The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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

Discover how to make your stories stand out in a crowded market. The hosts discuss the balance between originality and homage, emphasizing intentionality in storytelling. They analyze adaptations of fairy tales and the fine line between inspiration and imitation. A critique of the film 'Rebel Moon' highlights narrative shortcomings despite its visual appeal. Explore the challenges of midlist books in blending genres and the importance of authentic engagement in modern storytelling.

In a hilarious twist, hosts ponder a world that loathes podcasters. They dissect the misuse of metaphors in fiction, particularly in tackling sensitive topics like oppression and race. The discussion highlights analogies from 'World War Z' and 'The Matrix,' revealing the chaos that can arise from unclear narratives. They tackle the complexities of sleeplessness as a metaphor for labor dynamics, also critiquing how vague storytelling can muddle important themes. It's an entertaining deep dive into the art of metaphorical expression!

In this engaging discussion, bestselling author Sarah J. Maas shares her insights on writing romance through multiple points of view. She explores how these narratives impact character depth and emotional connection. The conversation dives into the balance between mystery and relatability in romances, critiquing common tropes that can disrupt relationships. Maas highlights the importance of cohesive characterization while tackling the challenges of presenting different perspectives in love stories, offering invaluable tips for writers in the genre.

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

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

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

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