there are a couple of different ways you can weaponize a transporter. Every time Star Trek does this, it raises the question of why they don’t do it all the time. But some writer is just really eager and they always are like, yeah, I’ll be clever by weaponizing the transporter. Chris: We always knew the transporter was very dangerous. We actually need to forget that because characters use it all the time, and each time we’re cringing. Bunny: Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about it. Oren: No, you chaotic drama llamas, don’t do that. It’s hurting the entire setting when you do that! Bunny: Don’t people always get stuck in the transporter too? Oren: Yeah. The transporter can be used to cause and solve most problems, but this particular one was from the DS9 episode where it transports the bullet into the room and shoots you with it so that you can shoot through walls and stuff. Bunny: Wow. That is OP. Oren: Which is, yeah, it’s pretty OP and the answer to why they don’t use it all the time was some handwavium. It was like, it didn’t turn out to be viable… but it looks pretty viable to me in this episode! Chris: It just really does ask the question, why doesn’t the gun instead just transport someone into nothing? Oren: There’s transporting a bomb over, there’s just transporting away pieces of the target. Chris: Oh, yeah. They also thought in the movie, thought they were so clever. Oh look, we transport a bomb! Bunny: That’s the first thing it would’ve been used for. Chris: The first thing. It would’ve been used for. Oren: Some of the shows have done that too, and it’s annoying then too. Like guys, come on. We have to pretend we can’t do this, or the show doesn’t work. Chris: Just like all the episodes where it’s like, okay, how about we solve this deadly disease by just running a person through the transporter and modifying them during transport? No, we need to pretend we can’t do that or else no medical drama works. Oren: My favorite weird historical weapons are the ones that you hear about and they sound like a terrible idea, and then you see how they were used and it turns out that they were exactly as terrible as they sounded. Bunny: “Why would someone do that? It must have a point.” Oh, oh child. Nope. Oren: My favorite, my absolute favorite is the spar torpedo. ‘Cause back in the day, torpedo actually was just a synonym for what we would now call mines, just a floating explosive that a ship would run into. Nowadays they’re self-propelled weapons. But that wasn’t the terminology way back in the day. When they were making the first – or actually the second, the first one was during the Revolutionary War, but that’s a different story – the second combat submarine known to exist during the Civil War, and they were thinking of how to arm it. They thought, okay, what if we put a torpedo on the end of a long stick? Bunny: I see where this is going… Oren: And then we pedaled up to the other ship, ’cause this was a pedal driven submarine, and hit the other ship with our torpedo on the end of a stick and blow ’em up. Bunny: Gotta be a pretty long stick. Oren: Yeah. And so you can see the immediate problem with this is that this requires you to be very close to the ship when your torpedo goes off. For a long time, we didn’t know what happened to that submarine, the CSS Hunley, because it never returned from its mission when it was able to sink a single Union ship. But we eventually found it and did a bunch of studies, and right now the main theory of why it sank was that everyone on board was killed instantly by the torpedo explosion. Bunny: Wow. Who would’ve thunk, you know? Chris: But did they test the radius of the torpedo explosion? Oren: They absolutely did not. Bunny: This was before math, Chris. Chris: Before math! Oren: You have to understand how cursed this submarine was, okay? This submarine literally killed two entire crews in training. Bunny: Oh God. Oren: It got to the point where the Confederate naval personnel would not go inside it because it was a death trap, and so they had to get Army people to take it out on its mission. This is the most cursed ship you have ever heard of. It’s very grim, but I also love it. Bunny: Save the submarines for a different war, guys. Oren: Yeah, they’re not ready yet. Bunny: They’re not quite there. Speaking of ships, when I was doing research for this episode, I learned of the claw of Archimedes. Oren: Yeah! Bunny: Which is just a very funny title, and it’s basically, I guess like a grappling hook that grabs an enemy ship, lifts it up, and then either drops it, turns it, or chucks it, and it sinks the ship. It’s just a big hand that grabs ships and sinks them. Oren: Yeah. It doesn’t really work though ’cause the game is rigged so that the claw can’t actually grab onto the ship for long enough to get it over to the prize. So you have to put in more coins. Bunny: A claw. A claw! You know, I have gotten a plushie with a claw of Archimedes.  Oren: What? No, you, that’s impossible! Bunny: I know. I did it once! Oren: Some kind of chosen one. Bunny: I got a branded bee. Oren: Mm. Very nice. So it should be noted that the claw of Archimedes is probably made up, but Archimedes is a real person – or was a real person, he’s probably not still alive – but a lot of the things he’s credited with inventing probably never happened. Like the claw of Archimedes, that’s probably fake. There’s that idea that he had the soldiers shine light from their shields and burn other ships as they were coming in. That probably didn’t happen, but it’s a neat idea. In a fantasy setting, you could probably make it work. Bunny: Is that the same thing or a different thing than Greek fire? Oren: Greek fire? Okay. All right. All right. Hang on. I gotta talk about Greek fire. Bunny: Go off, Oren. Oren: Okay, so first of all, it should be called Roman fire because it was invented in the Byzantine AKA Eastern Roman Empire. Mm-Hmm. Take that, historians destroyed by facts and logic! So Greek fire is just a general catch-all term we have for a kind of incendiary liquid that was used by the Eastern Romans from around, I think the nine hundreds, probably a little earlier than that. And they used it to protect Constantinople from various invading fleets. And it should be noted that they were not the only ones to have incendiary fluids. Incendiary fluids have been used for basically forever in warfare, but Greek fire, at least from the history records that we have, seems to have been more effective than whatever anyone else was using at the time. But it gets confusing because the term Greek fire got so popular that people would start using it for any kind of incendiary liquid. Often it’s hard to tell if this thing that they’re talking about is the same as the really famous Greek fire. But Greek fire basically made the Byzantine navy unbeatable for a certain stretch of time because there was just, there’s no answer to it. If you don’t have a gunpowder weapon and your enemy ship has a flamethrower… sorry, that’s over. Chris: This is maybe an odd question, but were the flames from Greek fire a normal color? Oren: Last time I checked, there’s different reports on that. Chris: Oh, really? Bunny: Interesting. Oren: Yeah. ‘Cause we don’t really know exactly what it was made of. There are different ideas, but like the actual formulas for what the Byzantines were using were so tightly guarded that we don’t have them anymore. And that may have actually been why the Byzantine stopped using it after a while because it’s such a small circle that eventually they lost it. Bunny: Well, that’s embarrassing. Oren: There are illustrations that show them as orange and red flames, but I believe there are accounts that describe them in different colors, so it’s likely that they may have had different colors because who knows what was in there. Chris: I think in Game of Thrones there’s what’s clearly Greek fire- Oren: Yeah, alchemist fire. Chris: -clearly inspired by Greek fire, that’s green flames or something like that. Oren: As far as I know, there isn’t a lot of evidence that Greek fire burned green. I think that’s a George R. R. Martin invention, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Chris: I mean, it’s certainly a cool image. Works great on film. One of my favorites when it comes to weird weapons is the point of view gun- Oren: Yeah, that one’s great. Chris: -that’s added to the Hitchhiker movie. It’s not from the book. They added it during the app adaptation, but it’s cool, so, when you shoot somebody, they understand your point of view on the situation. Bunny: Okay, that’s great. Chris: So it helps you win the argument. The description of it is weirdly gender essentialist though, because the movie explains its history by like a coalition of angry housewives that wanted their husbands to understand them and that it supposedly doesn’t have much effect on women because their empathy is high already. Bunny: What? Chris: It’s like, okay, we don’t, that’s weird. We don’t need to go there. Oren: Look. I will accept that a group of housewives had to create this weapon because patriarchal standards make it so that men are not supposed to understand each other. But don’t tell me that one gender is inherently more empathetic. Come on guys, we can do better. Bunny: And does that imply that women always empathize with the other side of an argument? Because that is emphatically not the case. I’ve had enough arguments with friends in philosophy class to know that. Chris: But I like that because there is still almost something weapon-ish about it, in that if you’re having an argument, you could use it as part of your argument, but it’s also just entirely peaceful. Bunny: But it is a gun! Oren: I also really like historical weapons that sound like they should be superweapon game changers. And it turned out they weren’t. And so then you get a lot of people being like, why didn’t they use this thing more? And then that leads to weird conspiracy theories, which are very fun. I mean, fun to learn about. One of my favorites is the air rifle, which is an invention from around the late 17 to early 1800s, which was literally a gun that was fired using compressed air instead of gunpowder. And it had a really high rate of fire ’cause you didn’t have to do the whole ramming a ball down the barrel thing and it could fire in the rain more easily. It didn’t produce any smoke, so it seems like a wonder weapon. Why isn’t everyone using these? And so you get these weird conspiracy theories about how Napoleon hated them and would kill anyone who was using one, and none of that’s true. The reason is that they were really expensive and hard to make and had a tendency to catastrophically fail when you were using them. So that’s why. But they’re just a very fun weapon to imagine. Bunny: “Eight Weird Weapons – Napoleon Hates Number Four!” One weird one that I learned about was apparently still in use – by, of course, the police, of all things – is the man catcher, or rather the person catcher, it will catch you either way. And it was used for pulling people off of horses. It’s basically those sticks with a little grabby thing on the end that you use to pick up trash. It’s basically that, but human sized. Chris: What? Bunny: And then it has spikes all over it. Chris: Oh! Bunny: Yeah. So you grab someone off their horse and they’re presumably wearing armor, so the spikes don’t kill them, but it could kill them and the police use it. They don’t have the spikes currently. But very funnily, in my opinion, people in India were using this to capture fugitives during covid so that they could social distance while they were arresting people. Chris: Wow. Oren: You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess. Chris: But it’s for grabbing people off their horses. Bunny: Yeah, but it can be just used for grabbing people too. It’s like a big trash picker upper, but for people. Chris: Woof. That’s very strange. Oren: I feel like that’s gonna become an overpowered weapon in the Avatar setting,  because in Avatar, any weapon that is at least theoretically non-lethal is super good because they can’t kill or cut anyone, hence the prevalence of bolas in Avatar. Everyone loves bolas. Chris: Right? So many bolas. So Hawkeye has an arrow that shoots bolas. I don’t know how that works, but apparently he has one. Oren: My favorite thing about his bola arrow is that he also has at least one arrow that just like traps you in foam, which is obviously a more effective way to- Chris: I like the big purple foam arrow. That’s cool. Bunny: That sounds goofy. Oren: I can only imagine that the purple foam arrow is more expensive. So he is like, “I’m on a budget, man. I retired from the Avengers. Tony Stark’s not paying for all my arrows anymore.” Chris: So your bola arrow is like the poor man’s big purple foam arrow. Oren: Yeah, exactly. Some video games make you track ammo, so you have to keep your very best ammo for the boss. And for the minions, it’s like, all right, I guess I’ll use bola arrows for these guys. Bunny: Oh, what he should be doing is using heat clip arrows. Chris: They even in the show, this one was kind of a joke, but he apparently has a USB arrow. Bunny: Look, when your computer is on the other side of the room… Oren: The problem with the USB arrow is that it wouldn’t work because to plug in a USB, you have to try to plug it in once, not work, take it out, turn it over. It still doesn’t work. You take it out and you turn it over a third time and now it works. Chris: Maybe the arrow does that. You don’t know. Oren: I’ve seen it. It doesn’t do that! Chris: Maybe you just shoot three arrows, so you shoot one one way and then the other way, and then back the first way. Bunny: You gotta rotate them. Oren: It always goes in perfectly the first time, and my suspension of disbelief is ruined! Bunny: That’s the most unrealistic thing in that show. Oren: I do find it funny on Star Trek when they’re trying to come up with a unique weapon for aliens because there’s only so many ways you can put variety on like a point and shoot laser weapon, at least with the budget Star Trek is usually working with, so you’ve got like the Ferengi laser whips, which is just… sure, what if you had a phaser, but you also had to make this really awkward arm swing motion to use it? How do you aim that? Bunny: There is that- we referenced the urumi, which is the whip-sword-whip. You can stick a bunch of these into a hilt and swing around and whip people with it. I guess it’s sort of like that. Oren: The phase whip is supposed to be a ranged weapon. Bunny: Oh. Oren: It’s a whip, but when you crack the whip, it shoots a bolt of energy. Bunny: What? Chris: Why would you do that? A gun is so much easier! Oren: Because the Ferengi, back in early TNG when we thought the Ferengi were gonna be the big bads of Star Trek- Chris: Oh, isn’t it that first weird one where they’re super goofy and they’re introduced? Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The laser whip stuck around for a few episodes after that, but then they retired them and just decided that Ferengi used phasers like everyone else, but they had a different shape of phaser. Chris: That honestly reminds me, because it seems like it would be dangerous to the Ferengi, of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber handguards. The things on the sword that stick out on either side, they’re to protect your hands. Okay? They’re not to kill your opponent with, so making them a burning laser is not a good idea. Bunny: Just get a little stabby stabby when you get really close to your opponent and you can’t impale them on the big one. You gotta like, stabby stabby on the side. Chris: You’re just more likely to burn yourself with that at that point. Oren: Man, okay. So there are like pages and pages of discourse on this because if you look closely at Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, you can see that the energy bits don’t come directly out of the handle. There are sections of just metal, and then the energy comes out of those. So at least in theory, if he slides his hand too far forward, he’s not just gonna burn it up on lightsaber stuff. But then this raises the question of what happens if someone else slides their lightsaber down the sword, which is the whole point of a handguard. Aren’t they just gonna cut through those little emitters? Which then led to the fan theory, I think propounded by Stephen Colbert, that those are not emitters, that those are actually just conduits and the lightsaber bits are coming off of the main one. It is so confusing. Bunny: What? They wanted it to look cool. Chris: Yeah, I mean, clearly they’re designed to look like handguards. That’s clearly what they’re inspired by. So regardless of the technical design, if you look closely, that’s what they’re supposed to be reminiscent of. Bunny: Yeah. But what if he swung them around and it made a crack and then he shoots you?  Oren: Lightsabers are just a weapon that if you think about them for five seconds, you realize just how incredibly silly they are and how nothing about them makes any sense. So I just generally advise against making me think about the mechanics of lightsabers because like for example, I don’t want lightsaber fights where what people do is when they go to clash swords, one of them just turns off their lightsaber for a second and then turns it back on and kills you. That’s boring. I don’t want that kind of fight. A martial artist on YouTube pointed out that if lightsabers actually weighed nothing, the way you would use them is by kind of waving them around like a flashlight, and that also looks very silly. I don’t want that. So we just have to assume that lightsabers have weight somehow. Things like that. Bunny: Like how far can you extend the blade? Oren: Yeah. There are some of the books where the guy’s like, I have a nine foot lightsaber blade. Okay. At this point, why are you not just using a gun? Bunny: I have a lightsaber where if you point it at someone and turn it on and off very quickly a beam shoots out and impales them. Chris: Speaking of “why not gun,” I think we should talk about Omega’s laser bow on Bad Batch.  Oren: Oh my gosh. Chris: Okay, so for anyone who’s not seen Bad Batch, Bad Batch is about a bunch of clones in the Star Wars universe who end up defecting when the Republic turns into the Empire and leaving, and the clones start getting replaced with other recruits. So it’s a bunch of burly guys, and then they have a little girl with them. Her name is Omega, and so she needs to learn to fight. But instead of giving her a blaster, they give her this laser bow and it’s big and bulky and apparently takes strength to pull back, ’cause you know, bows, a conventional longbow, or even a shortbow takes a lot of strength to pull back. And we even establish that she’s having trouble with the amount of strength that it takes to pull this bow back, and that’s affecting her aim. But then instead of being like, okay, Omega, you need to go weightlift until you can have enough strength for this bow, they just have her keep shooting at a target. It’s like, clearly strength training is what she needs. But anyway, it’s big, it’s bulky and all it does is shoot the same kind of blaster fire that just a normal gun would shoot, that you wouldn’t need strength for. Oren: And it doesn’t have a stun setting. It’s just an objectively worse weapon and she’s the worst person on the crew to have it. Bunny: Oh, it is massive! Oren: Yeah. It’s such a weird choice for her and every time she’s in a face-off with someone and she has pulled the string back, the laser string, and is holding it on someone and they’re holding a weapon on her, I just think of how hard it is to hold a bow string like that. Chris: That takes a lot of strength. You can’t just- Oren: I just keep expecting her to lose her grip on it after a while. ‘Cause even a trained archer can only hold that for a short amount of time. Yeah, that bow is so silly. Chris: I understand the impulse to want to give her a signature weapon. It’s also like… pink. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Which opens questions about like, I mean, pink is fine, but did you give the girl a pink bow because she’s a girl? Oren: Yeah. It becomes noticeable in that context. I noticed none of the burly guys have pink laser weapons. Bunny: One has to wonder, we can only guess. Oren: I also feel bad for sci-fi TV show prop designers who are trying to make alien melee weapons. Chris: Oh, like the bat’leth? Oren: Yeah, the bat’leth is the main example. Chris: I mean, it looks cool with all its curvy blades, but yeah, probably wouldn’t actually make any sense to wield a bat’leth. Oren: Yeah, it’s a very awkward weapon to try to use. It’s a big two-handed weapon with no reach and its swing is very awkward. And the way that you swing it, you’re trying to hit people with the spikes on the end, but the spikes are always at an angle to whoever you’re swinging it at. So you’re never getting full power from it. It’s just the weirdest weapon. But there are only so many ways to design a practical melee weapon, okay? And we’ve explored most of them as humans. Chris: Okay, so, pointy object that is designed to hurt another person. There’s only so many optimal designs. It’s not that complicated. It’s actually very simple. You try to get creative, you’re just making it suboptimal. Oren: Or at least the ways it is complicated are very hard to read on screen. You can look at two swords that to most people would look almost identical, but to a trained swordsmith, there’s a lot of differences. Chris: Sure. Absolutely. But to a viewer, so, trying to make it seem cool to somebody who doesn’t know anything about weapons… Bunny: And then there’s apparently, I was remembering there’s that episode of, I think we see these in the original series, but I could be wrong about that. Where Spock gets really horny. Oren: Yeah! Bunny: And has to go back and then he and Kirk fight each other with these big pizza spoon looking things. Chris: What? Oren: Those are spears that have a big half moon blade on them. Bunny: Lirpas? Oren: Yeah. Those are pretty silly looking. I’m trying to remember if that’s based on a real weapon or not. Bunny: If it is, I’m lost. I could not tell you. Oren: Because I mean, there are some odd looking weapons historically speaking, especially because sometimes it’s not clear if a weapon was ever really used or if it was ceremonial. There are a lot of swords that are in museums and stuff that look too big for a person to have ever used, and the two explanations for them are that they were either ceremonial, or that there are secretly giants that the Jews are hiding from us. So I’ll leave it to you, which one of those you think is correct. Speaking of Star Trek, I unironically love Kirk’s bamboo canon in the Gorn fight. I don’t care if it works or not. There’s internet discourse about whether or not you could actually make that work. And I’m on the record as “I do not give a crap.” Chris: I’m not familiar with this cannon. Tell me about the cannon. Oren: So this is the first Gorn episode and the Gorn are rude guys and an alien beams Kirk and a Gorn down to fight. ’cause why not? The Gorn is much bigger and physically more powerful than Kirk. And so Kirk figures out that he has all the things he needs to make gunpowder, and he uses a reinforced bamboo tube as the barrel, and then he uses diamonds as the ammunition.  Bunny: Uhh… Oren: And he builds this thing and he uses it and he shoots the Gorn and then doesn’t kill the Gorn, therefore showing that we have evolved as a species, and it’s great. I love that part.  Fantastic episode. Except for the part where we just let the Gorn get away with murdering a bunch of people for no reason. Bunny: Well, I’ll keep that survival tip in my back pocket in case I ever have bamboo, diamonds and gunpowder. Oren: Mythbusters did an episode where they tried to recreate it and they couldn’t get it to work. I think their conclusion was that the bamboo is just not strong enough and that it would explode. Bunny: Fancy that. Oren: But there are competing claims. There are other people online who claim to have made something similar. So I think it is conceivably possible. As an engineering obstacle, it might be too much for Kirk to realistically overcome, but wooden cannons are not unheard of in history. They have happened. They’re just- obviously metal is better. I have never tried it. I just know that there’s discourse about whether or not this would actually work. Bunny: So, I know we’re running out of time here, but I wanna mention one more, and I’m curious if either of you have heard of it. I think it’s the Panjandrum. Chris: A drum. Bunny: So it’s basically a steel drum full of explosives – This was in World War II – put between two big wheels, giant wagon wheels that were propelled by rockets. Rockets around the rim of these wheels. Oren: Yeah, why not? It seems like a fun day at the beach. Bunny: Yeah. And then you light the rockets and set the thing going and it just rolls through whatever barrier you put in front of it. For some reason it was never used, which is sad. Oren: There are a lot of very odd weapons that you can find in World War I and II. Chris: So it was supposed to basically carry explosives into something. Bunny: Yeah. The ultimate goal is to bust down big defenses like concrete walls and fortresses, and it could get up to 60 miles per hour with these rockets on it. Chris: So if you have a flat, no man’s land, whatever, that you don’t want a person to go on. You set this thing rolling into the wall with a bunch of explosives. And the idea is that it hits the wall and then explodes. Bunny: Yeah. And like crashes through it. And it’s to get a tank sized hole in it, so then you can get your tank through it. And the best way to do that is a rolling ball of explosive death. Oren: Well, maybe not the best way. Bunny: [laughing] No. Shut up Oren! Oren: As it turns out… Bunny: Shush! Oren: Alright. With that we will, I think, call this weird episode to a close. Bunny: Closing it with a bang. Oren: Ah! Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons who help make sure we can afford to research all of these bizarre weapons, which, you know, is a very important process. I think you’ll all agree.  First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Finally, there’s Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. We will talk to you next week. [Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

Tension comes from problems that the characters have to solve, and if a character is important, they should contribute to solving the problem in question. But how will they contribute, exactly? This question can be difficult to answer, especially if you have a bunch of characters with different power levels on team good. Fortunately, we’ve got a few suggestions for you! Show Notes Animal Companions  Avatar Beach Episode  Echo  Tech The Winchester Brothers  Toph  The Buffy Gang  The Fellowship  Cersei  Margaery  Holly Munro Counselor Troi  Temeraire  The Northman  Ops  First Officers  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] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: …Oren… Chris: …and… Bunny: …Bunny. Chris: Okay, quick. We all need to make sure we are contributing to this podcast, or the post author might decide we’re superfluous and erase our existence.  Bunny: Oh, no! Chris: Oren, what’s your contribution?  Oren: I have one joke that I make all the time, and it’s the same joke, and it was really funny the first time, so it’ll probably be funny the next 500 times. Chris: I see nothing wrong with this. Bunny? Bunny: I’m the pretty lady who walks around and shows you the car you can win on the game show. Chris: Ohh, very good. Oren: That is very useful. Chris: So, for me, is providing the intro enough? Am I done now?  Oren: You served a purpose early in the story, so that should work for the rest of it, right? You can just hang around for the rest of the story and not worry about anything. Chris: Yeah. Or just, like, engage in active listening, just to remind people that I am still here. I haven’t disappeared, I swear. But I won’t actually provide any information, or offer any tips. Bunny: We could just imagine you leaning forward and nodding intently. [Oren laughs] Chris: Yeah, with the same body language every time, because we’ve got to change it up. Bunny: It’s like when you’re playing a video game and the animation begins to loop, but it’s active, don’t worry. Oren: Oh, it’s a podcast idle animation? [general laughter] Bunny: Yeah. It comes with a track that goes, “Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah.”  Chris: [laughing] This time, we’re talking about how to give protagonists a way to contribute. Basically, the reason why is because you need every character to make a difference. So, from a plot perspective, you should not be able to cut a character out and have nothing change, right? That’s bad. They’re just not gonna feel like they belong there. They’re going to feel extra and useless. And then, also, contributing helps make your secondary protagonist in particular more likable. When they help the main character, they really do come across better. Whereas if you have a side character that is constantly creating trouble for the main character, maybe they’re just always getting into trouble and the main character always has to bail them out, and they’re never actually helping anything, they get really annoying. Oren: Why would you personally attack animal companions everywhere, Chris? [laughter] Bunny: Like the lady showing the cars, they can just be cute, right? Chris: If they’re cute, and they’re not contributing, but they’re also not hindering…. but animal companions, you also don’t really have to develop them or invest in them that much, like they’re not there. [laughing] Which is a low…I think we can usually do better than that, but I’ve seen worse. The other nice thing about getting your protagonist to contribute is that it just helps distribute the candy among Team Good, or Team Evil–in some cases, stories, generally not narrated stories, film stories, will have a Team Evil. I’m thinking about like the beach episode, which I know Oren hates the beach episode of Avatar, the Last Airbender. Oren: I don’t love it. It’s not my favorite. [Oren and Chris laugh] Bunny: Refresh my memory? Chris: So this is when we have an episode where Zuko and Azula…they all hang out on the beach. Bunny: They brood. Chris: Yeah. In some situations, if you have a Team Evil with charismatic characters, it may be helpful to also make sure they’re all contributing, just because anybody who does not contribute, they feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick. They feel like they’re not being treated as well by the story, they’re getting more spinach, that kind of thing. And yeah, it can create resentment against the characters who are doing all the contributions, and make people sympathize with a character that never gets to contribute, or, again, make somebody annoyed with the person who doesn’t contribute, because they’re weighing everybody down and never helping. Oren: If you introduce a team of characters, different people in the audience are gonna like different members of the team. And if those team members just become useless, then it sucks to watch, or read. This is a special topic to me, because it was one of the first times when I was a kid when I, like, distinctly noticed and identified a problem that was making me enjoy a story less. Because I used to watch a lot of Cartoon Network anime when I was a kid, and I always noticed that Dragon Ball Z introduced this big group of characters, and then over the course of the show, a bunch of them just stopped mattering. But they were still there, like they never left. They just hung around and didn’t do anything, and I hated it, so much. Because naturally every character I picked as my favorite would end up being one that became useless. Bunny: And the rest is history… Oren: I could not catch a break. I was so upset. Okay, fine. This new guy, he’s got a sword and he’s also a Saiyin, so he’s gotta stay important for the whole show, right? No, he doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not Goku. Oh God, please stop. I hate you all. Bunny: And thus, a critic was born. [Oren laughs] Chris: It also helps to distinguish between the characters and remember the characters. I’m thinking of The Bad Batch, which is a Star Wars cartoon, where in the beginning, the character Echo just doesn’t do anything.  And the problem is that there’s a repetitive skillset between him and Tech. They’re both like tech people. And so it’s clear that the writers just don’t know how to help give him contributions. And so he just fades into the background like he’s not there. And he’s much less memorable, as a result. And we don’t really get to know him. We don’t remember what his personality is like, because we don’t ever hear him talking as much, and that kind of thing. How a character contributes can definitely help distinguish them in the group. Oren: And–spoilers for the second season of Bad Batch–but that’s the reason why he leaves for a while, and then they kill Tech at the end of the season.  Because now, when Echo’s not around, we don’t have to deal with this problem of he and Tech competing for the same content, because he’s off doing something else. And then Tech is the obvious choice to die, because it’s tragic, we like him, but we also have a replacement ready. We still have a tech character, someone who does tech problems. So when Tech dies, the team doesn’t lose anything that we need to make the story work, which is what would happen if we lost any of the other characters. Bunny: Yeah, except for he was the only one who had just a hint of romance. I’m like, why… Oren: I’m not saying I liked his death… Bunny: …and why did you bait me with a romance? And then… [laughing] Oren: I’m just saying that’s the reason they picked him to die, because they had a replacement ready. [laughing] Bunny: Is there any story that you think didn’t have enough team members? Oren: Didn’t have enough team members? Hmm. Bunny: Yeah. There’s probably a lot of stories where you’re like, “that team member was unnecessary,” but was there one where you felt they were lacking? Oren: Supernatural. Bunny: [laughing] Oren: Supernatural, it definitely became noticeable after a while that they would recruit allies, and then those allies would just leave, and sometimes they would kill them off, and then sometimes they wouldn’t. And it just got to feel strange, after a while? It just, it seems like they should know more people by now. Chris: Yeah. I do think that–Supernatural had like 15 seasons, right? And so we’ve got these two brothers, and I think the problem is that after a while, they just end up rehashing their issues, or they become such different people in order to keep their interactions fresh. It’s like, how much interpersonal drama can you do with just two people over 15 seasons, you know? [laughing] Oren: I watched a mere seven seasons, and… Bunny: [dramatic outraged voice] Fake fan! Oren: You could already see they were at a point where they were just switching off between Sam and Dean of which one would have the arc of going too far this season. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Who is it? Is Sam going too far this season, or is it Dean who’s going too far this season? Because they’re always doing that arc. Chris: So potentially if you had, like, a novel series, and you liked a lot of interpersonal stuff, two characters might not be enough, and you would probably have room to bring in other skills, another person, that kind of thing. If you have one person, a story could definitely work with one person, like The Martian, for instance. But sometimes the second person is really helpful in creating some contrast, making some foils of each other, and bringing somebody to life. Yeah, there are instances, but it’s much more likely to go towards the other end.  Oren: There are a few stories that I can think of where the team doesn’t really feel complete until they add a certain character. But I’m not sure that’s an issue of there not being enough of them. Like with Avatar, honestly, watching the first season of Avatar now is a little bit of a chore, because Toph’s not there, and I love Toph so much that she really completes the group. So having her not there feels like something is missing. Chris: But that might be because–you might not have noticed the first time you watched. Oren: If Toph had never been there, or if I had never gotten to the second season, I doubt I would’ve felt like there weren’t enough characters in Avatar. Bunny: I feel like bringing up Toph also raises an important thing with characters, which is that they need to not just contribute different things, but also feel like different people. Which should go without saying, but Toph is memorable, not only because she’s the earthbending master, but she’s got, like, an attitude, and she’s got a different appearance, which, some teams don’t manage that. Oren: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a character who overlaps with another character, you have to really have a lot of that to go around. If you’re gonna have multiple fighters on your team, you need to have a lot of fighting. Chris: I think a really good example of that is actually how many information gathering characters you have in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because, you wouldn’t think that would be important, but anytime you have a monster of the week episode, usually part of that is figuring out, “Okay, what is this new monster we just encountered? How do we defeat that monster?” And so there is research, or information gathering, that has to basically be done for most episodes. And so a bunch, a whole bunch of the characters, they just do it in different ways, and that makes them more distinctive. Like, Giles looks at books. Whereas Buffy, she also gathers information, but she does it by scouting, and therefore going directly into danger, because she’s also a fighting character. Spike networks, right? He knows all the demons… Bunny: …he has on LinkedIn. [Oren laughs] Chris: So he talks to them, and then, some people have psychic powers, science, there’s a whole bunch of different ways, but it’s all about finding clues and information. And because the show has so much of that, they have room for a whole bunch of characters that do that, in different ways.  Whereas, if you have a story that’s lots of fights and doesn’t have much conversation, you might only have room for one social character. Oren: Yeah. And then when it comes to, like, aesthetic, or personality, or attitude, I don’t think you really want characters that double up on that unless you’re specifically trying to contrast them. If you have two goths on the team, you would probably wanna show what makes them different kinds of goths, as opposed to just having them both be goths, because then it would feel like they’re cramping each other’s style.  Bunny: Yeah, and it also–style, attitude, appearance, those sorts of things can’t be the only thing making them different. Otherwise you’ve just got, like, “fighter, but this one’s wearing a different hat”. Chris: Going back to Bad Batch, let’s say we have Tech and Echo. If they had lots of conflicts involving technology, and then they, for instance, made Tech so that he, like, makes things or repairs things, and Echo does all of the hacking, does all the software, and Tech does all the hardware, or something, that could have worked. And I think the issue was that the show didn’t have enough need of a technology character to fill two roles. Bunny: Yeah, subspecialties help. Oren: And it becomes easier with similar roles, again, if you are putting them into some kind of contrasting or competitive situation. Like in Lord of the Rings, Aragorn and Boromir work decently because even though they have very similar roles and contributions to give, they are somewhat antagonistic towards each other. Boromir, at least, is not super into Aragorn until the end, spoilers. And Gimli and Legolas don’t really become super prominent until the second book when they start, like, getting into competitions to see who can kill the most Orcs, right? Like in the first book, they’re both just kind of there. They’re hanging around, they’ll be there eventually.  Chris: If you need more things for characters to do, oftentimes the kind of support roles are easy to overlook, but you can make them relevant. So that includes healing, repairing people’s equipment, getting people fed, or logistics things, like mapping the area, being a guide. All those kinds of things that support all of the other characters in a team.  Bunny: Think about making an RPG party. You’ve got the sneaky one, you’ve got the fighty one, you’ve got the magic one. Chris: Yeah. Don’t forget the social one. In some stories, social is like the equivalent of fighting. Where there are lots of social conflicts, and actually, Game of Thrones, for all its fights, it’s surprisingly like this, right? There are tons of social conflicts in Game of Thrones, and lots of different social characters who engage in social conflicts in different ways. So Cersei is always, like, leveraging her power against other people, where Margaery is always using charm to get people on her side. Oren: Yeah, so that’s what I call a shared task type situation, where there is a thing that your characters engage in so often that you can have multiple characters who do that thing and not have them step on each other. So in Game of Thrones, you can easily have multiple political characters. Now, of course, in Game of Thrones, they’re often on different sides. But even if some of them are on the same side, there is so much political drama in Game of Thrones that you can have multiple characters on the same team doing that, and it’s not so much of a problem. With support characters, the two things to look out for are, one, make sure to show that their support actually matters, and show how and why it does. Because in theory, the character Holly in Lockwood & Co. is a support character, but her support doesn’t matter. Like the story just doesn’t know how to show why it matters. And so she’s just around for most of the story. Chris: I do think that one of the things to think about that, is, do you need the character to stay in one place, or move, go into danger, right? Because Lockwood & Co. is very much a story that really focuses on the characters going into danger. And it does have scenes where they’re at their, like, home base, but a lot of the important stuff actually happens at danger. And so, the problem with Holly just doing her support stuff is it leaves her at home base, and she doesn’t travel with them for all of those dangerous scenes. So sometimes it’s something that you need to think about. Okay, if Holly’s providing support, how does she provide it? Is there a kind of essential support she needs to provide while they are out at a haunted house getting rid of some ghosts that might fit the urgency of the situation? Maybe some of the support keeps people safe in those emergency situations, and she has a reason to be there. And then you can see how she helps in an emergency, and that makes a difference. Oren: And you also wanna make sure you don’t add a support character when you’re planning to do a bunch of stories that depend on the support not working. And I’m not only talking about Troi from The Next Generation, but I am definitely talking about Troi from The Next Generation. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Because so many Next Generation plots depend on protagonists having, like, serious mental health problems that they don’t get any support for. Which is weird, that’s not how we think of The Next Generation, but there are a surprising number of plots where that’s the case. And so as a result, Troi cannot help them, because if she helped them, then their problem would be resolved, and then we wouldn’t have a plot anymore. Chris: I can think of at least two episodes where Troi literally goes to Captain Picard and tells Picard that he has to do it, instead of her. This person needs, you know, this boy from this super patriarchal planet needs, like, a man to tell him, give him directions. He won’t listen to me. Or, I think there was another one with Data. Data won’t admit that he’s having emotional problems because he doesn’t have emotions, but he is, and he needs you to do it, Picard, or something. [laughing] And it’s just, it’s sad, because it’s like, why don’t we let Troi do her job? But you wouldn’t have an interesting variety of internal conflicts, if Troi always fixed it by just sitting down and doing her job. Oren: Yeah. And when they really want someone to talk to a more nurturing support character in TNG, they almost always use Guinan. And, like, I get it. I like Whoopi Goldberg, too. So I’m not even mad that they wanna use Guinan for that role, but, like, you have a main character whose job this is…why. [laughter] You wanna be careful with that one. [Oren laughs] Chris: If you do have a big team, and okay, sometimes this happens, where, you’ve done the thing, you’ve added too many characters, right? And now you’re like in book two [laughter] and it’s hard to get rid of them, and you’re trying to figure out how to make the best of it. In general, we try to keep characters together, but for really big, important conflicts, like big fights or battles, or something like that, splitting characters up does really help. I’ll give them a task, something like, one group distracts people–the enemy–while the other one attacks something or steals something. One group sneaks in somewhere, unlocks it to let the others in. One group, maybe, if they’re doing a con, dresses up as security, while the other ones act like they’re thieves, that kind of thing. So, if you have lots of people, and you have to find a way for them all to contribute during big conflicts, it can be helpful to think of a strategy that requires more than one role that’s happening simultaneously, and then split them into smaller groups. And then once they’re in the smaller groups, you may need to think about, okay, they’re sneaking in somewhere. Let’s give it a lock that has to be picked, for our lock picking character, and then let’s give us a guard that we have to talk our way past for the social character, to split it into multiple stages, or something like that. Oren: What you have to do then, is you have to plan a plot that is robust enough to require a bunch of people. Bunny: A plot? I don’t know… Oren: Yeah, you have to bring plot into your characters, and you’ve got characters in my plot. Oh no! Bunny: What is it driven by though? [everyone laughing] Chris: Well, that’s how you make a character-driven story, you just add more characters! [laughter] Oren: Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left! But like the Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of characters, and there’s a funny thing where they graduate the extras on the dragon crew to named main character status over time, so you end up with more and more of them. And it does a pretty good job, because that’s like an epic war story, so there’s a lot that needs to be done. A story that doesn’t do as well is Shadowshaper, which, I like Shadowshaper, it’s good, but it does have a problem where the main conflict is that the protagonist needs to beat an evil wizard in a magic fight. And there just isn’t really much for the other characters to do, but there are a lot of other characters. Chris: Yeah, I’ve sometimes seen these stories where it feels like what the writer really wants to do–I think in that case of Shadowshaper, it felt like the author really wanted to highlight the value of the community, which involves bringing in lots of characters, but then he didn’t have enough for all of those characters to do. And so they just… Oren: You need a community action! What does it take a community to solve? Right? That’s the question you need to be asking yourself at that point. Bunny: Raising a child. [Oren laughs] Chris: Another tricky situation is if you have a super humble character in a group of heroes. Which sometimes we like those dynamics, and this is like the Frodo character, who is, “Oh, I’ve fallen in with all of these great heroes, but I’m just a normal farm boy.” [laughing] Whatever you have. How do you let that character, especially if this character is your main character, how do you give that person something to do? I have a post for this, but obviously, Lord the Rings does it by giving Frodo a special, basically magical role, where Frodo is the best person to carry this ring. Other people can’t seem to handle it, so Frodo does it.  So you can do something like that. Any magical ability that is special really helps. Of course, that makes your character less humble, so you may not want that. Those support tasks, again, we were talking about the fact that you do have to find ways that they matter. But I think of it this way, one, let’s say your support character is cooking for people. When might cooking really be crucial? Maybe in situations where everybody gets poisoned. Or maybe in situations where it’s actually that food is starting to get scarce, and you have to get creative. Or if they’re cleaning, maybe they find something that was lost, or repair something that everybody assumed couldn’t be repaired, or what have you. So those support tasks, they’re a little bit trickier to work with, but you can make them work, and it still leaves your character feeling humble, even if they make a big difference. And then you can also–again, this is ad hoc–what you really want the most is a skill that can reliably give them a way to contribute, for every character, ongoing. So if you have to depend on how you arrange the specific events in the plot to make them matter, that’s gonna be really hard because yeah, you can do it one or two times. It’s gonna get exhausting and logistically impossible if you rely on it all the time, but for a couple times, you could have, you know, nobody else is there, right? Your humble character has gone off by themself to go fetch some water. They run into an antagonist, for instance. That kind of thing. It’s just, you can’t rely on that all the time, and which is why it’s really important to give characters the right skillset so that you have a reliable way of letting them contribute. Oren: Yeah, and that’s why so many humble characters have an arc where they, like, get more skilled, or learn how to use their powers, or something. Chris: Right. That’s also just good wish fulfillment. Oren: It is. [laughter] You can also use a social connection as a way to make a character prominent when they otherwise wouldn’t be. This is like a common one, is that the character inherits something. Bunny: Ah, a nepotism character. Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Because now they’re responsible for it, whether they wanted it or not. “Congratulations, you are the king.” “Well, I don’t know how to be king.” “Well, deal with it,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve inherited this spooky ghost property,” or something. Now, the trick with that one is to not then surround them with friends who know how to handle the situation. Which is the thing I see authors do sometimes where they’re like, I know, I’ll make my main character a fish outta water who inherited like an evil spy business. And then I’ll give them like a bunch of spy friends who will just tell them what to do. Bunny: Yeah. The main character has to be in that position. Even if they’re a fish out of water for story purposes, they need to seem like they should be there. Oren: And if you have them, if the more experienced characters are people they can’t trust, then you can solve that problem, right? It’s just, if you give them like a random connection that makes them important, but then have a much more capable character who they can rely on, then they never have to do anything for themselves. Chris: Strategizing is probably one of the skills that is most associated with your main character. Not always. There are some exceptions, like in Avatar, the Last Airbender, Aang isn’t really the strategist, but he’s important because he’s the Avatar, and so everybody trusts him, and puts a responsibility on him anyway, and that frees up Sokka to do the strategizing. But in most stories, your main character is like the idea person. And what really makes a difference is them coming up with plans and making decisions, and that can easily go away if you surround them with characters who are just a lot more experienced. It becomes harder to be, like, okay, how come my main character can come up with a good idea or a solution for this? Oren: Yeah, that was the problem with The Northman, where he was supposed to team up with this lady, and she was supposed to use brains, and he was supposed to use brawn, but he was also the brains, ’cause he’s the main character, and the main character is usually the one coming up with the ideas. So she just was also in the movie. Chris: That was super irritating. I think probably what they should have done in that situation is had her come up with plans, him start to follow the plan, and then something goes wrong. And then he has to do the improvising, when something goes wrong. Oren: Yeah, that…I think that would’ve been better than what they did. [Oren and then Chris laugh] You can also make this easier for yourself if you create a setting that has prescribed niches that give characters specific skills that you know are gonna be important because that’s how you’re setting up the story. This is your basic Star Trek scenario, where everyone’s got a job, and because those jobs are all on the ship, they matter, presumably. You just need to know, make sure you know what those jobs are.  Like, no one actually knows what Ops does in Star Trek. It’s just the other guy, who isn’t steering the ship. Bunny: They op, come on. Oren: Yeah, they op. [Chris laughs] The only ops character who ever does anything is Data, because he’s also an android, and so he’s super overpowered. But if you look at the other Star Trek shows, the ops character is just hanging out. And sometimes he has a Russian accent, so that’s fun, I guess. [Bunny laughs softly] Chris: At the same time, we still need, if they’re part of the main cast, when there’s an actual something that goes wrong in the Enterprise–they also still need to be involved in that. It doesn’t help if they, for instance, have a routine thing they do on the ship, like they’re the janitor, and there was no role for the janitor to play when something goes wrong. You can be vague what the ops person does. I think the ops person is just like whatever miscellaneous thing that we could use somebody for. But we have a way, you know, there’s a pilot, for instance, and there’s a way in many of the conflicts where there’s some tricky piloting somebody has to do, because they’re sneaking a shuttle onto a planet, or what have you. And you have the chief engineer, and there’s again, in a lot of conflicts, there’s damage to the ship, in which case the chief engineer becomes really important. And having…the first officer one is probably the trickiest one to make work. It only works if they, again, have an away mission. So they have one person commanding the ship, and one commanding the away mission. The problem was with TNG, they always wanted Picard, after a while, to be in the middle of the action, and so Riker didn’t end up going onto as many away missions as he should have. Oren: Yeah, that’s why most of the Star Trek shows give the first officer another job. Because otherwise, they’re just the emergency backup captain, and that’s just not much to hang your hat on. And Riker absolutely has that problem. There are a lot of episodes where Riker just has nothing to do because Picard is there. And, I mean, Chakotay has it so much worse in Voyager. Because he’s got nothing, and Janeway does all the captain-y stuff, and there’s nothing for Chakotay to do. But if you look at the original series, Spock is also the science officer, in Deep Space Nine, Kira is also the Bajoran officer, so she does all the Bajoran politics stuff. And in Enterprise, as much as I hate to praise Enterprise, T’Pol is the science officer again, so you don’t have to worry about that. Although Enterprise then has it so they give us a specific cool pilot guy who has been in space before, and has all this experience, and then they have Archer do all the piloting stuff. Chris: They basically take all the piloting away from their actual pilot so that they can make their asshole captain do more cool things. Instead of their, like, one Black character. Oren: Yeah, that was bad. I did not like that. Chris: It was really bad. Oren: All right, so with that sufficiently big “oof”, I think it is time to call this episode to a close.  Chris: If you feel we contributed to the character roles in your story, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants Oren: Perhaps we at least contributed an “oof”.  [general laughter] Before we go, I want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. And it should go without saying, that all of these people contribute to Mythcreants being here to annoy you in podcast form. [laughter] So we will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself,” by Jonathan Coulton.

In this intriguing discussion, iconic characters Sauron and Saruman from Tolkien's works, Tyrion Lannister from George R.R. Martin's realm, and Jack Torrance from Stephen King's horror dive into the art of multiple viewpoints in storytelling. They debate the merits of varied perspectives, especially in political dramas, highlighting how these angles can deepen character relationships. The conversation also touches on the balance of narrative cohesion and the risks of overusing cliffhangers, making for a rich exploration of narrative techniques.

Daniel Kish, an expert in echolocation, shares his insights on enhancing character senses in storytelling. He explores how unique sensory abilities like echolocation add depth to narratives, discussing everything from superheroes to animals. The conversation delves into the challenges of portraying these senses authentically, including humorous and complex narrative implications. Kish emphasizes the value of diverse sensory experiences, showcasing how they can transform character interactions and storytelling dynamics. And of course, there are plenty of amusing cat references!

Everyone knows that stories should have well developed characters, but what does that mean? Should you be racing to give your characters as many traits as possible? Does it matter at all what those traits are? The truth is a little more specific than some advice may have led you to believe, and that’s what we’re talking about this week. We discuss how character development works, which characters need it, and why it’s important to remember that fictional heroes aren’t real. Show Notes Game of Thrones Ending  Murderbot  Friendship Arcs  Legends and Lattes  Aang vs Ozai Fight  Character Arcs  Eldest  Meta Mysteries  Backstory Anthony Lockwood Kaz Brekker   Wade Watts Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is: Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And: Oren: Oren. Chris: Bad news folks. We don’t feel real enough. We have to fix that. Okay, so first we each need a memorable trait, so pick one. Bunny: I have brown hair. Chris: Very memorable. Oren, what’s your memorable trait? Oren: My memorable trait is I’ve decided is that I’m now gonna be really into crypto.  Bunny: Oh no. I think we’re getting too three dimensional here. Oren: Look, you guys are never gonna be able to forget the blockchain, okay, because I’m gonna bring it up in every conversation. Chris: Yeah. My memorable trait will be that I complain a lot. I’m gonna first start by complaining about your crypto obsession.  Oren: You can’t silence me, Chris. This is who I am. I’m just a real true person. Chris: That’s too true. It’s too real. And now we’re a little bit flat caricature, so we need more traits, because Bunny, you’re entirely defined by having brown hair. Bunny: Damn. Oh well. Somehow I need another trait. Chris: Or how about a deep motivation? What do we really want during this episode? What overriding desire is driving our actions? Bunny: I could use a drink. Chris: And this episode is your way of getting a drink. Bunny: Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise. Chris: Okay. Very good. Oren: Okay. My motivation is that I want to convince everyone that I would totally vote for a progressive candidate, just none of the ones who are actually running.  Bunny: Oh, that’s elaborate. Oren: That’s, look, I just feel like that fits with my crypto obsession. I’m not racist, but… Chris: Oh no. Bunny: Oh, you’re becoming more rounded by the minute. Chris: Yeah, maybe I have layers because my complaining is a way to get attention. And that’s why I’m a podcast host. Bunny: Oh, that’s right. You’ve got a tragic backstory now. Chris: Yeah. I just want people to notice me, okay. And if I complain about your terrible crypto obsession and your brown hair – which is too brown, okay. Bunny: Oh no! Don’t come after my hair like that. Chris: Kids these days, the Gen Z, their hair is too brown. Have you noticed all the Gen Z kids have brown hair? Oren: It’s so brown. Bunny: Well, you damn millennials and your crypto. Oren: There’s an NFT for that. I actually already own your brown hair because I bought an NFT of it, but that’s how crypto works. Bunny: Oh no. I guess I have to dye my hair now. Oren: Yeah, you better. Otherwise you’re gonna have to pay me 1 million Doge fan coins; that’s probably a real currency by now. Bunny: I don’t even have a single Doge fan coin. What am I gonna do? Chris: Alright, I think we’re off to a good start. Now I’m just gonna hand you 10 pages of random questions like what your middle name and favorite food is, and then we will be good. We’ll be totally developed. Bunny: Sushi, easy. That’s my middle name and my favorite food. Oren: Man, that’s efficient. Bunny: Brown hair wants to drink sushi. In every scene. Oren: I think we’ve got real winners on our hands here, Chris. I think we’ve solved it. I don’t know what it was, but we definitely solved it. Bunny: Was there a problem? I don’t know, but it’s fixed now. Chris: We’re very real now. Very real. So, this time we’re talking about character development, and I guess the first question is, what is it? It’s for the most part just designing a character or making stuff up about a character, but it’s really vague, and the implication comes with that your end goal is to create a quote-unquote “strong character,” which is also an extremely vague term, and it all just boils down to, like, design your character real hard, so they are a good character. That’s what the rhetoric – basically doesn’t have more to it than that. Oren: Yeah, my official stance is that character should be good. Make your character a good character, not a bad character. I want quality of character to be high, please. Bunny: Look, this is the hot takes people want out of Mythcreants.  Chris: So, not really helpful. I blame Romanticism because of course I blame Romanticism, but for everything. Oren: That’s your real defining trait. Bunny: So cliché, Chris blaming Romanticism. Chris: So I guess the question is, is a real seeming character what we should be aiming for? To some extent. Obviously I don’t want a character to walk in and be completely unbelievable. Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like realism is a bit misleading. Like, we want to believe in them as a character. You don’t want them to necessarily be like a real person, because they’re your character and they’re going on an adventure for a reason. Like, why is it them on this adventure? Oren: Yeah. It depends on what you mean by real. If I wanted to be hip and cool, I would say you want a believable character. I would say you want a character who seems real, like, don’t get me wrong, if your character feels fake, people will notice that. If your character does things that just don’t seem to fit with who they have been established to be, then people will react and they’ll say, this character doesn’t feel real, or this character feels like a cartoon or something. So I think that is a real thing, like your character should feel real, but what it means is very context sensitive. Chris: Yeah. I think for the most part, the realness of characters is an illusion, just like the realness of dialogue is an illusion. We want our dialogue to seem natural sounding. We don’t actually want it to be real. I think characters are the same way. You want them to not be so fake that they interrupt the experience, but real people are mostly kind of dull. Bunny: That’s true. This is why I struggle with creative nonfiction. Chris: I think about it, we can’t remember real people’s names very often, but we want our readers to remember character names and remember our characters. Bunny: I’ve started reading Parable of the Sower, and there are so many characters. I can’t keep them straight. I can’t keep the people in my class’s name straight. Chris: Yeah, and we want our characters to be entertaining at some level: to be interesting, or fascinating, and have something that stands apart. And all of those things are not typically present with the average person we happen to meet. But that – again, how real a character seems is one of those things that’s also often mentioned in the same conversations that character development and quote-unquote “strong characters” are mentioned. Oren: Yeah, and it’s not even so much that real people are dull. It’s that, at least in my mind, they are unlikely to demonstrate things that are interesting in a fictional context most of the time. You could hang out with a person and they could very well have a lot of interesting things about them, but very often you won’t ever find out those things. And for a fictional story, it’s not just that they have to have interesting things about them, they have to have interesting things about them that feel like part of the story. Because you can have a really interesting backstory about how your character grew up in a protest camp and was part of an environmental movement. That could be interesting. But if the story is about, I don’t know, building Lego bricks in a tournament, how is that relevant? That just feels like some random side thing you brought up. Chris: I do think that the conventional character advice treats characters like they exist outside of the story. Like they’re completely independent of the story and like they’re developing on their own with no consideration of what their role is. And I’ve even seen plotting advice that makes no distinction between protagonists and antagonists, which is very bad. And seeing people use that plotting advice, I’m like, no, you don’t do that with antagonists, that’s for protagonists. But if you don’t make any distinction, then they’re all just characters, because we’re thinking of characters as people who exist outside the story, which again plays into the whole like real, you gotta make somebody seem real, like a real person that you could just grab if they from the street when they feel like they step outside the story and start talking to you. Bunny: I do think it can help to consider who they are outside of the adventure. Usually that comes in when they’re just about to start the adventure, and then they of course change over the course of the adventure. I think that can be helpful, but they are also in a story and their role needs to reflect that. Chris: Yeah. And I think that’s why at Mythcreants, we spend so much time discussing what makes a character work in their role. Because that is largely what feels like it’s missing elsewhere, and that is a huge factor in whether they are successful. Again, conventional characater development is, there are some things right that are important for any character, and so we can talk about that too. But that kind of optimization for the role is a piece that is often missing.  Oren: Here’s the thing. If you come at this purely from the angle of I’m just gonna make a set of people and then I’m gonna put them in a room and see what happens, which is a way I have seen advocated of writing a story, and you’re not willing to like make any changes to these characters to facilitate a story, one of two things is almost certainly going to happen. You’re either going to not have a story because you didn’t just magically, by extreme chance, stumble onto a connection of characters that would make a dramatically satisfying story. Or, you are going to have to suddenly make some of the characters act differently to how you’ve established them to get a satisfying ending, and neither of those are gonna go over well. People don’t like it when you do either of those things. The most obvious example of the latter recently was Game of Thrones, season eight, where suddenly Daenerys had to act like a completely different person to get the ending that the writers wanted. And we don’t see the first one that often because that almost never makes it to publication. I just threw some characters into a room and they just hung out. At least not in spec fic. Not in the kind of books we tend to talk about on myth grants. Chris: So should we talk about what should we do when we’re developing a character? What things are we trying to do with our characters? What properties or traits should they have? Oren: I think you should just draw random traits out of a bucket, and then that character just has the trait now, and just keep doing that. Because more traits is better. Chris: They’ll be multidimensional. Each new trait you pull out is a dimension, and you want a hundred dimensions. Bunny: So they have brown hair and they complain. Oren: Yeah. That’s good. And just keep adding. Chris: And they talk about cryptocurrency. I think that one thing that good characters tend to have is looking ahead to character arcs. Good characters tend to have character arcs. Yes. But then that means that when the character’s going into the story, when you’re first sitting up the character, they need to have something to overcome, like a misconception or a flaw. Learning to trust, for example, is one that a lot of action heroes have, where you’ve got the gritty veteran who needs to learn to trust the newbie, or something like that. Murderbot, also; learning to trust the humans. Pacifism is another one that I’ve seen, like trying to learn nonviolent solutions. Legends and Lattes: the whole center theme is about this putting away the sword and all, and she gets tempted now and then to use it to solve problems. And then Avatar: the Last Airbender tried to do that, but it couldn’t really commit to it because the heroes had already beat a bunch of people up over the course of three seasons. Oren: Yeah. But now suddenly fighting a guy means we have to kill him. Suddenly.  Chris: So I would think of this as an internal problem the character has, then make it part of a character arc. Usually either they are unhappy in some way, or discontented, or they’re making some kind of misjudgments where even if they don’t know there’s a problem, the audience is looking at them and being like, this doesn’t look good. That’s definitely something that I’ve seen for important protagonists. For minor characters, that’s a lot of investment because anytime you build an arc, you have to follow through. And so you can’t give a character arc to all of your characters, but if you try to do a viewpoint character, especially your main character who has a viewpoint, and you try to give that person emotional struggles or just a bunch of negative feelings, and you do not think through a character arc for them, oftentimes just… call it spaghetti, like spaghetti emotions, where we just have strands of possible arcs everywhere and it feels like a mess. It feels very inconsistent. Suddenly the character’s angsting about one thing and then another thing, and they don’t seem to have consistent issues from one scene to the next. Bunny: Their problem can’t just be angst. Chris: Generally angsting about whatever happens to be in the scene at that time. Probably my favorite is from Eldest, the sequel to Eragon, where Eragon seems like a nihilist in one paragraph, and then he changes from paragraph to paragraph what his emotional issues are. Oren: He just has a lot of facets, Chris. He has so many. Chris: For anybody, if you wanna give a character deep driving emotions, a character arc provides structure. It’s just, we don’t necessarily have that much time for every character in the story. Oren: Yeah. What I have seen is that audiences really like getting to know a character. They like to feel at the end of the story as if they know the character better than when they started. And often that means an arc. Not necessarily a hundred percent of the time, but arcs are very helpful just because they also have some attachment and drama while you’re learning things, and it’s more likely that they will feel relevant to the story and not just random pieces of information. They’re especially useful for viewpoint characters because with viewpoint characters, unless you’re doing meta mysteries, which you shouldn’t, we’ve covered this. Stop doing it. Then you can’t do the thing where you just find out more random things about them, because in most cases, those are things you should probably already have known. Whereas with a non-viewpoint character, you might be surprised to find out that the jerk rival takes care of their siblings at home because their parents aren’t around. That might be part of an arc, but it might not necessarily be; but that’s hard to do with the protagonist. Chris: With a protagonist, you can still get to know them better, but they have to be like embellishing details, right? A meta mystery happens when there’s something that would naturally come up. And the only reason it hasn’t come up is because the storyteller has decided to arbitrarily keep it a secret, giving the audience the feeling that there is something they don’t know or something missing, or just they don’t understand where the character’s coming from. Emotions are coming off as flat, and just missing. That kind of thing. Certainly if it’s something that’s more of an embellishing detail that wouldn’t have naturally come up and it’s not important to the story, sometimes those details are fun, right? A character really hates mushrooms. Bunny: Oh no. They’ve gotta learn to overcome that. Nobody should hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are so good. That’s a character flaw.  Chris: …What have you. So you can add some of those things. But yeah, for non-viewpoint character, giving ’em a little bit more complexity, I think gives you more to learn. Giving them layers. Sorry, whenever we talk about a character being deep, or layers, it just, there’s just so much… I can’t take those words seriously anymore. Oren: They get used for, I would argue, less than admirable purposes. You get the people who are like, the character arc is the true soul of the novel, and they tend to talk about that sort of thing. I will say that absent those perhaps ulterior motives, having a character with more than one side to them, if you see that character a lot, I would say is valuable, because if they are the same every time you see them and you see them all the time, then that starts to feel weird.  Bunny: Especially if they’re in a bunch of different contexts. Like maybe your character will be putting on a different face when they’re talking to a police officer than they do when they’re at home. And that can be useful and feel real. And you can still see the interiority of the character. They can still be having thoughts and feelings to themselves. In fact, they can think about how they wouldn’t normally act like this or that. They’re consciously trying to be a bit more rigid and official than usual. That can absolutely work. But if they act the exact same in every context, that doesn’t make sense. Oren: If you have a wise mentor who is in two or three scenes, wise mentor can be their character. They could be memorable as that, as long as there aren’t a lot of other wise mentors. But if that wise mentor is in a lot of scenes, you’re gonna wanna show some other sides to them. Common ones are, this character’s normally show wise and calm. Let’s show what would make them show anger. And that feels cool. That creates contrast. People like that sort of thing. Chris: I think another important thing to think about in this category that lets you learn more about a character, that is useful for non-viewpoint characters, is the fact that people are not going around purposely showing everyone their emotions all the time. A lot of times there’s what they’re feeling and their motivation, and then what they choose to show other people. What they’re trying to show other people is different from that. So that gives you opportunities for them to put on one face, and then when you hit the right situation, for them to reveal what they’ve been thinking underneath the brave face. They put on a brave face, but really they’re scared. That kind of thing. And you can also have that with motivation. You can leave a character who has a very simple, obvious motivation. But you can also add a deeper motivation. Like, I want good grades just because I am kind of a teacher’s pet or something being superficial; or I want good grades because I really need approval, because I have low self-esteem and I really need the approval of others, being a deeper motivation. That’s more emotional about their personal identity, that kind of thing. Oren: So here’s a question. How does backstory fit into character development? Because I have a tendency to write characters with too much backstory. That’s just my toxic trait. So how does that work exactly? Chris: I think backstory, again, is one of those things like character arcs that is a very high investment choice. If you’re gonna do it, it has to be usually for an important character, and also it has to matter. I’ve seen a trend with candied characters where we reveal a backstory and it just doesn’t change anything. Again, it just feels very glorifying. The author’s like, don’t you care that this character used to work for the bad guys? No. I don’t. It doesn’t change anything about the story. It’s like, but isn’t that cool? No, I don’t care. But for a more important character that you wanna spend more time on, explaining their character arc is probably one of the number one things. It depends on the character arc. Sometimes characters have flaws that don’t really need explaining very much, like they’re impulsive. Maybe they’re just started that way and they have to learn restraint, but there’s no deep backstory reason why they’re impulsive. But there could be deep backstory reasons why if they have trust issues. That suggests somebody hurt them. And then that backstory could end up being very relevant because it might change which situations are really sensitive for them, or what kind of people they trust, or the person that hurt them might show up in the story.  Bunny: And I feel it’s very difficult or impossible to create a character without any backstory, I guess unless they’ve just been born or something. But at the same time, you have to know how to doll that out in ways that are actually supporting the story. And in that case, I think you’re right that it’s usually explanation. I’m thinking of backstory that can explain their relationships with other characters. I think that’s another big one, especially if that ties into the character arc. And I think that’s especially important if they have a character arc about either reconciling with or finding a different way to relate to another character. Chris: For a relationship arc backstory, their relationship can also be important, but I would say that when you talk about backstory, it has to be something that is not self-explanatory, that’s important enough to actually take time out of the story to relate something complex. And there are many cases in which, especially if you have a young character, where things are fairly self-explanatory, and then the issues start when the story begins. They’re a young character who’s naive, they have a friend that they grew up with… That doesn’t really take much explanation. And then when the story starts, then stuff goes down. Then they lose things, then they develop their flaw. Then they have a fracture with their friend. And it’s all in the story proper. None of it is backstory. So if you’re going to take time to relate something that happened in the past, that doesn’t move the story forward, there has to be a bigger reason for it.  Oren: My favorite weird backstory thing is when the author gives their character more backstory than it feels like they’ve had time to do. It’s like, you’re not that old. How did you have time to do all these things? Chris: How did you have time to watch every single episode of All In The Family, or whatever it is that Wade does in Ready Player One? Oren: Yeah. The ones that come to mind immediately are Lockwood and Co. and Six of Crows. For one thing, it’s really obvious that in Six of Crows, those characters were not supposed to be teenagers. They don’t act like teenagers. They don’t have any teenager related arcs. They clearly were supposed to be at least mid-twenties, and were aged down because YA is hot. That seems very clear to me reading the story, but Kaz still has the backstory of someone in his mid- to late twenties and I just don’t believe he had time to do all the things he is talking about having done. Chris: Yeah, Buffy made fun of that in the episode, I think it’s called Superstar, where Jonathan uses a magic spell to give himself all the candy. Like how did he have time to go through medical school and do all of these other things? Oren: Yeah, and Lockwood has the same problem, specifically the character Lockwood. He just has too much backstory; he has so many people that he knows and so many things he’s supposedly done, and it’s like, was he 10 when he was doing these things? My favorite is that he supposedly has had a rotating cast of casual girlfriends and the story – he’s 15 when the story starts. How many girlfriends could he possibly have had by that point? He hasn’t been dating age for that long. Bunny: You went through puberty two years ago, Kaz. Chris: One of my favorites is a newspaper article about the death of his sister that’s like, you know, oh, and the sister died and her brother was unable to stop it, or something like that. And it’s like, okay. He was a young child. What was he, eight or… he was seven. His sister was older than him. How many newspapers reporting the death of somebody are like, oh yes, and their seven-year-old younger brother was unable to stop it. Bunny: This tragic child death occurred, and the family hamster was not able to stop it. Oren: What a scrub. Chris: So another one that is sometimes worth thinking about is the character’s motivation, which people make a lot of. I think a simple motivation goes a long way. And the reason is just to make the character more consistent, usually, so that you can catch if they’re doing things that are inconsistent with whatever they might want. Because there’s a good chance readers will notice if the character switches sides inexplicably, or seems to go do something in one scene that’s contradictory to what they do in a different scene. And if you know what they want and their primary motivation is, that just helps you make them more consistent. Oren: This one is hard for me to intellectualize. It’s like, I know when I see it that a character is going against their established motivation, but it’s hard to give advice on it beyond don’t do that. Very helpful advice. Chris: I will say that one thing that does happen, and I think we talked about this a little bit when we went over believability, is that it’s one thing to know, but you also actually have to communicate to the readers. So if you have any issues with consistency and believability, the first step is actually knowing what’s going on yourself. And the second step is making sure that readers do. Because if you do have a character that’s complex, for instance, and you’re thinking, oh, they’re on the fence about this, or they have nuanced feelings, they’re really divided, it is tricky to make that come across as being complex instead of just inconsistent.  Oren: Yeah. My advice to clients I work with is when in doubt, simplify their motivation, because a lot of the issues that I’ve encountered of ‘this character is doing something that just seems to contradict what they wanted,’ is that the author has this very complicated idea of their motivation in their head that is hard to portray on the page. When in doubt, simplify, is my constant refrain. Bunny: I’ve had this problem myself, especially in short stories, which I’m terrible at writing, where I’m like, I want this complicated background and I want the characters to have history with each other and interact in complex ways. So I come up with a backstory that’s completely tangled and requires tons of explaining. And then my professors, “This feels like a chapter of a novel,” and I’m like, goddammit. Oren: No, I get it. I have the exact same thing. Okay. So these two characters, they used to date until they had to split up because of a war, and then they met again, but that one of them cheated on the other one, and then the other one stole all their money and then they worked for rival crime syndicates for a while. How long is this story again? 5,000 words. Don’t worry about it.  Bunny: Yeah. The one I’m thinking of was that there was like two vampires and initially one of them had turned the other one, and then that one wasn’t ready for it and went on a rampage, and now they blame the first vampire for that. And it’s all very hard to explain in a ten minute play with only dialogue.  Oren: Sounds like it could be a good novel premise though. Bunny: That’s my problem! Oren: Just saying. Chris: Backstory, there’s the issue of communicating, but I think the other issue that happens with lots of backstory is that you want your audience to be on the same page as a character and feel what they’re feeling. And so you have to be able to relate the backstory in enough detail that you can feel that with them. So if you have them meet up with their ex, you want that to be an emotionally meaningful moment. The audience has to understand all that history enough to feel something about it, right? Feel whether that this is a good ex or a bad ex, or what have you, so that when you see the ex, they’re like, oh yeah, the ex, or like, oh no, not that ex. And when all of those emotions are poured into the backstory, not only is it hard to explain, but it can also be really hard to then bring forth emotions in the story because it all depends on all this stuff. So, yeah, that’s again a matter of how much time do you have to develop your character. That’s a big one. And you have less time in a short story than you do in a novel. It depends on basically, what is the total number of words you have to devote to this character? And if you don’t have that many words, you gotta pare it down. And if it’s a character that only makes a small appearance, they can be a flat character. You’ll get away with it because people won’t have time to know the difference, and they’ll probably just be memorable, which is good if they appear more than once. Oren: Okay. Now that you know all of our backstory and we are all very well developed around here, I think you can agree we are very real people who exist. We’re gonna call this episode to a close. Chris: If you think we are real enough, consider supporting these very real podcast hosts on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song]