The Mythcreant Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

Even the best villains must eventually come to the end of their run, but what if you could bring them back? It would be so easy, what would be the harm—NO. You stop that. Do not give in to temptation! This week, we’re talking about why it’s almost always better to leave a villain dead and then complaining about stories that didn’t leave their villains dead. You could say there’s a bit of an Echo in there, and that, somehow, Star Wars discourse returned.  Show Notes When to Kill a Hero – Or Not  Kingpin Peter Hale Kate Argent D6 Star Wars RPG  “Ursula’s Crazy Sister!”  Sheev Palpatine  Darth Maul  How to Bring Back a Defeated Villain  Transcript Generously transcribed by Paloma Palacios. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.  [opening theme] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the  Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orin. With me today is – Chris: Chris. Oren: – and – Bunny: Bunny. Oren: Now, you might remember that I was vanquished at the end of the last episode, but I have risen again, better and stronger than before. Bunny: Nooooo! Chris: Oh man, I put so much work into killing you. Bunny: It was such a struggle. Could you just go back to being dead? That’d make it a lot easier. Oren: No, since people liked me as a villain the first time, they are guaranteed to like me even more the second time. That’s just how stories work. Bunny: You know when someone comes up to you and they’re like, did you miss me? Did you miss me? Yea, I always miss them more. Oren: This is the process. You just brute force everything. It’ll work out. Chris: But marketers really need easy, profitable successes, can’t we just take the last story and just do that again? Oren: Yeah. Minimize the investor risk.  Bunny: Look, even if you have an evil laugh, it’s even better ’cause then you can put it in trailers Chris: Or the end of the credits, like we think the villain is dead, and then we have the entire credits, and then we resurrect the villain at the end of the credits. Like when most people left and then everybody’s like, why is the villain – I thought this person was dead and we made a really big deal about how this villain was dead. At the end of the last movie. Oren: I hope you watched the mid credits scene! Bunny: Psyche! Oren: So today we’re talking about why your villain should stay dead.  They almost certainly should. The good news is that, from what I can tell, this is mostly a TV and movies thing. I actually could not find many novels that did this. Bunny: That’s not too surprising. Chris: I wonder if it has to do partly with, again, bringing in big name actors that play the villains again. Oren: I think it really is. I think it’s the franchise obligations from what I can tell. Bunny: Also Oren, go away if villain should stay dead. Hoo. Get outta here.  Oren: [laughs] Chris: Well, that’s a nice evil laugh, that will do. Bunny: I would put that at the end of the credits. Oren: So there’s the big franchises like the MCU or what have you, where they have a bunch of characters and no one ever wants to get rid of them because each new writer wants to be able to use them. You see this in comics too, right? They’re never gonna permanently kill off a named character. That’s just how comics work, or at least how mainline, Marvel and DC work. And it’s the same thing when it comes into TV and movies, but you occasionally see it in other places where it makes even less sense and is even more confusing. Bunny: Here’s a question – Do you think it’s better or worse to bring back a dead villain or a dead hero? Oren: I would in most cases say a dead villain is worse. Neither is good. You shouldn’t start killing people and then bringing them back. It’s very tempting, but don’t. Chris: Either one can seem really contrived, so they can both have that issue, but at least with a dead hero, I think people are more likely to be excited that the hero comes back and they can still function in their role as a hero. Oren: The hero doesn’t have the same problem that the villain has of, if we killed them, they’re probably not threatening anymore. Bunny: That’s true. What you need in a villain is, primarily, threatening. If you’ve gotten the crap kicked out of you, I think you’re just a little bit less threatening.  Oren: There are some edge cases where that’s not the case. Sometimes the villain doesn’t get taken out by the heroes, and in those cases it’s not that specific problem. There are other problems, but it doesn’t have that specific one. But with a hero, that’s never gonna be an issue, or probably not ever gonna be an issue, but you’re still resurrecting a dead character is always gonna have a serious cost that is always going to erode audience trust in what you’re showing them. This is true of anything when you take back something that should be untake-backable, but it comes up the most with character death. Chris: I think that the way it really destroys the experience is if when you do want a character to die. What you want is for your audience to be focused on that tragedy. You do not want them to spend all of their attention being like, okay, is this character really dead? How graphic was this death? Have they been bisected? Have they been set on fire? Their pieces been sewed back together?  If you actually have a dramatic death scene, you want them to be in the moment feeling the tragedy of that death when you know so many characters are brought back, that is less and less possible, and it becomes harder and harder to actually make deaths look permanent even if they are, and this is happening with injuries too. Marvel’s very bad. Marvel has become extremely bad about injuries. Bunny: It also makes the audience just trust you less. It also, no matter whether or not it was planned, it just feels sloppy, I think. It seems very difficult to me, even if it was planned to make it not feel uncreative and sloppy, like you didn’t have any other ideas. Oren: There are ways you can do it if you really set it up in advance. Maybe. I’m not gonna rule out a hundred percent of those possibilities, but it’s pretty rare, and most of the time, there’s no question. Most of the time when we see this happen, if people are complaining about it, that means you’ve already failed.  Chris: Yeah, some implementations are definitely better than others, and so it’s impossible to say never, ever, ever, but it’s so uncommon for it to be done well, and of course, every time somebody does it, now they have the legacy of all the other storytellers have done it, right, in a cheap way. Bunny: That makes it even harder, at the very least, that legacy is accompanied by a lot of unhappy people. Oren: I also think we should  consider another reason why you shouldn’t bring back a dead villain, and this one’s a little more subtle, but I think it’s just as important and it’s ’cause it’s repetitive beyond the lack of threat. We’ve already done this and you made it seem like we were getting a new villain, right? That’s what happens when you kill off a villain. It seems like we’re getting a new one that’ll be interesting and some novelty will be added, and instead you brought back the old one. Chris: Or just new problems because usually when you have the same villain, there’s a limit to how different the next problem the heroes are gonna tackle will be, so that also just limits, besides just the villain character, other types of variety in the plot arc.  Oren: Then of course there’s the practical consideration, which is that most settings don’t have an explainable way to bring a character back from the dead and the ones that do have their own problems. And so as a result, most of the time when a character gets brought back beyond the more abstract level of, ‘well now I don’t believe you’ when a character dies, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s just not believable. They almost always end up having survived an unsurvivable injury. How did they get back by not dying? Bunny: I think the way to do this is just to say. How did they come back? That’s a secret. Oren: If you don’t explain yourself, everything’s fine. Chris: I also think that it can be, again, really unsatisfying and frustrating when the hero does everything right and they’ve gone through their climax, their turning point, they’ve proven themselves, saved the day, and despite, through some examples here that we’ll bring up, despite doing everything, somehow the villain is just comes right back again and it just feels like authorial fiat, where we, the story, took it in one direction and the heroes didn’t succeed because the author just said so, and it undoes all the agency that the heroes have in many cases. That’s just a really unsatisfying way to end the story. Oren: So I think we’ve talked, covered the principles enough. I think we get to complain now about specifics. Bunny: Specific examples! Okay, my favorite part. Oren: I think we’ve had our vegetables, we can have our dessert now.  So spoilers for echo, but yeah, kingpins back. He’s alive.  How is he alive? It’s ’cause he didn’t die. That’s how he’s alive. Bunny: It’s a secret! Chris: It’s also, spoilers for Hawkeye, because Echo is a spinoff of Hawkeye, but that just tells you how many times Kingpin should have died  because he started in Daredevil. He was a Daredevil villain. I didn’t even think he was a good Daredevil villain. Bunny: Isn’t his shtick just being rich, like being a crime guy? Oren: No. His shtick is that he’s large. Chris: Yeah, and he is a crime guy, but like he’s not very good at it. Oren: And in Daredevil, he at least conceptually made sense. Right? Because Daredevil was a very gritty show. Daredevil arguably doesn’t even have superpowers, because his superpower, and there’s a lot of ableism wrapped up in this, but his superpower is that he can see.  He has about as much perception as a sighted person. That’s his superpower. Bunny: About that – apparently, we’ll get to this in a couple episodes, but he has a really random grab bag of powers that mostly amount to extreme senses and also sight. Oren: Right, but in that specific show, he almost doesn’t have a power, so going up against a normal crime boss enemy works fine and Kingpin can be a big dude who’s good at punching. That’s not a problem. In execution it was a problem in that Kingpin wasn’t very smart and seemed really bad at running his crime organization, ’cause I guess part of his character is that he throws temper tantrums. And I thought we all agreed after Kylo Ren, that’s probably not a good trait for your villain to have, but apparently it’s okay when Kingpin does it. Chris: They make him almost an underdog because there’s other crime boss antagonists that are also Kingpin’s antagonists, and they all seem much smarter and more competent than he is, and he just comes off as really pathetic to me, just not an intimidating villain. He feels like a goon, a typical goon, who then somehow ended up in charge and had no idea what to do. Bunny: But what if he’s really tall? Oren: He is very tall. He’s a big guy. But then it gets way worse in Arrow. Where, in Arrow,he’s up against Hawkeye, who, yes, is the most loser Avenger, but is still an Avenger. Hawkeye has still fought intergalactic alien space warlords, and now he’s fighting a guy who is large, and the show even recognizes that at some point, because it just keeps beating up Kingpin. Kingpin will show up in a scene and get beaten up, and then someone will drive a car into him. Chris: Yeah, there was literally a scene where somebody drives a car into him and then he just gets up again and I’m like, what is happening? Bunny: The human punching bag. Chris: Does he have indestructibility powers? ’cause he isn’t supposed to, but he acts like he does. Oren: That’s a whole thing, and it did not make him a good villain, and then finally he died. Chris: Oh, finally, I would just rejoice. Finally, this character, more minor antagonist, (again, spoilers) Maya, she finally shoots him in the head at the end of Hawkeye. Oren: Not just in the head – in the eye. You could not be more lethal than that. Chris: It goes into his brain. Okay, great. We hated that villain. We hated him when he showed up in Hawkeye, but at least now he’s done. He’s been in two shows, which is more than he deserved, but he’s done and – suffer – He wasn’t done. Oren: No! And then he comes back in Echo and he has a little scarring around his eye. How did the bullet leave those scars? His eye is not even not working, his eye is intact! Did the bullet bounce off of his eye and he was just stunned? What happened? Bunny: He’s not even that big of a guy. I’m looking these up and he’s smaller than some wrestlers. Oren: Yeah, he’s a moderately large man. I don’t think he’s bulletproof. I, I don’t get it. Bunny: You can get an action figure of him that comes with detachable fists. Oren: Oh, that’s nice. That’s a good. He should have that power in the show. Chris: Yeah, he should have actual powers. Oh man. And then of course, at the end of Echo, he is, instead of like, again, he’s willing to kill lots of people. He has no problem with that, but at the end, Maya decides to heal his trauma instead of killing him, and it’s like, oh no, he’s gonna be back. Oren: I noticed we didn’t heal the trauma of the Rocket Launcher dude, that guy we just shot. Does he not have trauma that could be healed? Why does Kingpin deserve to have his trauma healed? He is one of the worst people in the Marvel universe. Bringing back Kingpin for a second time was just ridiculous and it completely killed a lot of the drama, and at least they didn’t kill him again knowing they were gonna bring him back. At least this time, they were honest enough to just have him run off into the darkness, like, that’s a little bit better, but man, that was so irritating. Bunny: I guess he could come back evil again. Man, I didn’t wanna be de-traumatized. Oren: The reason this happened was clearly that they just made a mistake at the end of Hawkeye, probably because they didn’t know if Echo was actually gonna get to be a show or not, and they wanted to give Maya’s storyline in Hawkeye some closure, so they have Echo kill Kingpin as closure, but then they get their spinoff and they decided it needed to be about Maya and Kingpin, even though it didn’t. There are so many things it could have been about other than Kingpin. Chris: I just wonder why they brought Kingpin into Hawkeye in the first place. Were they out of villain ideas? Oren: I do think that’s actually it. I think it’s because the MCU seems to really, really, really like pulling in all of the stuff from other stuff you’ve seen, and they’ve run out of most of that, so they were like, Hey, we haven’t used the Netflix shows – let’s grab those, people liked those! and that seems to be their motivation as far as I can tell. Bunny: It was just extra weird because they have so many comics, dozens and dozens of villains that they could pull from. Oren: People liked that villain in Daredevil, but from a storytelling perspective, it’s obviously a bad choice. Chris: So somehow Palpatine returned. Oren: Yeah. Ugh… Bunny: I’ll have you know, it’s cloning Dark Magic Secrets only the sith know. Oren: Palpatine returning is the opposite from Kingpin returning, and it’s still bad, but it’s the other side of bad because with Kingpin it’s like, how did he come back? He didn’t die, we’re not gonna explain it. With Palpatine, it’s like, uh, force Magic cloning – those might exist, who knows? Those technically exist, you can’t tell us we’re wrong. Chris: At least we know why they did it. It was absolutely desperation. Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause they didn’t have a villain. It’s ’cause they were like, oh crap, it’s the third movie, nobody planned anything! We can’t use Kylo Ren as the main villain for a number of reasons, and so we need a new one. Bunny: When I went looking for that quote, because I was like, did they explain it anymore? Did they just say somehow Palpatine is back? And the answer is no, they didn’t explain it, but there was an additional quote about how they don’t explain it, and I found a lot of horrible discourse about how somehow Palpatine has returned is actually a really smart line. Chris: Well, it’s definitely lamp shading, I think. There’s no question it’s lamp shading that ‘look, we don’t know, okay.’ Bunny: They’re trying to be like, look, it was actually so obvious! There was someone on Reddit who is ‘clearly, it’s a soul transported into a cloned body, everyone else just wants to be spoon fed.’ Oren: Oh, did they say spoonfed? That’s a classic. Yeah. You can tell it’s implied to be cloning. You don’t need to read Reddit discourse to tell that they have big cloning tanks. It’s just that it doesn’t matter. Bunny: It translates to, yeah, we dunno. Chris: I also just love the idea that they decide to make a clone of Palpatine and instead of making young palpatine as he looked when he was like a senator, they decide they’re gonna, once again age that clone, so he looks like the wrinkled dark Lord. Bunny: Why isn’t he sexy? That’s my question. He could have come back as sexy as he wanted. Oren: Especially since this is a story about him having a granddaughter come on, show us this face that wooed this lady that we don’t know who she is, but she was around, she had to find something interesting about him.  Bunny: Yeah, why is he like missing fingers and stuff? Why is he being hoisted around on a crane? Does his clone not have legs? Oren: There’s almost certainly a tie-in novel that explains how using the dark side of the force makes your body fall apart in this particular case. Chris: And he used lots of dark side really fast. His clone did as soon as it was resurrected. Oren: Lots of dark side characters don’t do that, but this time it did for reasons, read, this tie-in novel, it’ll explain it. Bunny: He got up from his cloning tank and immediately shot lightning for two months. Oren: Hang on, I’ve solved it, I figured it out. So in the old Star Wars D6 RPG, there was an exploit where your force lightning did damage based on how much dark side points you had, but using Force Lightning gave you a dark side point. So, in theory, if you could just force lightning a rock for several days and then your force lightning would do infinity damage. Bunny: You just wrinkle yourself. Oren: So that’s that. We’ve solved it, everybody. We’ve figured it out. He’s just power gaming.  Bunny: Who would’ve known? Oren: This is the ideal Sith body. You may not like it, but this is what peak force lightning looks like. Bunny: Maybe it’s what the Siths find sexy? Maybe that’s why he removed his clone’s fingers? He’s like, oh yeah, that’ll get ’em going. Oren: This is not the only character that Star Wars has randomly brought back. They usually do it in the animated shows, which is a little less annoying ’cause those are understood to be their own thing. Darth Maul is brought back, which isn’t great, but it’s better than Palpatine. Bunny: I think they should have just gone in with Palpatine coming back and rather than explain it in the opening crawl, they should have had a character see him, slap their hands to their face and go, Palpatine’s crazy sister!, just pull a little mermaid, too. Oren: That would be perfect. I don’t see a problem with that. Bunny: You can bring your villains back as much as you want, but you have to say ‘villains crazy sister!’ Chris: I do think that the Palpatine Fiasco is a good example of how a film that’s even quite good, becomes terrible if you bring them back, for all the reasons. Oren: Especially with Palpatine, because he was just so thoroughly defeated. That was just the completion of a really major arc. Whereas with Darth Maul, it didn’t really feel like his arc finished. He had a lot of unspent potential. People saw Darth Maul and thought he was really neat. He looked cool. He was the first character to use a non-standard lightsaber. He fought two Jedi at once. He seemed like he was an important guy, and so him just dying at the end there felt like a real letdown, and so we’re more willing to forgive when Darth Maul comes back. I’m still not advocating for it, but I see why that’s less annoying. Whereas with Palpatine, it’s, look, this guy has nothing left to give. Okay. Chris: We fully explored this character. We spent a lot of time defeating this character. We defeated him very thoroughly. He’s been dead for quite some time now. Bunny: He even looks like a towel that’s been rung out. Chris: But I do think the tricky thing is if they had a third movie. Where is their villain gonna come from? I might have gone with a hut instead or something like that. Oren: I don’t know. I have thought about this a lot. Chris: How, where will the villain come from? Oren: Randomly theory crafting: How would you fix episode nine if you can’t change anything in the previous two movies? And I’m at a loss. Chris: Time travel. Bunny:  Oh no, that doesn’t open up any other problems. Chris: At the very beginning , your characters travel back in time. Change what happened in the previous films.  Bunny: This can only go well.  Oren: Both the sequel Trilogy and the prequel trilogy have the same problem and that there’s just so much wrong with them and it is so unclear what anyone was trying to achieve that it’s really hard to try to come up with fixes ’cause you just have to start from scratch. Chris: The whole thing. The whole thing needs to go in the trash bin. Oren: Teen Wolf is another series that likes to bring back dead villains, although after the first two, they just stopped killing them and just had their villains hang out instead of dying. Chris: That’s what’s so funny about Teen Wolf! The teen Wolf, he usually has two villains per season, and the first season, they kill both of them and they both end up getting resurrected. It was like they realized their mistake, oh, actually we wanna keep those villains. Drat, why did we kill them? And so then for the rest of the seven seasons, two of those seasons are like, have a part one and part two with their own villains, right? They have lots and lots of villains and they never kill them ever again, so the show just collects more and more villains as it goes on. It’s like, oh, come on, you probably could have afforded to kill a few of those villains. Oren: They just keep building up. Bunny: Should’ve just put ’em all in a house together. They can share a condo and it’ll just be the villain house and they hang out there and antagonize each other. Oren: They honestly did need something like that because that was a problem they had at the end of one, I think it was season three, where they have the big bad guy who they’ve defeated, temporarily, and they don’t know what to do with him, and so they just give him like a stern talking to and send him on his way is. He’s killed so many people, but don’t worry, they’re confident he won’t do it again.  Bunny: You pinky promised. Oren: It’s like you guys, I don’t know man, you need some kind of system in place. I just, I feel like your solution of doing nothing leaves a lot to be desired.  Chris: I do think though that the villains that they killed and brought back do make very interesting case studies because they are handled in different ways. So we’ve got Peter and Kate, and Peter is probably the bigger villain in the season, and he’s brought back, but they don’t try to make him a big bad again, well, for the most part, there is one scene in one of the episodes where they have this like big hook where Peter’s scheming, like, ha ha, I’ll get you. And it’s like, really? That’s not – now, Peter, Peter, I’m sorry, You can’t handle this, this is not happening.  But for the most part, he becomes an untrustworthy ally so they don’t need to make him threatening again and he’s interesting in that role. Oren: Although they do then try to turn him back into a villain in the climax of one of the seasons and it absolutely doesn’t work, but it like, just comes outta nowhere. It’s like, oh yeah, I guess he’s the bad guy, sure, why not? Chris: They take care of that problem that way. They do also give his resurrection a lot more buildup, then they do for Kate’s, and it’s still a bit contrived, but I do think investing more time and building up towards it makes it feel better. Oren: One of the reasons it feels better is that it helps alleviate the possibility that anybody could come back at any time. ‘Cause if you establish the rule, that is gonna take a lot of effort, like a lot of narrative effort to bring a character back. We can at least feel like if we don’t see that the character’s probably not just gonna pop up one day.  Chris: It also just feels like, again, the show earned it and it doesn’t feel as cheap anymore. In this case, we have another character who is a banshee and she can sense death, so it gets combined with her arc of realizing she’s a banshee and she starts getting visions of him and doesn’t realize it’s him at first and that kind of a thing, so it’s a major investment to bring him back. Whereas Kate, instead of her becoming just a untrustworthy ally, she is actually a big, bad again and actually works pretty good because instead they put her their investment into revamping her so that she can be, but she has to be more powerful. She was originally just a human in the first season, and she’s a human who knows how to use firearms, which in Teen Wolf, has the whole constraint where only humans use guns. Oren: Kate’s actually interesting, because after she’s brought back, she’s a were-jaguar or something, and she’s, I think, one of the only characters who has magic and guns, which doesn’t make sense, but that’s a thing. She’s able to break the guns rule because she used to be human, I guess is the argument. Chris: It’s a little contrived that she’s a were-jaguar. Teen Wolf has established that when people get bitten by a werewolf, they might become something other than a werewolf, but to me it, feels contrived every time. This person has a tragic backstory, so they became this other thing, all these characters have tragic backstories. Bunny: Jaguars are just more tragic. Oren: If you look at a Jaguar, haven’t you ever thought, that it is a sad wolf? If a wolf was really sad, that’s what it would look like. Chris: And they don’t take – her resurrection is a surprise, so they don’t really take time with it, however, they put a lot more investment into she gets new powerful minions and new magical powers and other things to make her more threatening again. Oren: And to make her feel different. So it’s not just, oh look, it’s Kate again. It also helps that when she died, the heroes didn’t actually kill her, the other villain killed her, so it didn’t feel quite as repetitive. It wasn’t like, oh, well we’ve already beaten this person, so it worked okay. Bunny: Compared to some of these other examples, I’ll say. Oren: It worked well enough for me to use her as my case study of how to bring back a villain. If you’re gonna, this is the way to do it.  I still wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to try, this is probably the best model you’re gonna get. Well with that, I think we are gonna go ahead and draw this episode to a close, since I’m going to go be permanently dead this time and not brought back again, I promise. Bunny: Good riddance! Oren: Pinky swear, but you might meet my weird sister next time. That’s all I can say. Bunny: Oh, it’s Oren’s crazy sister. Chris: Now, if you would like us to bring Oren back from the dead so he can host another episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, and for the first time, we’re thanking Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much, and we’ll talk to you next week. [Closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast

Holy podcasting, Batman! It’s time for an episode about stories that have two main characters instead of one. A story so nice they main charactered it twice. Whether it’s a hero and their sidekick or two siblings equally sharing the spotlight, this week we’re talking about how to balance the needs of both characters. We cover how to keep them both in the plot, how to keep their interactions compelling, and why they shouldn’t steal development from each other. Show Notes The Winchester Brothers  Bo and Kenzi Slayers: A Buffyverse Story Sherlock and Watson  Nine Personality Clashes Character Conflicts The Daughter of Doctor Moreau  Lirael and Sammeth  Frodo and Sam  The Mimicking of Known Success ART and Murderbot  Laurence and Temeraire  Tom and Diana John and Dorian Harrow and Gideon Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren…  Chris: And I’m Chris.  Oren: So there’s two of us. So we are gonna need to divide the spotlight evenly, but I know you’re gonna try to steal it because you’re clearly the author’s favorite.  Chris: What, me?  Oren: Look, I’ll divide the spotlight in two and you can pick which one to take. Does that seem fair?  Chris: I’ve got an idea. How about if I say things and then you doubt me each and every time so I feel very put upon. And then at the end of the podcast, I can be proven right about everything?  Oren: Wait, how is that different from normal?  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: No, careful, too much self-deprecating humor will make you Sokka. Oren: Oh, no! Now everyone is Sokka.  Chris: Everyone is Sokka.  Oren: Okay. So. Today we’re talking about designing dynamic duos, which is not just an alliteration, which I’m very proud of.  Chris: Here’s your Hugo.  Oren: Yeah, one Hugo, please. [Chuckles] But is something that I work with clients and I see them try to do, and they don’t want just one main character. They want two main characters. And I could be wrong, but as usual, I blame TV.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: There are a lot of famous spec fic shows that focus on two characters instead of having a single main character. You’ve got Supernatural, Lost Girl, Loki, Harley Quinn, The X-Files, the list goes on.  Chris: I also think though, that we shouldn’t underestimate a writer’s tendency to get attached to their characters. Maybe they just want multiple characters to be important ’cause they like their characters a lot.  Oren: There is that too, for sure. And I think TV has a tendency to do this because it’s valuable in TV to have a character for your first character to talk to. Because they don’t have narration, so they have to explain a lot more through dialogue. Chris: Basically visual media without much narration wants to have more than one character in pretty much every scene. And when they don’t have a character, sometimes they’ll have a pet. I’ve listened to the Buffy audio drama recently and they have a very convenient pet dog and a pet monkey so that whenever a character was alone, they always had a person to talk to. Oren: Man, that is so much harder in audio dramas. You can’t use visuals even to communicate what’s happening. You can try to use sound effects, but that is dodgy. That is unreliable. But the reason why you then have perhaps just two main characters instead of a larger group of characters, like with a Star Trek show, is that having two regular actors you have to pay is a lot cheaper than a whole cast of regulars. So just from what I’ve seen, I think that is why this thing is popular on TV shows. I could be wrong. I don’t work in the TV industry. That’s just what it looks like from the outside.  Chris: And we’re talking about, again, if you’re writing a story that is primarily about a relationship, like a romance, although romances don’t have an exclusive right to relationship-related stories, it could be platonic too. There’s a lot more reason I think to have two main characters, but I think a lot of visual media chooses that even when the story’s not necessarily as focused as much on the relationship.  Oren: I do think that if you are going to have two main characters, deciding what kind of relationship they’re going to have is important. There’s obviously romance, but it does not have to be a romantic arc. There can also be a friendship arc or a mentor-student arc.  If you don’t want them to have a major relationship arc, if you want them to start with the same relationship, that they more or less continue throughout the story, I would recommend thinking: How do they fit into each other’s emotional arcs? ‘Cause you don’t wanna have one character going through a really intense emotional arc and the other one is just there. ‘Cause at that point you’ll start to wonder why this story is about two people at all.  Chris: Generally you want them to be equally central. ‘Cause I do think if one of them is having a lot of strong emotions, that sort of signals that maybe the problems are more about them than the other person. And usually you want the character that is at the center of your problems to be your main character. So that would put one character in the position of feeling more central, even if they’re getting 50% of the screen time, for instance. Oren: That actually is another thing that you should decide at the beginning, is what spotlight dynamic do you want for these characters? Do you want it to be a co-protagonist situation where there is a 50-50 split, or do you want a hero and a major sidekick? Second one tends to be a little easier, but I know that a lot of people are really devoted to the two co-protagonists.  I just think that it is important to choose that from the beginning because you can increase a character’s importance, but decreasing it is very hard. ‘Cause if that character was well written, then people will like that character. Some of your readers will get attached to that character, and if you then try to decrease their importance, those readers will be mad. Chris: And they can also start resenting the character that becomes more important. Setting clear expectations so that people don’t find their favorite character has been downgraded, is important. The advantage of having a single main character is then you can focus your attention on one person and focus on making the plot about that one person, and it’s all very complimentary. You get everybody attached to that person and then make the plot about them. It’s all very synergistic.  So if you divide that up more by having two, basically co-protagonists, then you have to be a lot more careful in maintaining that or else people can get upset. This is what I feel like when I watch the BBC Sherlock and I just desperately want Watson to get more candy, but everything is about how cool Sherlock is, and I just start to hate Sherlock. Oren: Yep. “And Watson was there”.  In general, you can promote a character from sidekick to co-protagonist. So you could start with protagonist and sidekick and then evolve that into co-protagonists a lot more easily than you can have co-protagonists and then try to change that into co-protagonist and major sidekick. Honestly, at that point, you would be better off giving the character you want to leave some kind of grand farewell. And then just having them leave the story instead of demoting them and then sticking around.  Chris: You might get some people who are like, “Okay, that character is why I was reading so I’m gonna leave now”. But they won’t stick around and be resentful. I guess whatever your goals are. I would personally prefer, just set correct expectations and say goodbye rather than have a bunch of fans that hate me.  Oren: You might lose a few readers, but you’ll have fewer one star reviews. Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: So the next thing that I would recommend once you’ve figured that out, is make sure that they are part of the same story. [Chuckles] Chris: Yep. What we just talked about, consolidating your story, making it cohesive. Oren: And that generally means making sure that they can both participate in whatever the activity of that story is. If it’s a demon hunting story, they should both be demon hunters. It’s possible to have secondary characters who are not demon hunters, but a co-protagonist or a major sidekick, probably not. Chris: I was thinking of doing some Lord of the Rings fanfic, where it’s about Sam and Frodo, but Sam just stays at home.   Oren: [Laughs] Yeah, and that’s the other thing is you typically want them to be in physical proximity to each other. It is much harder to have two main characters who are separated by distance. In a advanced technology or maybe an advanced enough magic setting, I’m not saying it’s impossible, if you have enough instant communication and the ability to interact over long distances, but man, is it hard and it is much harder if you don’t have that technology. Probably impossible to be perfectly honest.  Chris: Going back to our demon hunters example, they both need a reason for collaborating in this demon hunting related plot. But for instance, if you didn’t want them to both be demon hunters, maybe one person is the person that the demons are going after. And the other person is a demon hunter. So they wanna protect that other person and use them as bait, maybe.  But in those situations, you still need to make sure that other person who’s not the demon hunter has something to contribute. Maybe the demons are going after that person because that person is a scholar who has studied the history of how demons came into the world and knows the key to defeating them, for instance. So as long as they both have a reason to be engaged in these conflicts together and solve problems together, for the most part, then you should be good. Oren: And this applies even if you aren’t talking about a action packed spec fic premise. If it’s a political story, you need both of your characters to be involved in politics in some way. It doesn’t really work to have one main character who is a politician and another main character who doesn’t pay attention to politics and never votes. That’s just not gonna work.  Chris: Need to get some politics in this relationship.  Oren: Speaking of politics in the relationship, one thing that you should also consider at the beginning is, what makes these characters interesting together? Some of this is just chemistry, which is the fact that their interactions are fun to read about, is typically what people mean when they say chemistry.  It can mean romantic chemistry, it can mean a touching friendship, or it can mean a rivalry. They don’t like each other that much, or they have some beef that they have to work out. Those things are all fun to read, as opposed to two characters who exist in the same place and are polite to each other. That’s not really much.  Chris: And I think they can have a lot of personal reasons to dislike each other as long as they have a compelling enough reason to work together. If they have something that makes it so they don’t want to be in the same room together, they just have to have a compelling enough motivation to overcome that.  The other thing that I see, of course, is that people want there to be more antagonistic chemistry, but they just can’t come up with a reason. They have a hard time thinking of a reason why their characters would fight and so then they just randomly hate each other.  Oren: Yeah… [Chuckles] Chris: Or they just rub each other the wrong way. But you gotta think about that ahead a little bit. What exactly is it about their personalities that makes them rub each other the wrong way? Is one person very like, “I hate planning ahead ’cause I don’t wanna commit to anything. I just wanna do what I feel like in the moment and make sure to keep all of my options open” and the other person is like, “No, we need to have a schedule and we need to get on time everywhere”? That would be specific, different approaches that would clash with each other and create some of that rubbing each other the wrong way. Sometimes if you just try to wing it as you’re writing your draft, the characters seem to act out for no reason.  Oren: Yeah, and if you’re looking for reasons why they might rub each other the wrong way, I would recommend the post: Nine Personality Clashes for Character Conflicts by Chris Winkle.  Chris: [Chuckles] Oren: It’s got a very lovely picture of two birds yelling at each other. [Chuckles] Chris: Yeah, that was very cute. I think you found that picture.  Oren: Yeah, I might have. It’s been a while, but it’s a good article and it’ll give you a lot of ideas. Ideas that are very helpful without going into the area where it just feels like these characters hate each other and have no reason to be together or are just mistreating each other so badly that it becomes unpleasant to read about. Chris: Normally our recommendation for that is to basically give them conflicting goals, but if this is like a dynamic duo, so that you want them to be together solving problems together during the story, it is a little harder to give them conflicting goals. Now what you can have is a temporary alliance, like they both need to travel from Point A through dangerous territory to Point B. And they know they can survive better together, but they actually have different ideas for what they will do, that are in conflict, which they reach Point B.  And then that way, their different goals can still create some conflict because they know that other person is gonna do something they don’t like and they’re trying to convince each other, or something. So you could have a situation like that, but, again, if they’re supposed to work together that much, it can be harder to give them conflicting goals in that situation. So you might rely more on personality clashes in order to create that antagonism.  Oren: Okay, so those are like the best practices for creating your dynamic duo. There are also some common mistakes I’ve encountered that I would like to talk about. The one that I was not expecting, but that I have encountered several times now and is really irritating is when the characters interfere with each other. This is like a scene in a roleplaying game where the GM has put out a plot hook that’s clearly for one character and another character is like, “No, that’s my plot hook now”. Chris: Is this because that character is the writer’s favorite? Is that why it happens?  Oren: It can happen for that reason. Other times it makes less sense. The time that I saw most recently was in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which has this really interesting social conflict story where Carlotta is working on this social manipulation that she’s doing, and it’s really important and cool. And then because another character, this guy named Montgomery, has this jealousy arc. Where he has to learn not to be a controlling asshole, he just calls in an NPC who unceremoniously ends the social manipulation arc, and we never got to see any conclusion. It just stopped.  In that case, it’s hard for me to say that the writer liked this other guy more than they liked Carlotta. But in this case, for whatever reason, Carlotta’s material was sacrificed for Montgomery’s jealousy arc. And man, did it make me hate that character. I just wanted him out of the story so badly.  Chris: Yeah, no, that would be very frustrating because, sounds like he took her agency away.  Oren: And that’s not the only way it can happen. You can also have, in theory, you could have something like a wish-busting moment where one character takes away a cool item from another character and stuff like that. In arcs and other story material is the most common. That’s where it happens the most.  Chris: That seems similar to spotlight stealing. Spotlight stealing on a very specific plot point, level.  Oren: It’s a very specific kind of spotlight stealing, because with spotlight stealing, that can be anything that makes one character just seem a lot more important than the other one. Stuff like what we saw in Lirael, where it seemed like Sameth was gonna be important, but then once they finally meet up with each other, Sameth barely does anything. Lirael does everything.  Chris: Well, actually, the dog does everything. [Laughs] Oren: Yeah, that’s true. The dog does everything.  Chris: I mean, Lirael gets two important roles and eventually we find some sort of title for Sameth, don’t we? But initially, he doesn’t get any of the magical roles we expect him to get. Lirael gets all of them and later he gets some kind of consolation prize. Oren: Yeah, he makes a sword for her at some point. I had honestly forgotten that happened. I found out about it rereading the plot synopsis for this podcast.  Chris: Lirael is just altogether a mess because neither of them have agency because there’s this “God dog” escorting them, on an escort quest, to get them to the end of the plot, because the writer clearly thought that was clever. But I do feel like, again, he’s given some consolation prize later, but it’s last minute at the end, he’s certainly not given the same level of development, or definitely not the same level of candy that Lirael gets.  Oren: Yeah, so that’s a very broad form of stealing the spotlight, whereas interfering with each other, that one’s very specific.  Chris: I will say that with Frodo and Sam, for instance. Frodo is just set as the more important character, and Sam is the sidekick. And so again, because those expectations are set, it’s okay for Frodo to have more of the spotlight than Sam does because we set that expectation in the beginning and we continue the expectation. So spotlight stealing happens when you deviate from the expectations that you set and what is rewarding to the audience. Oren: Now in terms of dynamic duos that I think are worth imitating and I’ve tried to come up with a list that are from books just ’cause again, I feel like this is a slightly different situation in TV. So my favorite that I’ve read recently are two characters whose names I have trouble with. They are the main characters from The Mimicking of Known Successes, and I believe their names are Mossa and Pleiti. This is a Sherlock retelling, although you might not know it immediately. And I think Pleiti is the Watson character, and Mossa is the Sherlock character. One of them is one and one of them’s the other.   Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Oren: And it’s basically what you were talking about earlier, where it’s watching the story and you’re begging, “Please give Watson some candy”. This is what would happen if you did that. It’s what if Sherlock and Watson were partners instead of Sherlock being a genius and Watson watching him be a genius. Chris: [Chuckles] Definitely sounds like an improvement. Oren: Yeah, I like it.  Chris: How was that split up? What did Watson get that Watson doesn’t normally get?  Oren: Okay, so the way that it works is that the Sherlock character is the eccentric weirdo who has big ideas and is their information compiler, more or less. Whereas the Watson character is the more action-oriented character. She is the one who gets things done and actually does a lot of the investigation legwork. So they have a fairly equal share of the spotlight.  And of course she’s the one who remembers that they need to do non-investigative stuff. ‘Cause Sherlock is still the investigation-obsessed weirdo, that hasn’t changed. Maybe we need to go get medical attention before we run off after the weird space cat, stuff like that. And of course, they’re also lesbians on a gas giant, which is fun, but not actually the main important thing about them, in my opinion.  Chris: How about ART and Murderbot?  Oren: Yeah, that one was tough. ‘Cause I don’t like ART. Chris: Yeah, I don’t like ART either.   Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: But in the last work, Wells did finally nerf ART quite a bit by having ART load its consciousness into a smaller drone. And then they went off with the drone. So instead of having a huge ship that could just bully anybody, they had a drone that was not as powerful. So it wasn’t as grating. Oren: Yeah, and again, similar to Frodo and Sam, ART and Murderbot have a very clear hero-sidekick relationship where ART is the sidekick. It’s an important sidekick, but it’s still a sidekick. Murderbot is the main character. It has a pretty good split. Again, Murderbot is the one doing all of the action stuff for the most part. ART’s drone does a little bit of action, but it’s fairly minimal, whereas ART is running a lot of the support stuff and compiling data.  Honestly, it’s not that dissimilar from what I was just talking about with the Sherlock and Watson split. You see that a lot in these kinds of stories. I’m also a big fan of the Temeraire books and the two main characters there. Laurence and the dragon, Temeraire.  Chris: Yeah. You got to have your animal companion, except for Temeraire talks. Oren: Temeraire does talk.  Chris: So not really an animal companion in the way that we talk about it being the pseudo-character. Temeraire is a full-on character.  Oren: Yeah. Although Temeraire does still have some traits that you would associate with being an animal companion in that he’s very powerful and strong, but he’s also just, extremely earnest and trusting, which is a trait because every animal on a long enough timescale becomes a dog.   Chris: [Laughs] Oren: Temeraire is just not at all duplicitous or capable of really thinking in those terms, so Laurence has to protect Temeraire from his own trusting nature, that sort of thing. Those two, they go for the touching friendship angle of chemistry where they are just really good buddies for the whole story. Except for briefly when Laurence gets amnesia. ‘Cause that happened.  Chris: Yeah, that happened.   Oren: [Laughs] Hey guys, we’ve been doing this for a while. We’re kind of out of story.  Chris: We ran out of ideas. How about if Laurence gets amnesia?  Oren: [Laughs] But beyond that there, the relationship doesn’t change a whole lot. They have their initial bonding period, which honestly, we cheat because dragons magically bond to whoever feeds them first. So that was easy. But beyond that, their friendship is pretty set. It doesn’t really change a whole lot, but it is like a rock that the two characters can hold onto when they’re having their turbulent emotional issues, which happens to both of them as they go through different phases of the story. Chris: So how important do you think banter is?  Oren: I like banter a lot. For characters who are a little bit antagonistic, banter can be great fun. Chris: I think the main thing is to make sure it’s banter and not one character being an asshole.  Oren: If it’s just one character being rude to the other one and constantly making jokes at their expense or getting to pull one over on them ’cause they’re so clever, that’ll get grating real fast.  Chris: I’ve seen a couple TV shows like this. So for instance, in The 4400, there’s a cop duo and it’s noticeable, one of them is a woman and one of them is a man. And man is just really mean constantly. And I’m trying to remember if he’s actually explicitly sexist or it just came off to me like he was sexist because he was giving her such a hard time. Oren: I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t think he makes any super overt, sexist remarks, but there is definitely a vein of, “Ha ha. Why are you taking this so seriously, lady? Do you not have a sense of humor, lady? Come on, lady”.  Chris: And it felt very similar in Being Human, where we have a cop and a character that is an android, but also black. And so this white dude cop is supposed to be really skeptical and mean to this other character because he’s an android but it’s impossible for the viewer to ignore that he’s black and it really just looks like racism. Also just being an android, you could consider another form or something very similar, very akin to racism.  Again, those types of stories assume that we will be on board with a character who is being mean because we identify with them. And so it reveals what audience they care about and expect to have, or that they just expect everybody to identify with that character because of their demographics.  Oren: And to be clear, that absolutely works. It’s just narrowing your audience in a way that you very much don’t have to do.  Chris: I have no doubt that there were people who either, just identified with the white guy in this scenario and liked him and was ready, like, “Oh, I know he’ll learn better”. And it’s like, okay. He probably would. I just have to not want him to die, first, to get through the show. So that makes some certain assumptions.  I also think personally with the sexism example, that there are a lot of people who just have low expectations of the way that men behave socially and might just look at that and think that it’s normal. And that has changed over time, but especially when we get to generations that are older, their expectations for how men are supposed to behave towards other people can be lower. Oren: I mean, it’s the issue of, the difference between an arc where the character eventually learns better, and one where that’s just the accepted way that they act, is hard to spot at the beginning. And you just have to ask the question: Is this worth that? Is it worth alienating a bunch of your potential audience so that you can have an arc where one of your characters learns to not be a jerk? Chris: Now, there were not those exact same bigotry dynamics in Gideon the Ninth, but there were still power dynamics. So we’ve got Harrow and Gideon. And Gideon is an indentured servant who is not free, and Harrow has control over Gideon. Obviously everybody’s excited about space lesbians, and it’s natural that people were shipping them. But on the page, what’s happening is that Harrow has tons of power over Gideon and is also very mean to Gideon. So, why I was not a fan.  Oren: Yeah, but it’s okay because Harrow eventually had an arc where she briefly questioned her magic powers and then decided actually her magic powers were awesome, and she was awesome for having them.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: She was supposed to feel guilty about her magic powers, but it never felt that way.   Oren: All right. With that, I think we will bring this episode of the “Mythcreants Dynamic Duo Podcast” to a close.  Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

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

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

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