The Mythcreant Podcast

Biff! Pow! Bonk? These are all terms have have been used to describe violence in fiction, but unless you’re writing an old-timey Batman comic, you’ll probably need a bit more. Fortunately, that’s our topic for this week! What’s the best way to describe violence? How much violence should you describe in the first place? Is there ever a good time to use metaphors in fight scenes? Listen and find out! Show Notes Dullahan Onomatopoeia Animorphs  The Dragonet Prophecy  Torture  Fight ScenesTranscript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is… Oren: Oren Wes: …and… Chris: Chris. Wes: Today we’re going to talk about how to describe violence in speculative fiction. We know that not every reader can stomach violence and not every writer wants to go all in on describing it. Fair enough. I think, today I just wanted to talk about how to approach describing violence in fiction, some ways of doing it, and some things to keep in mind because people often portray things “realistically”. And so, if you want to depict violent encounters, there are tidbits and advice that we can throw your way. So, let’s just get into it. Chris: You said realistically, Wes, so I think thinking about the level of realism is a good place to start here. Wes: I think that’s a great idea because there’s kind of a lot of things that we will let pass with certain types of violence, depending on target audience or rating. Star Wars is a good example. Plenty of violence, but generally not graphic violence. So that when certain things are very graphic for Star Wars, and then somebody walks it off, that’s not realistic. Oren: In Star Wars, we’re used to characters miraculously avoiding taking lethal damage or something that should kill them, at least by film standards. In real life, you know that getting shot in the shoulder is not something you just walk off a lot of the time, and hitting your head really hard and falling unconscious is not something you just walk off most of the time. But in movies, that is the trope, and Star Wars usually adheres to that until the recent trend of impaling people and then having them just walk it off. What is going on at Disney, guys? Chris: Can we stop doing that, please? Can we stop? Please. Black Panther’s doing it too. You’re a bad influence, Star Wars. Wes: Quick note on prose writing: If you are describing violence and you’re using the verb impale, that’s a pretty strong one. I’m just saying, that’s a strong word choice. Oren: Your old buddy Vlad would be disappointed in you. Chris: I think you have better ways of creating dramatic moments in prose than showing somebody get impaled. Again, it’s this one-upmanship over, you know, the audience is used to shoulder shots. So now we need to do something more dramatic to make them worry about the character, but we still want the character to live. And you just can only go so far before it becomes absolutely ridiculous. Someday soon, everybody’s going to be sewing their head back on. Oren: Maybe they evolved the ability to remove their own head. Chris: Oh, man! Lost girl reference! Oren: Early Lost Girl reference for you. Chris: That’s episode two, right? Something like that? Oren: It’s very early. It’s before they had any budget, and so their bad guy was a guy whose head was hidden in his shirt. Chris: Again, they’re supposed to be scary assassins, but their ability is that they have evolved the ability to remove their head. Oren: They said the word evolve! Chris: And again, these are like fey in this setting. So, evolving, removing your head is a little bit of a theme clash there. Anyway, it was absolutely hilarious. It’s like, oh, they’re so scary because their head isn’t with them. How is that supposed to help them fight? I don’t even know. Oren: Apparently, they can see without it, so it’s like fighting a normal person, I guess. They’re not invulnerable as far as I can tell, or if they are, it has nothing to do with their head. Chris: I think that that would be a disadvantage. It would be very interesting if they took their head and put it at a bird’s eye view. Oren: Maybe their eyes can shoot lasers, so they put their head on a little cart as a turret and it flies around and shoots at you while you’re trying to fight them. Or you could just go the opposite direction and take comics as an inspiration and write Biff! Pow! You know, that sort of thing. Maybe this is just me, I have to ask with you two here: Am I the only one who really doesn’t like onomatopoeia used in fight scenes in particular, but I guess anywhere in stories? Anytime a story writes boom when there’s an explosion, my eyes roll back into my head. Chris: I really think it’s about how it’s used. I think if you use cheesy comic book onomatopoeia, that is going to feel like a tone clash in many stories, especially when you want the fight scene to be very serious and tense. But I do think that sometimes onomatopoeia is a lot more subtle, where you just have a little italicized drip, drip, drip that’s kind of representing a sound. Wes, where do you see the border of onomatopoeia? What qualifies and what doesn’t qualify? Wes: Technically, we’re just looking at is the word on the page representing the sound as closely as possible? Drip, drip, drip is an interesting one. I never really would have thought of that as onomatopoeia, but I see that there’s definitely an argument for that. I don’t know what the line is. I think medium matters. And so, if I see it in a graphic novel, I don’t mind it at all. It feels like that’s just kind of part of the deal. But if I was reading a story and they’re somewhere there was an explosion and then single word, italicized: boom. I’m just like, ugh. Maybe that could be done well, but it wouldn’t be done that way. Oren: Maybe I’m just biased right now because I’m nearly done with my Animorphs reread and Animorphs uses onomatopoeia constantly. And some of it just sounds a little silly. Like when the Yeerks fire their Dracon beams, the book has tsew written out. And so, the narrator is constantly saying tsew. I don’t know what that is. And it’s also very similar to the onomatopoeia they use for the sound that the hawk in the group makes when it’s screeching. But I also just think it might have to do with the fact that the audio narrators, when they were recording, were clearly given the direction to try to sound as freaked out as possible when reading the onomatopoeia descriptions to try to make the fight scenes more tense. Wes: It’s kind of an interesting point, because if you were not listening to an audiobook version of that, but reading, my experience with that, when I see onomatopoeia written down, I think my internal reading brain doesn’t process that the same way as just normal prose. I just see it. I register it. Okay, cool. But I’m not in my head going tsew-tsew, or whatever. Oren: It might not be a big deal. Except when the Yeerks shoot at them with guns or lasers and the narrator is reading: bang, bang, bang, as if they’re about to be murdered in real life. It’s like, guys, I know that no one is going to die in this fight, okay? It’s an Animorphs book. I know that no one’s allowed to die until the last book. Chris: I think this is similar to when we’re talking about level of realism. What is the tone of the story? Is it campy? Because you could definitely get away with more onomatopoeia if the story already feels campy. Oren: I mean, that is, I think, also just a general problem with Animorphs. As is, remember how of The Dragonet Prophecy, the first book had really gruesome fight scenes? Chris: Yeah, it’s like this does not feel appropriate for middle grade. Oren: Yeah, ease off on that. Animorphs is the opposite. Animorphs starts with what feels like appropriate levels of description of the injuries and the damage that the characters give and receive. But as you get further in, it gets more and more graphic, and it just doesn’t match. Because again, this is a story where we have to pretend that every time the Yeerks fire their lasers, that they have hands made of butter and the lasers are constantly slipping and sliding all over the place, so that we can explain why a bear doesn’t just get disintegrated by a laser beam. Then it’s like, now read this very graphic description of a tiger biting someone’s head off. It’s like, I don’t think you’ve earned this, Applegate. I don’t think you’ve earned the right to make me read this. Chris: Certainly, if you want your characters to do things in fighting that are unrealistic, like how high can they jump? How big is that weapon? Do we get an anime size weapon that’s the size of a person? Oren: I want a sword that’s big enough I can use it as a shield. Chris: How well can they shake off injuries? That kind of thing. It just should be consistent, and it should match the work. But it doesn’t always have to be highly realistic. High realism isn’t better; It’s just different and it suits a different tone of story. Oren: A lot of this has to do not even with what is realistic, but what feels more realistic based on tropes. And one time back when I was in college, I approached a new group to play in a Firefly game and I was like, hey, I want to make a guy who uses a sword. And they were like, that’s cool. You can totally make a guy who uses a sword. And I’m like, all right, I have this really powerful character who uses a sword and I want his sword to be super big because I was playing a Final Fantasy game at the time. And they were like, no, you can’t do that. That’s not realistic. I’m like, okay, it’s not realistic for my sword to be huge, but it is realistic for my sword character to charge across a room before any of the bad guys with machine guns can shoot him and then stab them all with his normal sized sword? That’s realistic? I was a little salty. Chris: So, should we talk about narrating a fight scene itself? Wes: Before we hop into that, generally, I think if you are going to get into a violent situation in a story, you have two options: You can narrate the fight scene, show it all blow by blow, or you report the violent encounter after the fact. Those are really the only two options. If there’s a third one, I’m not smart enough to think of it. There’s pros and cons to each. And depending on the level of violence and how graphic the violence might be and how realistic you might want it to be, I feel like there are good decision points for whether you’re going to show it happen or report it after the fact. Chris: I would say that usually if this is a situation where you don’t want to show it in a scene, in most cases, you probably just shouldn’t have that violence in your story. I guess if you have a story that’s dealing with a really difficult issue… So, let’s say you have a story that’s about something like sexual assault, about something like torture; You have to have a character in that situation in order to make the necessary commentary that you want to make, but it’s also very sensitive. That would be a time to cut away until afterwards or something like that. Wes: You’re right on all those points. And I think after the fact stuff, we see that on screen or we read about that in stories, whodunnits, mysteries, things like that. The anticipation, the next victim, and it happens, but we cut away. And then the investigators see it after the fact. Chris: So, this is not a fight that the protagonist is actually engaging in, in that case? Wes: Exactly. That’s a very common use for not showing it, but letting the audience get the anticipation of, oh no, kind of picking up the pieces later without showing something as graphic as the examples that you described. Because whatever violence you’re including in a story at whatever level, I think that a lot of writers can feel a sense of concern that depicting violence is condoning violence. And that’s something that I think everybody needs to kind of understand. How you depict things in your stories and report on them. There are certain levels of authorial endorsement that come with that. And leaving certain things out is probably a good idea if it does not contribute to the story meaningfully. Chris: I do think that the major mistake that people make when it comes to messaging is that they think that if they depict something and make it seem bad. Let’s say, oh, I don’t want to condone violence, so I’m going to show how horrific violence is. And then they do it in detail and it’s like really graphic. That doesn’t actually condemn violence. It normalizes it. So, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Right? If you want to show graphic violence, but also want to condemn it, you can’t do both of those things. Oren: Showing violence as horrible can be part of condemning it, but it’s not that on its own. Right? The classic trap here is the stories about characters having cool fights and then the author feeling kind of bad that they’re glorifying violence. And so, making the fights unnecessarily brutal and gross. Also, Animorphs, let’s be perfectly honest, later Animorphs books do this too, where we’re clearly trying to do all the horrors of war, but also, we want to have super cool animals-fight-aliens fights. That is, I think, the trap to avoid. If you are trying to avoid glorifying violence, the easiest thing to do is to not have violence in your story. But if you want to do something a little more in depth, it takes more work than just making the violence you have more unpleasant. Wes: And just being consistent in the depictions, I think also matters. Because, to piggyback off of what Orin just said, if you have a story and I’m looking at basically every superhero story where the goons just get violently destroyed and then the villain, somehow you aren’t going to kill. Because everything that led up to that moment, despite if you’re like, oh, I can’t kill, that would be against my code. It’s like, well, you probably killed and hospitalized 30 people just now. But that is kind of condoning a certain type of violence, right? It’s like, well, we’re not going to point out that that was problematic, but that you might kill this person. This one moral dilemma right here is suddenly the focus of your attention? I don’t like that. It’s not consistent. It’s not realistic. Oren: I don’t know how much of that is description, but that is a problem that the whole like, well, I don’t want to kill this guy because he’s the boss. And it’s like, if nothing else, that’s dissonant. You can argue whether or not it has any kind of problematic messaging, but it certainly creates a weird feeling of your character being really inconsistent. For the record, I’m not super worried about stories glorifying violence by having characters get into cool fight scenes, if for no other reason than that ship has entirely sailed. But beyond that, I do think there are some things to consider, like you just mentioned, having your characters be willing to ruthlessly kill minions, but suddenly the bad guy, no, he can’t. We need him for the next book. Chris: Personally, I’m not going to look at somebody who writes a cool fight scene and be like, you’re promoting violence because you wrote a fight scene. At the same time, if your point you want to make is an anti-violence point and your protagonist solves problems with violence, I feel like you’re going to be working uphill at that point and that you should consider a different way of solving problems. Wes: No, you both raise good points. The presence of violence is not necessarily condoning, but how it works into your story. And Chris, I think you raised torture showing up. If somebody, this happens way too often, we’ve talked about this a lot, if there’s violent torture or any kind of torture in your story and that gets the protagonist what they need, you’ve condoned that violence. Chris: Even if it’s the villain torturing the protagonist, but the protagonist still gives the villain information that’s useful. Oren’s written about this. Oren: Well, because that feeds into, there’s a lot wrong with torture. Hot take. Hot take: Torture would be bad, even if it was a reliable means of getting information, but it’s not. And the fact that a lot of people think it is, distorts the debate around it. That is something that I will never stop getting mad about whenever I see some story where the hero or the villain, either way, it doesn’t matter who it is, beats up some guy until they give them the information and it just works that way. And it’s like, that guy could have just not known the information. You didn’t know he knew that. He could have just not known. And then he would have beaten him until he lied to you to make you stop. Or maybe he lied to you the first time. You often have no way of knowing. And they never show that because it would be narratively inconvenient. So, they instead just want a dramatic punch this button until you get information. And I think we need to do better as writers. I think we can and should do better. Chris: Are we ready to move on to fight scenes? Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about some fight scenes. Oren: I’m ready for fight scenes. That’s a lot more fun than torture. Chris: Yeah. So, I have some tips. Wes, I think you probably have your own tips. Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about it. Chris: So first, know what actions to cover and what level of detail is important. At the too detailed end, we have talking about either exact body parts. You can just say that somebody punched somebody else. You don’t have to say that somebody used their right hand to punch somebody else. That’s too much detail. And this is just a logistics issue, really. But you cannot recreate a film. Don’t paint a diagram. You have to keep it simple. But then you do want to stay in the moment and focus on specific actions that are happening right now. Unless logistically for the story to be believable, you have to summarize sometimes. If you have a huge battle, you’re going to have to summarize battles realistically last a while. But otherwise keep the fight short and stay in the moment. Have less moves, but make those moves riveting instead of like, and then they punched each other 20 more times, or over and over again, or whatever you have to fast forward. Oren: I would say that as a rule, if you have an option between summarizing the fight or just making the fight shorter, usually making the fight shorter is the right option. Chris: It’s more realistic too, because bodies break pretty easily. A lot of times the long fights that we see choreographed in film are actually unrealistically long. Wes: One fight scene that I really like on that note is in the first Daredevil that came out on Netflix, where his quest reward at the end of the season is getting the Daredevil suit. And up until that point, he’s just wearing a black leotard and a black headband. But there’s a long shot in the hallway in, I think like episode three, where that poor stunt actor is having to fight all these people and the choreographing goes on for like two minutes. And you can just see the actor just completely exhausted by the end of it. I’m just like, yes, this fight scene’s amazing because they’re not shying away from the fact that every punch thrown is draining this person’s willpower. Oren: That fight scene created its own little genre of hallway fights. That’s a thing now. It’s like, oh look, they’re doing the hallway fight and we all recognize it. Thanks Daredevil. Right here, I have a quick question on the subject of summarizing. Is it summarizing to say something like he launched a flurry of blows? Chris: Yes. Oren: Is it bad? Chris: I mean, I’d have to think more about the specific circumstance, but I feel like we’re making the individual blows feel unimportant at that point. What we want is to focus on specific actions that could make a difference. And a flurry of blows, it’s also just very abstract. If it’s some kind of combo action that involves more than one movement, I might state that at once, but normally I think that’s going to get a little bit too distant from what’s happening. Individual steps that your character takes are usually not important enough to narrate individually. There might be some times when you want to say a character specifically stepped forward and punched or something, but normally footwork is just not important enough. A specific punch or kick or block are all things that, you know, if you fail that block, you can get sliced up, that individually make a difference. So, you’re looking for actions that do that. I would have to look at what the flurry of blows does in the fight, but I would be concerned about that. Wes: Launched a flurry of blows, when I heard you pitch that example, Oren, I almost felt like that introduces then the fight scene. It’s like they crossed swords and engaged, and then we describe the fight scene. It’s like the pre-fight summary. That’s how I understood that. And I don’t know if that’s good practice or not? Oren: I would say that something like the example you just gave, crossed swords and engaged, is a little different than a flurry of blows because that is one action and then a statement of intent. Wes: Well, does it though? Cause you could say Oren launched a flurry of blows and then you could describe those blows. I’m keying off of launched because that doesn’t convey finished action. Oren: I guess my question would be: if you’re going to describe them all anyway, why did you start by summarizing them as a flurry of blows? Wes: To prime the reader. Oren: All right. Well, consider me officially primed. All right. I have another question about metaphors in fight scenes. So, if you had two characters who are about to start fighting and then the narration describes about how they were playing the most dangerous game of all. Presumably, maybe it’s not as bad as that. Let’s assume it was a good metaphor. I just don’t know of any. Chris: Admittedly, when you said, I have a question about metaphors in fight scenes, my instant internal reaction was don’t. Wes: —Don’t. Chris: Here’s the thing: We have to keep up the pace. And because actions in this case are very quick and happen very fast. We also want the pros to be tight, to reflect how fast the action is. Metaphors, they tend to be a little bit more confusing. They definitely slow things down. If you have a pause in the action where let’s say both people are exhausted and they kind of take a step back and stumble for a moment and you have an opportunity, then to add in a little bit more narration that maybe you could fit in a metaphor. But otherwise I think in most cases, if somebody added a metaphor to a fight, they would be again, summarizing and stepping back and being like, oh, this person maneuvered like a fish swimming upstream, I don’t know. And at that point, the question is, are we being specific and immediate? Are we focusing on what’s happening now? And how exciting that is? Or are we kind of taking a step back? I’m not going to say metaphors during fights are impossible. I’m sure there’s something that could work out, but I think that would be dangerous. Wes: I think more importantly in describing a fight scene, and if you are doing a grittier, perhaps more realistic, more violent story, using plain, simple language can often convey stronger violence more effectively. If I just said, he raised the hammer and struck the opponent in the skull and felt the hammer go in. It’s very simple, non-flowery language, but it’s gross. Those little zoom-in details, without saying he slashed his opponent and blood rained down like dark tears from the heavens. Chris: I mean, I will say though, that if you have just finished off your opponent, you do have time, usually… Wes: …to bring in the metaphors. Oren: It’s hard for me to separate best practice from taste here, because I know that personally, I have a very narrow band of describing what happens when you hit someone. Between It feels like I’m reading a Marvel fight where every hit is just on a cartoon character and Ugh, I’m grossed out, there’s too many organs. It needs to be in that very narrow band, or I won’t enjoy it. And I don’t know if that’s the right way to write a fight scene or if that’s just what I prefer to read in fight scenes. I don’t need to know it. I’m a content editor. Chris: That’s a good point. Strong, direct, active statements really punctuate those important moments. And you need some sentence variety, even during a fight, but look at which clauses have kind of lower emphasis. And if you have anything that they’re doing simultaneously, first of all, make sure it’s actually simultaneous, but also that’s going to be lower emphasis. And so, make sure that the content in there is naturally lower emphasis. And if they’re punching and kicking, that’s, you usually want a very direct statement for that. So, before we go, because I know we’re getting low on time, I’d also like to just go over what is graphic because I do run into manuscripts where writers don’t realize how graphic they’re being. So, I think just talking about the difference between what I would consider graphic or not graphic. And I will say, I am a person who does not like graphic bodily injury, and so the line is going to be different for different people. So, this is partly what I would consider, igh, and what I don’t. For instance, in a non-graphic fight scene showing an injury, you would have a simple statement about the injury, and then oftentimes describe the reaction by the injured person to that injury to kind of represent its impact. So, somebody is stabbed in the stomach. They cry out and collapse onto their knees. For instance, we just say they stabbed in the stomach. We’re not describing that stomach wound in detail. Oren: And then they just get up and walk away. Chris: So, we use their reaction to it to make it feel impactful without describing the actual injury in that much detail. You can have really abstract descriptions of pain if this is a viewpoint character getting injured, piercing, throbbing, that kind of thing. Some people might have issues with blood, but usually blood is fine. If you want to say a body part is at an odd angle to show the bone has been broken, I would just not be exact about it. Do not get specific. Their leg is at an odd angle. It’s all you need to say. You don’t need to say exactly where on the leg or what angle it’s at. But I would say that if you make your injuries particularly gruesome, it’s still going to be too much. Like for instance, Wings of Fire, we have a description of how acid falls on somebody’s face and starts eating through it. That’s just inherently really gross. Wes: I think if you want to add a slightly more appropriate description to emphasize the injury, if that’s the type of story you’re telling, then there’s a difference between what Chris has described, where he brought the hammer down on his opponent’s hand and his opponent recoiled in pain, or something like that. If you give an extra line in there to say he heard the bones break, a little extra declarative line can provide just a little heightened sense of graphic violence. I do think it’s best to keep it short and simple, though, and not go down this level of overly describing it because readers are going to fill it in well enough on their own based on the details that are already in the story. Chris: Personally, if I read description where bones are heard snapping, I consider that graphic. Again, this is about what type of story you’re telling. So, I’m not here to tell you to not make your violence graphic, but generally you need a reason because it is going to be off-putting to some people. So, if you’re telling a really gritty story or something that’s just revels and dark gory stuff, it’s not a good way to spice up your climax or make your climax more exciting because it isn’t excitement. Doesn’t make anything more exciting. It’s really just about the level of realism and how dark you want it to feel, how gritty you want it to feel. As I said, bone snapping, any bones sticking out. Again, this is going to be gross. You can exit the podcast now if you don’t want to hear this. Anything popping out: Eyeballs popping out, any other parts. I would say any description of organs. That’s pretty graphic. Skin being sliced, not a big deal. But if the skin is being stretched or is missing, somebody’s been skinned. That is going to feel pretty graphic. It varies with body parts being gone, which body parts we’re talking about. A missing finger, not that big of a deal. Some writers will write, here’s the viewpoint of somebody as they get torn apart. That’s not a thing that is a light reading. When it comes to describing pain, if you have really graphic metaphors or analogies about like, oh, this thing felt as though an arrowhead was being driven up my spine, it’s possible to make descriptions of pain graphic enough to be unpleasant for some readers. Oren: Well, that is a good thing, I think, to end the podcast on. Chris: Yes! Oren: I think we all died of being squicked. Chris: All right. If you found this podcast, I’ll say useful, possibly not enjoyable, please support us. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.

Any good adventure will give your hero a sense of personal growth and accomplishment, but what about something more tangible? Think of the rewards one could earn: sparkling jewels, enchanted weapons, or just great stacks of cash. This concept of “quest rewards” is very common in video games and TTRPGs, but it’s a lot more complicated in a scripted story. Why’s that? We’ll tell you!Show Notes Din Djarin  Bilbo Baggins  Callandor   Andúril Sting  Phial of Galadriel   Gurgi’s Wallet  Helm of Disjunction  Hither-Thither Staff  Shadeslayer  Shrek Chilling EffectTranscript Generously transcribed by Suzanne. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: Chris. Oren: and… Wes: Wes. Oren: Now as a reward for reaching episode 430, we each get a precious treasure. Chris, you get an enchanted red pen that slays all contrivances. Chris: Oh yeah! Oren: Wes, you get a pile of gold and jewels, which may or may not have a thematic greed curse upon them. Wes: It matters not. I can die knowing that this treasure is mine. Oren: For me, I get the satisfaction of a job well done. Wes: The best reward of all. Oren: The real treasure was the podcast all along. [Laughter] So this topic was born out of me thinking about video games and tabletop roleplaying games and looking at the fact that quest rewards are basically standard for those genres and thinking that they probably got that from written stories, but then realizing that that’s kind of an odd topic in written stories. In a video game, it’s like, yay, I completed a mission. I got 5,000 monies and a new gun. Woo! But if you do that in a written or filmed or otherwise non-interactive story, it seems a little weird. But there are still rewards that characters get, so I wanted to figure out what was going on with that. What’s the deal? Chris: We’re not gamifying our stories. We still do have rewards. Oren: Yeah, I’ve had some clients who definitely had a story I think critics would have described as feeling video gamey because the character went and did some difficult stuff and then at the end found a chest or something with a cool item in it. Chris: That felt kind of random, like this doesn’t come out of the narrative, it just, oh, there happens to be a treasure chest here. Oren: It’s sort of like the random encounter feeling you get when your character’s just walking along and then suddenly, whoa, bandits! Whoa, okay, we’re fighting bandits now. All right. Okay, bandit fight done. Moving on. Chris: It’s like, we don’t have story structure. Oh, wait, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment now. Random attack! Oren: And for this, I think it’s like I’m supposed to have something satisfying at the end of a quest of some kind and I don’t have that. So instead, cool sword! So I thought that would be kind of interesting. I can think of stories both older and more modern where at least something that looks like a quest reward is still part of it and the resemblance starts to get fuzzier the further out on the sandwich discourse grid you go because you have the really obvious stuff like if you go back to the Hobbit, Bilbo is going on this adventure with the dwarves for some cash. He’s gonna get some cash money and he does. He gets some cash money at the end. And then in a more modern story, we have Din Djarin who gets bounties and also gets cash. Those are kind of a literal interpretation of a quest reward. And then you have things where the character maybe wasn’t like promised that if he did this thing but still gets a cool thing at the end of a story like Rand getting his super powerful magic sword in one of the Wheel of Time books at the end. A sword so powerful that in the next book he had to get rid of it because he was too strong. [Laughter] Wes: I also kind of like the quest rewards that are like, I’m giving you this with the understanding that you are going to go do this thing. It’s like the pre-reward. Like when Beowulf goes off to slay Grendel’s mother, this guy gives him Hrunting, the sword. It’s like, here, use this. Chris: It’s dangerous to go it alone. Take this. Wes: But of course then that sword fails him, but then he finds a giant sword amongst Grendel’s mother’s lair and then uses the giant sword to slay. So he gets a double quest reward there. Getting that key item right in the video game moment that is way stronger than anything that you had previously. Chris: Yeah, there are pre-quest treasures usually given by a mentor or something in preparation for the quest. But that happens in video games too, right? Not just in prose or non-interactive works? Oren: It does, but not with the same regularity. In video games and in classic D&D style RPGs, you expect to get some kind of tangible reward at the end of a quest that will make your numbers higher, basically. And of course, this is a big generalization. There are video games that don’t do this. It depends on the medium. But it’s common enough that when I talk about quest rewards in video games, everyone knows what I’m talking about. Chris: Right. But I’m just being like, getting treasure without doing something first. I’m just thinking about Link and his little village that he often starts out in. Does he have to do anything to get his first sword and shield? Oren: Depends on the game. But yes, usually you get something to start you with. But I would say in video games, that’s not more common than it is in prose stories. I think the reason is that they serve the same function, which is either a way to explain why the character can do the thing that they need to do. It’s like, well, now you have a cool thing that you didn’t have before. Plus, a bit of novelty and wish fulfillment where the brand new weapon that they have now is more interesting than if they just started the story with this sword that they’ve always had. Chris: You could do a little mini obstacle in the village to give your hero their first sword if you wanted to. But I think in many stories that’s not what the story is about. We have other things to spend time on. There’s your sword of basic slang so that you can get on with your journey. Wes: Even the gifting process can say something a little bit, even if the thing isn’t particularly special. Like when Aragorn gets Narsil and he’s just like, here’s the sword for your station. Oh, cool sword. Does it do anything? No. It doesn’t. But this is a sign of how I trust you and I sanction you on your quest. Something like that. But Sting glows when Orcs are near. That seems more useful. This sword doesn’t do anything. Oren: Yeah, but it’s like a long sword and Sting is a short sword, so it does an extra 1.5 damage on average per swing. Wes: Ah, key. [Laughter] I like in the movies too, when Frodo gets from Galadriel the Light of Eärendil, this little container full of something. He’s like, uh, what? Oren: Galadriel, why did you give me this? Wes: Two movies later, it comes in handy. It’s like, you gave me a fragile vase full of water? Cool. Thank you. Chris: It will light dark places, Wes. Wes: Oh, right. Yes, but like, is that a metaphor, Galadriel? [Laughter] Chris: Is this like the reward is the friends we made along the way kind of thing? Wes: Yes. [Laughter] Obviously, we know Tolkien loved his epics and that like higher person of station gifting the person going on the quest something cool, I think plays into like the whole lineage of items and their stories and why that’s important to say this thing that I’m giving you has gone by many names, but always done these very things. And now you guys know that it is once again, this item that is also going on the quest and that gives it a special story significance, at least in epics. And we don’t really write epics anymore for good reasons. Chris: Right. But if you go on a quest and you have the sword that some famous person used to slay some giant monster, that makes it feel significant. Oren: Nowadays, I feel like if a quest starts and they make a really big deal out of the sword they’re giving you at the beginning, I’m like, that sword’s gonna break, isn’t it? [Laughter] The lesson is going to be that the sword didn’t matter. That’s the only reason to make a big deal out of the sword they give you in the opening chapter. It could be a lesson right there, like Taran, when he gets his first sword at the beginning of I think it’s the Book of Three when he has to head out to find Arawn and Dallben is like, here’s a sword and Taran’s like, what does it do? And Dallben’s like, it stabs people. What do you want from me? Wes: It’s a normal sword, you assistant pig keeper. Bringing up the Book of Three is a good example of how at the end of that book, each of Taran’s party members, they all get a quest reward. That’s kind of fun. I mean, the best one is obviously Gurgi’s bag of never-ending food or whatever it’s called. Oren: I love his wallet of never-ending food. Wes: Wallet of never-ending food. That’s the best quest reward. Oren: That’s actually the version of the quest reward that I think is underappreciated, perhaps, by modern writers, just because that’s a fun bit of wish fulfillment at the end of the quest, and you don’t usually want to use that as the main stakes. If you’re using a quest reward as the stakes, you need to think about everything the stakes need. Like, what bad thing will happen if I don’t get this? Because readers care more about a bad thing that will happen than a cool, nice thing that you might get. But if you already have stakes, and you’ve got those all sorted, then a cool reward at the end is a lot of fun, and Gurgi’s wallet shows exactly the way to do it. It’s cool, it has a neat function, it’s novel, it’s kind of unique, it serves a specific need that the character has. Chris: It suits Gurgi. Oren: Yeah, it suits Gurgi. Chris: The other thing that’s really useful about that is that it is logistically useful in books down the line, because now it’s like, oh, the heroes are in a bunch of trouble. Geez, how are they getting food? They’ve been out in the wilderness for weeks. Oh wait, we have Gurgi’s wallet, so I don’t have to explain how they got food for traveling. That’s super useful to have. But also, it’s not like, broken. It’s not overpowered. Wes: That’s a good point. If the quest rewards happen in the resolution of the story, if you are working on a series, they can show up later. Maybe have a bigger part in another story. Oren: Just try to do better than whatever it was Eilonwy got. Like a pin or something? I think it did eventually have some random effect later that wasn’t really important, but I was like, oh right, yeah, I guess she had that pin. Everyone else got something cool, and Eilonwy got a pin. Not even like a super cool-looking pin. Wes: I remember like, Doli’s reward was, sure, you can turn invisible, but it’s gonna hurt. Oren: Teach you to whine about not being invisible. [Laughter] Wes: Yeah. Chris: That is a good point though about the usefulness, because if your character gets an item part way through the story, whether that’s the end of book one or several chapters in, it does have to come into play later. Which can be an issue in the latest D&D movie. They spend a huge amount of time just trying to get one item, and then it doesn’t really matter. I mean, we could say it kind of barely matters a little, but it doesn’t matter in proportion to the amount of time they spend getting it. Oren: But on the other hand, it gave me such joy whenever they slipped and called it the Helm of Dysfunction. So can we put a price tag on that, Chris? [Laughter] Spoilers for the D&D movie, but as opposed to this random staff that they just happen to have. And it was a portal staff, and they basically use it to solve all of their problems going forward. It’s like, now we’re thinking with portals, and I’m like, is this a D&D item? I don’t remember this in any of the magic item guides that I’ve read. Chris: Yeah, it’s like, why didn’t you spend your whole quest trying to get that item? That would have worked a lot better. Oren: Because we needed it earlier to get them out of a bunch of other situations we didn’t know how to get them out of. Chris: Yeah… On the other hand though, if you do have a section of your plot, and you realize that you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make a difference, adding an item that matters later can be a way of making that section of the story matter. So let’s say you do have a random quest that your hero goes on, and they don’t meet their objective and then they just go back to normal. And you’re like, okay, well, they just failed and nothing happened. So that thing they did doesn’t matter, but you really like it. Maybe they will, while they’re doing the thing that they ultimately fail at, also happen to find something important that they then use so that section of the story still matters. Oren: Yeah, that can be very handy. Chris: I also think rewards are useful for balancing karma. If the hero worked really hard, especially if they suffered a lot, we want to see them rewarded for that. And it plays not just a quest, but like other important struggles. For instance, if you have a coming of age story about a young hero, and that hero goes through their first battle, you would expect that to be a very difficult experience. So usually there will be something that comes out of that battle. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be an item, though. Or friendship was the reward. Oftentimes I think rewards are just leveling the hero up, especially when it’s a young hero. So they might get a new title. The example that I can think of that comes to mind is in Eragon in book two, we learn that he now has the title of Shadeslayer because he defeated the Shade at the end of book one. Oren: Oh, well, good for him. Chris: Right? Eragon is funny in some places, but that part is appropriate. It’s like, hey, you got some candy. People think you’re cool. They call you Shadeslayer now. And that’s your reward for going through that struggle and succeeding. Oren: Well, they’d better call him Shadeslayer… or die. Chris: No! [Laughter] Oren: That sort of use of quest rewards can also be very handy, especially in a story where the character was laboring for a particularly selfless set of stakes. Like if they were really trying to help other people a lot, they can feel like they deserve a little extra. And it’s better to give them a magic sword than to have someone fall in love with them as a reward in most cases. Chris: Oh, no. [Laughter] Oren: Or just give them someone as a spouse now, as used to be the tradition. I was looking for stories that had examples of this, so I checked out TV Tropes and it was like, okay, there’s like a couple of animes and some movies and some fantasy books and like fairy tales. And I opened that one and it’s like, oh, look at this long list of fairy tales. It’s like, man, how many of these are like a guy getting a wife under very shady circumstances? And the answer was more than I was comfortable with. Chris: Yep, there’s a lot of fairy tales like that. Now, to be clear, I think it’s okay for your hero to become really cool and do something cool and someone likes them afterwards. And that can in a way be a reward, but that’s very different from if you defeat the dragon, you get the princess’s hand in marriage. Oren: Yeah, I mean, having your hero become someone more romantically interesting, I think is fine. The issue is when they haven’t really done that, but now someone is way into them and it feels like you’re just giving them a prize. Long way of saying I agree. Wes: Shrek did a pretty good job with that. There are all these motivations happening. Shrek wants to go do this reward just to get everybody kicked out of his swamp. And Lord Farquaad is sending him on a quest to get the reward of a wife and he’s the bad guy, so it’s a bad thing to want. But then Shrek does the dragon quest, but then after that develops a relationship with Fiona. There was time for that romance to happen. So even though he and Donkey did rescue her from the tower, it’s just a little different enough from our standard fairy tales for sure. Chris: That’s an interesting example because they definitely invoke the trope without actually doing it too much because after he rescues Fiona, she does expect that he’s going to be this prince she’s going to marry. Now later we find out that what she’s hoping for is if she has this handsome prince and true love’s kiss or whatever kisses him, then she won’t become an ogre anymore. That’s what she’s actually hoping for. But what it appears is that he rescues her and then she’s like, oh yeah, that means we’re getting hitched, right? And the important thing is he says no. [Laughter] As opposed to this thing that we see often where it’s like, oh no, this is wrong, but she wants to so much. So I guess it’s okay. It’s like, yeah, then you’re just looking for an excuse to do the bad thing, storyteller. Wes: Yeah. [Laughter] Oren: Not a great thing to equivocate on, I would say. The good news is that the fear of clichés works in our favor because the whole go on a quest and get the princess’s hand in marriage is so well known that like very, very few authors will do it sincerely because everyone knows it. And so they’re like, no, it would be cliché. So it would be a faux pas to put that in my story. And it’s like, well, you’re not wrong, but that’s not the main reason. [Laughter] Chris: It’s also notable that even Disney movies have stopped with the like, they instantly fall in love after one dance at the ball routine. They subverted it with Frozen and their other recent movies to give people at least a little bit more time. Oren: Now they try to do an actual romance arc with varying degrees of success, but they’re trying. Chris: They’re trying. It just goes to show how outdated the whole I rescue the princess and she marries me or I do a task and get a wedding is at this point. If even Disney has cut it out. Oren: Finally caught up, Disney. Good job. We knew you could do it. Wes: Are there any particular quest rewards that you all really like in stories? Because I have a fun random one. Oren: Please tell. Wes: Well, I really like in Lord of the Rings in the books, because it doesn’t happen, unfortunately, in the movies is that basically in return for like helping the Ents out and befriending the Ents is that Merry and Pippin get to drink Entwash and they get huge. They become huge hobbits. Chris: Really? Wes: Yeah, they grow. They’re basically become, I don’t know, like dwarf sized. That’s important at the end for the scouring of the Shire because they’re both just like riding into town and Frodo and Sam are there, but they’re kind of broken people. Merry and Pippin are just like, huh, huh, and they save the Shire because they’re huge hobbits. Chris: I did not remember that part. Wes: It’s so funny. Oren: I’m imagining how much of a nightmare that would have been to try to do in the movies. Wes: I know. Oren: They were already employing very cutting edge film technology at the time to make the hobbits look short and make it look like that was naturally part of the scenes with the human-sized characters. And so at least when the hobbits were all by themselves, they didn’t have to do that. They could just film the hobbits normally. And now suddenly if Merry and Pippin are significantly taller, oh my God. [Laughter] I can see why they didn’t do that. Wes: It’s just a funny question because one, it literally makes them bigger. And then two, they return home and it’s like, look how much they’ve grown physically and metaphorically and spiritually. Oren: It’s a secret metaphor. Wes: Exactly. Plus Entwash. You’re drinking Ent sweat. Oren: Is that what that means? Is that just water that washes off of an Ent? Wes: I don’t remember what it is, but I know it’s just called Entwash. I mean, I think the Ents drink it, but it’s unclear. Chris: Probably not their sweat then? Wes: Probably not. Oren: Maybe they’re weird survival types, Chris. Who knows? [Laughter] Wes: That was a quest reward that always stuck with me because I thought it was funny, but I also really liked it when I first read the books. I was like, oh cool. These hobbits are big. They weigh probably like eight more pounds each. That matters for some reason. Oren: I actually enjoyed in the first season of the Mandalorian- I think it was the first season. Maybe it was the second season. I don’t know. Whichever one, when he gets the darksaber. Wes: Second season. Yeah. Oren: I thought that was pretty neat. I’m not super attached to him having it. Spoilers for the third season, but the reactionaries are mad because he gave it to Bo-Katan. I don’t care. I think it’s fine that she has it, but it was cool when he won it from Moff Gideon and had a cool darksaber. Wes: Yeah. And he wasn’t fighting Moff Gideon with the understanding he would even get it. Oren: Right. It was a whole. Moff Gideon happened to have it and he was like, well, I guess I’ll take this. And then they’re all like, no, you can’t give it away. It has to be won in combat. And he’s like, well, I guess I’m stuck with this for a while. [Laughter] Wes: And then I like the implication later where he uses it. And he’s like, oh my God, this thing sucks. It’s so heavy. Why does it hurt to use? [Laughter] Oren: Part of Dave Filoni’s obsession with having non-force users use lightsabers. It’s a common thread in a bunch of his Star Wars material. Chris: I have to say, I did really like the Beskar in the Mandalorian. He did something, he gets Beskar, brings it to the smith. It just feels kind of video gamey, doesn’t it? You get the Beskar and then you bring it somewhere and then the shopkeeper makes a thing for you. Wes: It was fun too for people like me who like, I didn’t know that their armor was made out of Beskar. You know, I just saw what looked like an impressive amount of money and I was like, oh, cool. He gets a lot of money and then I go and melt it down and make cool armor out of it. Yes, please. Oren: I honestly couldn’t remember if Beskar was invented for the Mandalorian or if it was part of Star Wars secondary canon before that. But yeah, it was kind of neat. It was like, here’s some metal ingots. It’s like, that’s an odd thing to get paid in. It’s like, oh, I see. It’s blaster proof armor. Chris: He also got the Beskar Spear as a reward. And I thought that was pretty cool because you could actually, I think, fight against somebody with a lightsaber with it. So that was a really neat thing and it was unique, but also useful. I don’t remember what happened to that thing. I’m sad he doesn’t have it anymore. Wes: Well, because you have to watch the Book of Boba Fett to understand what happened to it. Chris: Well, I did, but I tried to forget as much as possible. Oren: I was legit sad. What happened to that spear is that the armorer melted it down because like Beskar’s not for weapons, it’s for armor. And I’m like, all right. On the one hand, that does make sense because Beskar’s only real use as a weapon is if you’re going to fight someone with a lightsaber and have an ability to block lightsabers. And that doesn’t come up that often. So I get it. It makes sense, but I was still sad. I love that spear. I was really sad when she melted it down. Wes: Spears are great weapons. They need to be in more shows. Oren: Yeah, I do love spears. Someone get me like a Jedi with a long stick with a lightsaber taped to the end. [Laughter] I’m into this. It can be like in the extended universe books where they started introducing weird lightsaber customization features where you could have like a nine-foot lightsaber blade. Chris: Whoa. [Laughter] Oren: It’s like, this is getting out of hand. Chris: Let’s not do that. Oren: Or you could make your lightsaber catch on fire. So it would do extra fire damage. You know, if there’s one thing a lightsaber needs, it’s more damage. Chris: Well, apparently now somebody can walk away after they get stabbed through the midsection with a lightsaber. So apparently it does need fire damage. Wes: Yeah, I guess so. Oren: Yeah, that’s the problem, man. The Sith need that extra 1d6 of fire damage. They just can’t get a killing blow without it. [Laughter] Chris: For me, when it comes to negative treasure, cursed items, I always keep thinking of in Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the dragon bracelet. Oren: Oh, that thing creeped me out. Not because it turns you into a dragon. That’s fine. But because it didn’t grow when you became a dragon. Chris: That was really creepy. Oren: Just freaking crushing your arm now. I hate everything about it. I was scared to wear rings for years after that. Not like I wore a lot of jewelry anyway, but I was definitely mildly afraid of putting on a ring and worrying that my hand would grow while I was asleep. Wes: I get that for sure. Chris: Yeah, that part was not necessary. The thing that really helped the story was turning Eustace into a dragon. Oren: That is a good part of the story. It’s as good as Eustace’s arc was ever going to be. It resolves his arc really fast after that, but I still liked the dragon transformation. Chris: I do think that in a lot of cases with treasure, it is almost like a karmic problem where storytellers don’t want to give their heroes treasure unless they need it, not just because they want it. And there may be some exceptions, especially if the hero has kind of gone through a lot of excessive hardships to get the treasure. But I think in that case, that’s often when it’s, oh, we didn’t get the treasure, but friendship was the reward all along. [Laughter] We didn’t actually need it for anything as opposed to, oh, my parents’ business is going to be foreclosed on. Now I need money, and then you get treasure to pay for it. And then often heroes just give away the rest. Or if they get a bunch of treasure, they don’t need it for anything. They often give it away. Oren: Sometimes they put a portal on a balloon and the balloon spews the treasure out over the rest of the town. [Laughter] We’re getting close to the end here, but I do have one more thing I want to mention, which as I talked earlier about using quest rewards as the stakes. And there’s a cautionary tale I want to share, which is that you need to be careful that the quest reward isn’t just a cool thing that you as the author want your character to have. So I read the novel Chilling Effect a little while ago. Some spoilers for that novel. The big thing that the protagonist is trying to get at the end of the story is that she wants her ship back, because she had a cool ship at the beginning, and it gets stolen from her about halfway through. And now she has I guess a less cool ship? Although granted, it’s kind of unclear why her first ship is better, but it’s supposed to be better in some unspecified way. So her big motivation is that she wants to get her ship back, and it’s just kind of a weak motivation, because she doesn’t need the ship for anything. She’s already got a new ship, which I actually have more attachment to than the first ship, because she spent a bunch of time fixing it up and getting it space-worthy. So that felt a little too video game-y. That was like, yeah, well, we need to get the cool ship back so that it has better stats for us to blow things up better with. Chris: Are there any actual stakes, like negative stakes? Oren: No. If she doesn’t get her ship back, she won’t have her ship back. Chris: Right, so that’s the problem, is that’s not capable of generating tension, because it doesn’t matter. There’s no negative consequences if she doesn’t get her ship back. Oren: Yeah, basically. That’s the issue. And I’ve seen that sort of problem in client manuscripts on a fairly regular basis. This was just one of the only times I’d seen it in a published work, so I thought it was worth pointing out. Alright, well, I think that’s a good note to end this on. We now have the reward of a podcast episode. That’s basically good. That’s the same as a pile of gold. Chris: We can say that’s the reward we earned for talking for half an hour. You can read what you like into that. Okay, if you enjoyed this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have 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. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

Spell books and mystic sigils are all well and good, but what if you’re planning a story with lots of fights? For that matter, what if the spell books and mystic sigils are part of the fights? This week, we’re talking about how to design your magic system for maximum action entertainment. Sorcerous martial arts, psychic duels, and shimmering shields abound! Plus, you know there will be complaints about pro-bending, right? How could there not be?Show Notes Channeling The Art  Q  Bending  Blood Witches Pro-Bending The Force  Allomancy Orogeny  Borg Shields  Dragon Age Magic  Crouching Tiger, Hidden DragonTranscript Generously transcribed by Anna. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.  Chris: And I’m Chris. And before we get started, just letting you know we are looking for audio editing volunteers. No experience is necessary. We will train you just to make us sound good.  Oren: Please make us sound good. [Chris laughs] You have no idea how much we need that.  Chris: Anyway, just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.  Oren: Alright, so it’s time for a magic battle. Very exciting. So you’re gonna make a shield and I’m gonna shoot little bolts at the shield until it either goes away or I get tired. Does that sound like fun? It’s like a lot of fun, right? Very exciting.  Chris: To make it more exciting, maybe we can just make it last longer. You know, make it epic size?  Oren: Yeah, I could make the bolts real big and glowy.  Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’ll make the shield super huge. Oh, it’ll be a dome.  Oren: Everyone loves domes. So magic, designing magic systems is hard and I really struggle with it. So I thought that it would be useful to focus specifically on making a magic system that is for fighting. If you want to do a lot of magic fights in your setting, what should you design your magic to be like? Because I’ve encountered a number of stories, both published and unpublished, where the author clearly wants to have a lot of magic battles but did not design their magic to work for magic fights. And so as a result, the fights are boring, or contrived, or over too quickly and such. So this is a way to concentrate and figure out if this is what you want your magic to do. Chris: And like, usually when we talk about fights, we also have to point out the difference between movies and books because it’s not the same. Movies, of course, are very good at making magic look cool. So we can have what is actually a very boring magic system or just a magic system that’s not optimized for fighting. So maybe it’s interesting, but the fights would be really boring and they’ll do all kinds of things to make it look super cool. Even though the fight isn’t actually that exciting in a way that a book would take advantage of. A book has to focus more on the strategy of the situation and has to carefully communicate first what is happening, which is hard enough when you have a whole bunch of people moving around and not just moving around, but also using magic, which has to be explained.  And part of what is happening is who is currently winning and why. And then they have to know what could happen. Right? So if you want your protagonist to feel threatened, we need to know that something could threaten them. If your protagonist just comes up with whatever magic is super cool in the moment and can do just about anything (which there are lots of stories where that is the case), how do you threaten that person? They’re on fire right now, but we know that they can just kind of like, wave their wand and that fire will turn into water and they’ll be completely healed. There’s not going to be much sense of threat in that situation.  Oren: Wheel of Time has that problem, which, because the mages can do practically anything. Age of Myth has it even worse. The book Age of Myth, where the mages are just at Q-levels of power. So like when two of them are fighting, I have no idea who’s winning. One of them throws a house at the other one and it’s like, is that bad? Is having a house land on you a problem for these mages? I can’t tell. I have no way to know.  Chris: [laughs] So yeah, the first question is just, are you limiting your magic? If you have a really long range ability to like, blow up anything, it’s not going to be much of a fight. Somebody just does spells in their basement.  Oren: Anything that instantly ends the fight, that there’s no defense against, is not good. And it gets worse the more easily it can be used. Like the further away you have to be, or the less effort you have to put into it. Avatar starts to have that problem towards the end with Korra, especially with bloodbending. Like bloodbending is actually very boring. It’s fine as a scary thing for the bad guy to do to show how threatening he is. But once you actually get into the fights, he can’t use his bloodbending because it just ends the fight immediately. Winx Saga on Netflix had the same problem. There were a bunch of characters, they were called blood witches, who, their power was just instant mind control. And so to stop them from just ending fights immediately, we just had to introduce a bunch of situations in which their powers didn’t work. It just started to feel like now it’s gone the other direction. Now they just feel useless.  Chris: So just having good limits is really important to keep the fight interesting. Because if one person can just insta-kill the other person, there’s no strategy that can happen there. Or having a death spell that’s equivalent to just shooting a gun or like a wand. A gun is at least better because a gun can run out of ammo. If your character has a kill spell, they don’t have any reason but to point their wand at the other person and be like, “kill, kill, kill,” all over and over again. And that’s just not very interesting.  Oren: That also can get into another common problem, which is repetitive powers, where you have a bunch of different powers that more or less do the same thing. I’d rather not mention it, but there’s a certain wizard school story, which is the poster child for this, because the characters have like 50 different spells, all of which do some variation of “point your wand and it incapacitates whoever’s on the other end” in various ways. And it’s like, there are not that many ways that you can do that that are actually interesting. Like, oh, well now the blast you shoot is green instead of red. [Chris laughs] That doesn’t actually make it that much more interesting. And even Avatar starts to run into this problem in Korra, but not just in Korra, but that’s where it really starts to become obvious, is that they have different bending powers, but often the bending powers just kind of end up being various flavors of “push your opponent backwards.” That’s most notable in pro-bending, where they added a bunch of restrictions that made the fight less interesting, and now they literally are just shoving each other back and forth. And I don’t know whose idea that was, but it doesn’t work very well.  Chris: Right, it’s also because it was a kids show, and so they don’t really want to show people getting burned. So fire pushes people back now.  Oren: Roasting someone alive. So I wanted to talk about two extremely broad strategies that you can go with, with your magical combat. And I found that, I think pretty much all books are going to fall into one of these categories, but that’s not impressive. It’s just because they’re very broad. There is the enhanced physical fight, in which the characters are still fighting with their bodies in some capacity, but they have additional powers that help them do that. Avatar is like that. Star Wars is like that. The Art of Prophecy book that I’ve talked about a few times recently is like that. Mistborn is like that. Any kind of magical martial arts story is going to be that way. And then the other extremely broad category is where your protagonist is basically not using their body in any meaningful way, and is just dueling with powers themselves. Which is rarer, but still happens. And The Broken Earth is probably the most notable example right now. Because when two mages in The Broken Earth fight, what they do with their hands basically doesn’t matter. They’re entirely dueling with their magic powers. So first things first, pick one of those. Decide which one you want.  Chris: There is opportunity for a little bit of blurring. So if your characters aren’t really doing martial arts, but where they stand ends up mattering for how good the magic is. Maybe there’s some ley lines, and if they are immediately on top of that ley line, for instance, they can cast better magic. They might still have reasons to use maneuvering their position as a strategy during the fight, or doing magic to get the other person off of the ley line to reduce their power might be a thing. You can still use a little bit of movement and spacing if you want, but it’s not the same as doing martial arts with some magic.  Oren: Okay, so the first thing that I recommend for your magic, when you’re adding defensive magical options, you usually want those to be active defenses. Such as jumping out of the way, or some kind of difficult deflection spell, or something like that. You don’t usually want all of your magic defenses to be like a passive shield or a suit of armor. Some of that is fine. It can help explain how your characters survive, despite having these very spectacular attacks hurled at them. But if that’s like the entirety of their defense, then that just gets kind of boring, because they just stand there and take hits.  Chris: You definitely don’t want defenses to be super reliable, because you also don’t want, for instance, a shield spell that a character can just cast over and over again. You want the possibility that the defense will fail, or some way for the attacker to get around it so that they have to change tactics. I’m actually reminded of the Borg. They have adapted! [both laugh] Okay, this character’s using this type of shield. Maybe there’s a way to get around it, or certain types of spells that get past that type of shield.  Oren: Yeah, I mean, and like, the bad guy having a form of invincibility or resilience that they use offensively is a little different. The Borg don’t just like, sit there and wait for your phaser to run out. They come at you. So there’s a certain amount of like, alright, well now we can’t shoot them and we need to think of another way to beat them or something. And that usually involves shooting them with something that isn’t an energy weapon for some reason. [both laugh] Bullets, they could never adapt to that.  Chris: That is hilarious when sci-fi settings pull out, like, okay, but like, what about the physical bullet?  Oren: Yeah, Stargate did that too, where it was like, the replicators are basically immune to everything except bullets. Bullets can kill them. It’s like, well, that’s convenient.  Chris: So if you have a battle, it could be just magical or there’s no reason you couldn’t do this if you’re doing like, physical martial arts too. Basically you want to create strategies that you can communicate to readers and that your characters can use to be clever, right? And that can change from fight to fight. The more fights you have, the more you need to be able to vary those fights so that every fight doesn’t feel the same. So basically what you want is lots of different levers that you can pull to affect the outcome of the fight and make the situation different this time. And one way to do that is to just think through all the different ways that your magic can break down or go wrong, right? Which is something I encourage people to do anyway, because you’re always going to have times in the story where magic is a little inconvenient. And on one hand, it can be a little bit much if you’re like, oh, it’s like the transporter fails for a different reason every time. That would solve the problem. But still, it’s good for magic to not always work.  For example, it’s very common in magic systems for characters to need to concentrate to do magic. It’s like, just concentrate, just concentrate. But strangely, once a character learns to concentrate, that almost never goes wrong. I almost never see stories where the concentration is only for a little training arc that’s usually underdeveloped. We never see people who are proficient in magic have problems with concentration, but there’s so many reasons why we might not be able to concentrate. And there are tactics an opponent can use to break somebody’s concentration. Anything from just a loud bang right nearby, that would make it hard to concentrate. Or you could go with the whole “your loved ones calling out to you” thing if we want to be much more clever about it. But if your characters have to do X in order to cast magic, that’s potentially something that could be disrupted, even if it’s something like, internal, like concentration.  Similarly, if you have an elemental system and they need to have access to that element, they can’t just generate it automatically. You probably don’t want to take all of the element away from them because, or at least not for the full fight. Maybe you take it away and they get it back. But you could have a strategy that’s about reducing it. So for instance, if you have a water mage and a fire mage, and the water mage can’t control steam in the air, the fire mage might use a tactic that’s designed to grind down the amount of water that the water mage controls by boiling it.  Oren: I like that concept. I do find it kind of annoying when you have an elemental system and like only one element has that problem and it’s always water. It’s assumed for whatever reason by default that fire mages can just make fire and earth mages always have earth around, basically. Most of these stories never take place somewhere where there isn’t any earth. And then air mages always have air or they would be dead. But with water mages, it’s like, ah, well now there’s no water. Drat. [Chris laughs] It starts to feel like picking on water. Chris: Well, I will say if the fire mage can’t just create fire in thin air, the water mage is definitely going to have an advantage for that one. Oren: Yeah, I agree, I agree.  Chris: Yeah. And then your magic systems have their own trickiness because you need to make them roughly equivalent enough if you’re doing lots of fights.  Oren: They have to be the same but different.  Chris: Same but different. But for instance, if your characters have magic tattoos, okay, what happens when somebody gets injured in a way that breaks their tattoo? That creates a new pattern there. Could that mean that their magic goes wrong? And just look at all the aspects of your magic system. Be like, “okay, where could it break down?” That’s a potential attack vector that somebody could use and the fight could then focus on that. Now you need a reason why, again, they would do that instead of just doing the insta-kill spell, which is why you don’t really want insta-kill spells. You want something where a person has to be clever to get around the other person’s kind of defensive or has a reason to try to get an advantage, right, for later in the fight.  Oren: The Broken Earth is actually a very good example here. So The Broken Earth has a clear objective that you’re trying to achieve in a magic battle, which is you are trying to break the other mage’s Torus, which is a fancy way of saying their little donut of magic that’s around them. Because if you break that, you can’t use your powers without an intact Torus, and if you can’t use your powers, you’re basically helpless against another mage. And so first it’s like, alright, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to break their Torus. And then, how do you do that? And so it creates this interesting system where you have to try to figure out, okay, should I put all of my energy into one point and attack there, but then they can avoid that attack? Should I split them into multiple attacks and hit them from different directions? And you have to try to find different sources of power from within the ground, because it’s all geology-based, so you’re trying to find hot spots or pockets of gas that you can use to draw power from. And so it creates a very active magic system. With a goal that is clear and easy to understand, but multiple ways to accomplish it. And no, like, one single, “I get out my Torus-piercing bullet and shoot it.” It’s a remarkably good combat system. I really like it.  One of the problems with that book is that there isn’t nearly enough mage-on-mage fighting, even though that’s like the best part. [Chris laughs] Because it’s an Oppressed Mages story. It’s like, I would really love it if the battle was between two factions of mages instead.  Chris: Yeah, that sounds cool. Oren: It’s so cool. Anyway, so that’s an example. There aren’t that many examples of books with good magic systems for fighting.  Chris: Unfortunately.  Oren: Broken Earth is one of the few I could find, and so I feel the need to trumpet it.  Chris: Well, I mean, similarly to, you know, what makes the magic break down, you could also go with, can you add something fun that would give somebody an advantage? You just have to be, again, be careful that the advantage is not too big, because you don’t want, like, “I do this and then the battle is over.” Well, I mean, that might be very convenient for one fight, but if you have lots of fights. For instance, my example of, maybe it matters where they stand, and then you have a reason for them to try to do a weird king-of-the-hill situation, for instance, where they’re both trying to stand on this little hillock and like fighting over it. [laughs] Oren: “You give me that. That’s my hilltop!”  Chris: Or anything else that could be interesting. One of them is upwind, or has other things about them. Items on them. Maybe you have a system where they have rings that help a little bit, and they can knock rings off of each other’s hands or something like that. So there’s lots of different options here, but basically you’re looking for things that could make the difference, you know, give an advantage or a disadvantage, or be the difference between winning and losing, so that you have different things to focus on in different fights.  And it’s also helpful, I think, if your mages are a little different from each other. And it doesn’t have to be like they inherently have one talent or the other, but you know, they can be trained in certain ways so that they focus on some tactics over other tactics. And that way they can do a little bit of sizing up. What’s this person good at, what they’re not good at. Just like all the times when we have physical fights. It’s all about, okay, this person is very fast, but they’re not very strong, so they can’t take a hit very well. That kind of thing. It’s also nice if you can do that during magic battles. Oren: I had one client story, and I’m changing the details of this because it’s a client story, but the general concept is the same, where the idea was basically that characters can activate more magical abilities, but doing that comes with risk of either exhausting themselves faster or losing control of their magic. So it was like (as an example, this isn’t what it actually manifested as, but without telling you the details of someone’s unpublished story), suppose you had a series of magic gemstones. You could like, socket them into your magic wrist gemstone holder. And the more you put in, the more powers you had access to, but also the faster you are drained and the greater the chance of a bad reaction between the two spells. So that creates an interesting choice that the character has to make, of like, “Okay, how many powers do I want at one time? What’s the risk worth here?” That was just a really cool concept, and it introduced a bunch of fun strategies for the mages in this client’s story to use in fighting. I really liked it. Chris: Yeah, any time the choice to use magic has to be strategic. Like, one of the things that’s interesting is if you have a system where you have to prepare magical things in advance, as opposed to just during the fight doing spells, that can be, you know, that has its own strengths and weaknesses. But if your character is like, okay, I’ve used up my magical battery, and now I have a finite number of spells that I can use, these spells left, now I have to suddenly be strategic. And there’s a cost to using magic now. And now I can only use it if it’s actually worth it, right? Where I have to like, “wait till I see the whites of their eyes” is basically the equivalent. [Oren laughs] Don’t shoot until you have a good shot, because we have limited ammunition. It’s similarly, you gotta hold on and only use a spell once you know it will have maximum effect if you only have a limited number of spells. So anything that has a tradeoff that comes with a cost, then the character has a reason to be more strategic than they were before, as opposed to again, just spamming the insta-kill spell as fast as you can for the entire fight.  Oren: If you’re primarily experienced with magic systems through videogames, this is a place where you’re going to run into problems. Because in a videogame, you can have like, fire, lightning and ice. And each of those have a different, like secondary effect. Fire puts a damage over time, lightning gives a paralysis and ice slows them or something. And like in a videogame, sure, that totally could work. But in a story, unless it’s a very specific type of story, hitting someone with fire, lightning or ice will have roughly the same effect in that they will be dead. [both laugh] Those secondary effects aren’t going to matter, so you have to think about it in terms of real humans and the way real human bodies work. You can’t count on very abstract secondary effects that only work in video game logic.  Chris: Unless you’re a Dragon Age cartoon show, though.  Oren: Yeah, I mean. [both laugh]  Chris: This new Dragon Age show, which was very surprising that it kept using all the same mechanics as the videogame.  Oren: Yeah, it was weird. Character gets like, stabbed in the back and just walks it off because they’re fine. Because they have hit points left.  Chris: Well, it does feel like Dragon Age. So that’s success there, I guess.  Oren: Yeah, it definitely feels like Dragon Age. [both laugh] Chris: I think it’s worth looping back on the fact that you want to make characters do more with less. We’ve talked about these situations where we have magic powers that just get out of hand. And I think bloodbending is such a great example because it shows you why we add things like that to the story in the first place. For one episode, it was really impressive and cool and intimidating. And so it had its purpose at that time. But then when we start to use it more and we get used to it, then suddenly it’s bloodbending everywhere all the time and our fights are just less interesting.  Oren: Right. And I was thinking about bloodbending too, right? Because I was like, all right, what if they… Because in Korra, they added a ton of special things onto bloodbending to make it even more overpowered.  Chris: And they didn’t have to.  Oren: That was a completely unforced error. There was no reason to do that.  Chris: I do think that once you add something that’s cool to your story, you want to bring it back outside of its original context. And that’s part of the problem here. Because originally, bloodbending was very difficult. It could only do it during the full moon.  Oren: And that was something that I was thinking about. I was like, what if they hadn’t added all of that nonsense to bloodbending that they do in Korra and make it able to take bending away and work when not on a full moon and not even have to make motions to do it? What if they just hadn’t done any of that? What role would bloodbending have had in the story? And I was forced to conclude I still think it would be kind of not good because it would basically just come down to Katara can auto-win a one-on-one fight during full moons. That’s what bloodbending came down to. If it requires full moons, that basically means it almost never comes up. Except if it did come up on a full moon, then the fight would be kind of boring.  Chris: There’s exactly one bloodbending plot you can do, which is “character learns bloodbending for the first time.” [laughs] Oren: You could arrange things so that on the full moon, she has to fight multiple enemies because she can only bloodbend one person at a time, presumably. So maybe you could make it work that way. But once you find yourself having to limit a power by like, a certain time slot that it can be used in, that’s already a bad sign. Chris: Right, I mean I do think with bloodbending we could have had maybe one additional episode where Katara uses it when she really doesn’t want to. Right? Uses it out of desperation. And then the full moon just doesn’t come back for the rest of the show. And fast forward to Korra, Korra learns bloodbending for the first time. It’s also still super creepy, the end.  But yeah, besides that, I think the other thing that happens a lot is that people who show their protagonist learning magic, they really want the climax to be showing, “Oh hey look at all the cool, powerful things they can do now!” But that doesn’t actually make for the most exciting climax. Because you’re just escalating all of the powers. They probably won’t feel threatened. It’s going to be really hard to keep track of what’s going on. So I think in many cases it’s almost better to, if your protagonist is growing in power, make them show off during the penultimate fight. And then for this climax, force them to show a lot of ingenuity by taking things away from them, right?  And again, if you have lots of levers, if you have reasons why your magic wouldn’t work, then you should be able to do this. If you don’t have any way to take the magic away from them, then you’re kind of forced to wait until the very end of the story to give them magic so that it doesn’t get in the way of conflict. But if you have those levers, then what you can do is they can show off for the penultimate fight and then during the climax, “Oh no! Their magic item was broken or their magical battery is out” or, you know, whatever you want to do, and then show that they are so good that they can overcome this obstacle by being clever. And showing finesse, for instance, instead of just like raw power. That kind of thing. Or in some cases, you can loop back onto the lessons that they were learning when they were just starting. It’s like, “Oh, you need to be more disciplined. You know, do your breathing exercises.” “Oh, breathing exercises are so boring!” And then like, at the very end, “Oh, I’ve got nothing left except for these breathing exercises.” [both laugh] Oren: A breathing exercise to save the world.  Chris: Something like that.  Oren: Here’s a question as we’re coming to the end of our time: What did you think of the magic fighting in Mistborn?  Chris: Now that I think about it, it did feel kind of like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn’t actually think about it that way at the time, but when I was told after, I was like, oh yeah, that does make sense because they’re leaping off of rooftops a lot.  Oren: Right, if you are a Mistborn in the setting, you can do that. That’s one of the things about it that I found kind of annoying is that it felt like, to do the cool stuff, you basically have to be one of the Special Mages who gets all eight powers. Because like, with just one of those powers, there’s not really a lot you can do. But with all eight of them, you can base, or at least with, there are a few that don’t really matter, but with like two or three, you can do magical kung-fu fighting.  Chris: On the plus side though, that means that you can have your super special chosen one who has all of the powers and not have them insta-win because they’re super powerful.  Oren: That’s true.  Chris: That’s definitely a tradeoff. There’s so many people who want to do the trope of,  “My main character has all the powers and everybody else just has one.” Right? It’s good wish fulfillment. I think that when you get to an elemental system that has like eight different elements, right? It’s one thing for Aang to have access to all four elements. Of course he also has the Avatar State, which is the real broken.  Oren: Yeah, that’s the real issue.  Chris: But if you have eight elements, think of how much that magnifies the difference in power level and it’s just gonna make it harder for you to keep that under control.  Oren: Or alternatively, the way that Mistborn addresses that problem is that like five of the eight kind of suck [Chris laughs] and they don’t really matter that much. It’s like, “Oh boy, I have eight powers. One of them is: the ability to notice when someone else is using magic.” And then another one is the ability to prevent that first power from working. There’s like the one to see far away, which is situationally useful. And then there’s like the three that are actually good, which is super strength, and then like the ability to pull metal towards you or push it away from you, which are like the three that actually matter in the story.  Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s worth noting that Mistborn also has a limit in that they all rely on metals that get burned up. So you have kind of a limited time span quantity, which is also, I think, a good choice there.  Oren: It gives you a good built-in reason why they can’t use their powers forever. Admittedly, it does have certain shades of like, they’ll get tired because I don’t know how long the metal that they’ve taken will last. They can tell me in the story, but like, I have no way of knowing how many seconds have gone by.  Chris: If you have any limit that’s like they get tired, their energy fades, or, you know, we have a limited quantity of material, something that’s, you know, not binary, that’s like an amount that diminishes, the key is really being consistent about it and not just, hey, this would be a convenient time for them to get tired. It should always be present and used consistently, and then it will feel a lot better.  Oren: Alright, well, that’s a good note, I think, to end this podcast because we are out of time.  Chris: If you found this episode useful, become a patron. You can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have 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. We’ll talk to you next week.  [Outro Music]

Turning points. We know them, we love them. Without a turning point, a conflict gives no satisfaction – it just fizzles out. But are all turning points good? Absolutely not. This week, we’re showing you the highest highs and the lowest lows of all the turning points we could find. And some of the bad ones aren’t even from the MCU. Amazing!Show Notes Turning Point Character Karma Fractal Plotting  Free Guy Daughter of the Moon Goddess  Space Opera  Rocky  Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness  Elantris  The Separation  Spider-Man: Homecoming  Wolfpack Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: [dramatic voice] The Mythcreant Podcast is in dire straits. For one, Wes was clearly captured by a villain. Why else wouldn’t he be here?  Oren: Oh no. Chris: Now, it’s the moment of truth. Can we save the podcast with our clever wits or unfaltering determination? [end dramatic voice] Speaking of which, we could use some audio volunteers. [laughter] Yes, that’s right. The turning point is you, dear listeners. If you’re interested, no experience necessary, we’ll train you how to do it. Just go to mythcreants.com slash volunteer. [*ting* sound] Oren: You can help us sound way smarter than we actually are. Chris: Okay, I will now assume the podcast was saved. Or, alternately, we just committed a misdeed by asking for volunteers during the opening gag. Oren: Oh, no! Chris: We’ll get our comeuppance shortly. Oren: We have bad character karma now, that needs to be balanced out. Chris: So, this time we are talking about good and bad turning points. What are turning points again? That is a very valid question. Oren: Yeah, who is turning point? Chris: They’re one of the most advanced storytelling concepts. When we’re doing editing, we don’t usually talk about turning points unless the plot is already pretty strong. Because they do take a little bit of effort to wrap your brain around. But basically, a turning point is how you make your resolution feel satisfying, feel right. You’ll have a moment at the climax–the climax of the climax, if you will. And that is the difference between failure and success. And your protagonist needs to do something impressive under difficult circumstances. Or, alternately, if it’s a downward turning point, it means they did something like taking the easy route. Or succumbing to temptation. So you can have a satisfying ending that is happy or sad. Either way, it just makes the outcome feel deserved. And it gives it meaning, too. If you don’t have a good turning point, a lot of times the end just feels kind of pointless. Because you’re not making a point. So, there are many different ways you can do turning points. And, it would take quite a while for us to get into it. But generally, most of the time we’re focusing on positive turning points because most stories end happily. So, that’s what you’re going to focus on. And usually, the hero is going to win because they’re clever, or they’re selfless, or they persevere and do what is necessary, such as making a sacrifice.  Oren: You’re usually demonstrating one or more of those three qualities when you’re doing a turning point. There are occasional other things, but those are the ones that will get the job done most of the time. Chris: Turning points actually happen at all levels of the fractal. When you get to the big climax of the story, you really want the protagonist to do something that feels impressive, that stands out. So if they’re making a sacrifice, it has to be a significant sacrifice. If they’re going to be clever, the puzzle should seem real difficult. If they have to just push past pain–this is a common one that comes up in movies because movies have a little bit more trouble with turning points. If you see a moment where the hero gets shot and then they manage to get up again, generally that’s their turning point. It’s like, see, because they had willpower and they just pushed through all that pain. Which we can talk about whether that’s a good idea, but that’s what they’re doing there. Oren: I mean, it tends to work better in movies because we can have the actors there to show us how much pain they’re in. And so it’s like, all right, well, that looks like an effort of will. That was hard work. So not that you can’t do it in prose, it’s just a little more difficult to communicate emotion at that level. Chris: So should we start with a good turning point, or a bad one? Oren: Well, we should start with something nice, I think. Chris: Okay, so my favorite still is the climax of Free Guy. For anybody who’s not familiar, the concept of this movie is that the main character is a video game NPC, non-player character, and he basically starts to gain the powers of a player. And again, I’m going to have to spoil this. We’re going to spoil all the things we’re talking about because we have to talk about the ending turning point. So there’s not really a way to get around that, sorry. So the way that he manages to get the powers of a player is he gets these special glasses. Before, he was operating on a predetermined route where he would just repeat the same actions over and over again as an NPC. And then he gets the glasses on and suddenly he sees that he’s just repeating himself and starts learning and kind of evolving beyond that little NPC role and becoming a protagonist. And as the movie goes on, he wants to empower all the other NPCs. So he’s trying to encourage them to rethink what they’re doing and try new things and experiment. But these glasses are, you know, enabling him to do what he does and giving him a lot of power. So the villain controls the game server, and to get rid of Free Guy, he creates Dude. [laughter] So the characters are Guy and Dude, don’t forget, which is a version of Guy who’s super muscled and has been designed just for violence. I designed this super violent NPC for the explicit purpose of replacing Guy and also tearing him apart. So the climax is when we do this fight, which is kind of like a mirror mode fight, except for Dude, of course, has been given all of these inherent fighting abilities. The turning point comes when Guy, the main character, just in case you mix up Guy and Dude, has been pinned down by Dude and is really struggling and he’s getting choked. And, for the turning point, he puts his all-powerful glasses on Dude. It’s such a good turning point because it just meets multiple criteria for what makes a happy ending feel deserved. For one thing, putting the glasses on Dude shows that Guy considers Dude to be another person, who is worthy of agency and having his own life outside of the constraints that have been programmed for him, despite the fact that he’s being actively attacked by Dude. So that’s really selfless. Oren: It shows a level of compassion that is refreshing to see in big budget movie characters.  Chris: So, it meets the selfless criteria, but it’s also just very clever. We know that he became self-aware when he got his glasses. Giving your greatest weapon, that he’s been using continuously during the fight, to the person who’s about to defeat him is just not an intuitive move to make. So it’s a very clever thing to do on top of that. And then, instantly after that turning point happens, we see the reward. Dude is really delighted to have these new glasses, and so he just gets distracted playing with the glasses and doesn’t bother trying to go after Guy anymore. Oren: Yay! Yeah, no, that was really good. That movie was better than I expected it to be. I was admittedly a little bit like, oh man, it’s another Ryan Reynolds vehicle where he’s playing a video game protagonist. But it worked out much better than I thought it would. Okay, so this one is a little less well-known. This is from a novel that I read recently called Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan. So, the protagonist has a problem, which is that she needs to give the Emperor these pearls that she’s found so that he’ll release her mother. But the pearls contain the souls of these dragons, and that’s why the Emperor wants them, because he wants to control the dragons. And the dragons don’t want to be controlled by the Emperor, because the Emperor’s kind of a rude man. So we have this moral dilemma. And so here she has a clever realization, that I really liked, where she realizes that she promised to give the Emperor the pearls, but didn’t say anything about the dragon souls. Those were just assumed, because they’re attached to the pearls. And so she realized that she can free the dragons, so that no one can control them, and then give over the pearls, which fulfills her end of the bargain. Now admittedly, as I read this, I was like, okay, this feels like maybe this is an invitation for the Emperor to fulfill his side of the bargain by releasing the mother into a pit of snakes. [laughter] But I was like, all right, it’s not perfect, but it’s very clever. I like it. I thought it made sense. It had a very, almost fairy tale type of ending quality to it. And I should note, all of my examples, my good ones, are from books, because I’ve noticed that books tend to have a harder time with turning points than movies and TV shows do. So I desperately looked for book turning points to find, and I eventually compiled my list. If it was me, if I was editing that, I might have suggested that they make it so that the Emperor doesn’t realize that the dragons aren’t in the pearls until after he’s released the mom, and then they, like, get out of town. [laughter] I think that would have been my suggestion to improve that a little bit. But it still, it wasn’t bad, as was. It worked fine. Chris: The other option, if you really want to feel good editing and don’t want to feel like the protagonist just got one over on the Emperor and actually fulfilled her deal, I think you would need to change the Emperor’s character. Oren: You could make the Emperor someone who would respect that kind of cleverness. I honestly would have preferred that. I found the Emperor a little bit too cacklingly evil. But yeah, that would also have worked. Chris: And you just do some things early in the story to demonstrate that your evil character is actually very lawful and respects that kind of thing. Alright, how about a bad one? Oren: Yeah, tell me a bad one. I’m ready. Chris: Okay. I think the baddest one has to be Space Opera. Oren: Oh gosh, Space Opera. Man, that’s been a while. This is the novel by Catherynne Valente?  Chris: Mm-hmm. It managed to have not one, not two, but three deus ex machinas. Oren: I wrote this in an article, but I don’t remember what they all are now. It’s been so long. [https://mythcreants.com/blog/six-stories-with-failed-turning-points/] Chris: Basically, we’re in a music contest that is supposed to prove that humanity is sentient enough to continue existing, and the humans have no way to win because all of the aliens basically cheat. Like, they have a song that releases brain worms, and the brain worms go into the audience and then give them various feelings, and that’s why their music is supposed to be better. It’s like, okay, but that’s not music, that’s just technology. Oren: Yep, they have mind control worms or super tech or whatever, and it’s like, alright, this is clearly rigged from the start. And yet, at the same time, also it feels too easy, because remember, they don’t have to win, they just have to not come in last. And it’s really weird to me that they aren’t talking about that more, they aren’t being like, okay, how do we make sure we beat whoever the other worst team is? They just never acknowledge that. And in fact, at one point, I thought they had actually just won by default, because a number of teams were sabotaged and didn’t show up, and it said that they were automatically losers. So I guess that doesn’t count? But I thought it did for a while, and I was like, alright, I guess they have won now. [laughter] Chris: So, basically, a weird alien creature is born, and other things show up at the end that basically screws up the humans’ number when they try to perform. But then because it’s so screwed up, people are like, yeah, we decided we like this. And nothing about it is due to any effort on the part of the protagonists. There’s no agency involved. They don’t make any choices that lead to this outcome at all. The funny thing is that it really would have been better if they had just done what everybody in this contest is doing, which is to eliminate your competition, because that’s allowed–for people to just attack another team. Oren: Except apparently not. I don’t know why they even bother doing that, since apparently those teams are just not counted anymore. I don’t know. That was weird. I don’t understand how this ranking system works. Chris: So yeah, deus ex machinas obviously are always a problem, because you need to lay the groundwork for whatever your solution is early, so that it doesn’t feel like you’re just making random stuff up in the moment. But also, your main character has to do something to bring about the end. That’s absolutely essential. Oren: Alright, I found my article where I mentioned what the other two were. So after this weird alien birth happens, a side character suddenly decides to help them, and it’s like, why is he helping them now? Why didn’t he help them at any other previous point? And the answer is, there is no answer. He just decides to, because the story’s almost over. And so he uses time magic to bring back their dead band member to help them perform. And it’s like, okay. And at this point, it’s kind of unclear, do they even need more help? Because again, they don’t have to win, they just have to be better than last. And then suddenly, the big space black holes who are sapient, or alive in this setting, show up to sing backup for them, because they just think that their song of losing their band member is so sad and tragic. But there was another person here who was singing about losing his entire species. Why is that not tragic enough to get the black holes to show up? It just reminded me of Star Wars, when Leia is comforting Luke, who has lost an old man he’s known for two days, and Leia has lost her entire planet. It was just so weird. And it was also weirdly unnecessary, because it felt like they had already achieved their objective. Chris: It’s weird how little most of these deus ex machinas actually have to do with the final outcome. We had a creature birth, and that doesn’t really matter, and we brought our dead friend back, and that doesn’t really matter either. Oren: It would be sort of like if how in Rocky, the big goal with Rocky is that he’s trying to last the whole fight with the champ. He’s not even trying to win. It’s a victory if he gets all the way through it. It would be like if they kept saying that, but then as the fight went on, there were just random people showing up to help him to not only win the fight, but to become the world boxing champion in the last five minutes of the movie. Okay, my turn for a bad one. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, in that it made me mad. I assume that’s what they meant. There are not one, but two big turning points in the ending of this movie that are solved by pep talks. First you have Doctor Strange, who is doing a weird communion where he’s trying to get control of the extra dark powers, and a bunch of ghosts are showing up and giving him grief. And his alternate universe girlfriend, Christine, gives him a little pep talk about how you tell those ghosts you’re the boss of them. And he’s like, oh yeah, I guess I should do that. And then he does it. And he’s like, alright, that was weird. And then a little bit later, we have Strange goes up to America Chavez, who is the sexy lamp of this movie, because she doesn’t really do anything, but she does have a randomly malfunctioning portal power that will move the characters around through dimensions whenever the writers want it to. So now they’re in the big fight against the bad guy, and Doctor Strange is like, hey, America, you actually can use your powers if you just believe in yourself. And then he tells her that she’s been controlling her powers the whole time, which is obviously not true. [laughter] I might even respect the movie a little more if it was a deliberate lie to give her confidence, but I don’t think it is. I think we’re supposed to think he’s telling the truth, and somehow that works. That gives her the ability to control her powers that she hasn’t been able to control for the entire movie. Chris: You know, considering that she remembers using her powers to send her moms away to a different dimension, you think that would make her feel a little guilty? Oren: You would think, but it’s okay, because the moms only exist for five seconds so that we can cut them out for releases in any countries that have anti-gay laws. So she can’t feel bad about them later, because then that would make it harder to cut out, you see. Chris: Ooh. Oren: We’ve solved it. Chris: Oh, no. Oren: The real villain was Disney’s moral cowardice. [laughter] Chris: Oh, dear. Oren: Although I will give Doctor Strange a little bit of credit. Once America has miraculously gained the ability to control her powers, her idea of opening a portal to a world where Wanda the villain’s imaginary magic children are real is actually very good. I actually like that quite a lot, because that’s a clever idea and it makes sense, and it’s actually something that she could think of and fits with what was happening instead of just suddenly being able to do something. Chris: Right, because having her children be gone is Wanda’s entire motivation for all of her villainy. It’s not really giving her what she wants, because the other version of Wanda is also there, but then her kids can look at her and be like, how could you do this? Oren: Right. It’s totally believable that, A, Wanda’s kids would freak out because this evil witch lady is in their house, and that this would get through to Wanda the villain as these kids that she apparently cares for a lot. I don’t buy that part of the story, that she cares about these fake magic kids she invented, but if we assume that she does, which the movie tells us she does, and that’s what America knows, then them thinking she’s a monster would have some effect on her. So that part of it makes sense. Chris: Alright, back to good. Oren: Yeah, give me another good one, Chris. Chris: Since somebody’s like, oh, we should talk about books. Oren: Mmhmm. Chris: I like the turning point in Elantris, Brandon Sanders, good old Brando Sando, because it’s about the magic system, and everybody knows he loves his magic systems. And so, it’s really nice to see a storyteller who then makes the problems about the things that they care about, and then makes that at the center and makes a turning point about it. So, in this case, Elantris is this fallen city that used to be basically heavenly looking, glowing buildings, glowing people who have magic and lived forever. And something happened ten years prior where the city just broke, and the people in it just kind of broke. So they still technically live forever, but now they feel the pain of all of their wounds. So they become, you know, non-functional pretty quickly. The main character, Raoden, starts to problem solve how this magic system works during the book, and he studies all of these symbols, and in the great cataclysm that broke the city, there was a big rift that was created. So it came along with a huge natural disaster, and as he puts together the pieces, he realizes that the magic system has symbols that are based on physical features, and that a very big important symbol stopped working because there was a new physical feature in the land that was created, and the symbol no longer matched. So for the turning point, he figures that out, and then draws a line in the ground to fix the symbol. Oren: That’s very Brandon Sanderson. Chris: [laughing] It’s very Brandon Sanderson, yeah. But that’s what I really like about it, is because I’m always trying to encourage people to, you know, you can make problems about anything, so you don’t have to add lots of action if that’s not actually what you care about. And so I just love that as an example. Oren: Center your darlings. Chris: Yep, center your darlings. Oren: If this is what you care about, make it the whole point, don’t keep cutting away from the point to get to the thing you care about. Alright, so I’ve got another one. This is from one of the Animorphs books, because I’ve been doing an Animorphs reread. This is from the book Separation, and the basic plot of this book is that Rachel, who is the group’s badass, gets split in two Captain Kirk-style. Fortunately, one of her versions doesn’t become a sex pest, I appreciate that. Chris: [laughing] Oh, no. Oren: But she has mean Rachel and nice Rachel, is what they describe them as. There’s some not 100% perfect things in the depiction that I would change if I could, but the basic concept is solid, which is that one side of her has the courage, and the aggression, and the short-term thinking, and the other side of her has her long-term planning, and her ability to care about others and empathize with them. So, the aggressive side is a huge badass but can’t make plans and is constantly messing things up because all she wants to do is charge in, and then the more passive side struggles to do anything because she doesn’t have any courage to help her get over her fear. You have that classic sci-fi setup, and in this case they manage to arrange a scenario where the climax depends on the two of them working together, which demonstrates a certain amount of perseverance, because they really don’t like each other. This is also symbolic of Rachel having a problem where she’s starting to think that she’s a bad person, so she has a lot of self-hate and the two sides don’t like each other, but they have to work together. They need the planning of the passive side and the ability to kick butt of the active side. And then of course they have to make a plan together, and that shows a certain amount of cleverness. And, I also just really appreciated how this book managed to make Rachel’s character arc its throughline, which is a thing that I hear a lot of authors want to do but is very difficult, and they managed to do it in this episode, while also leaving a hook because there was a Yeerk project that they were trying to stop that they weren’t able to, and so they continue to stop it in the next book. But it doesn’t feel like there was a bad resolution because Rachel’s character arc was introduced first, and was more urgent. So it was just very cool. It was a cool way of externalizing the character arc, and I liked when they worked together, and it was just a fun little turning point. Give me a bad one, Chris. I’m ready. Chris: Spider-Man: Homecoming. Oren: Aww yeah, I love that one! Haha! Chris:  So this is actually a very frequent problem that we see with turning points, is where the protagonist just does the same thing and gets different results. Or just does it like, with more spunk. It’s like, were you not trying the first time? So in Spider-Man: Homecoming, we’re going with the theme of great power comes with great responsibility. So, Spider-Man decides to go and solve this big problem, fight this bad guy on his own without calling any backup, and it leads to…was a building being split in half or something? Oren: A boat, yeah. He’s on a boat, and the boat gets split in half. Chris: The boat gets split in half. And afterwards, Iron Man berates him for being irresponsible. It’s like, you shouldn’t have taken on this thing and now all this disaster was created. You have not learned your lesson. And then, for the climax, we do the same thing. He does a big fight on an airplane, and the airplane crashes. So that’s just as destructive as the first time, but he manages to catch the villain. And this time Iron Man is totally cool with it. So he made the same decision, it’s just this time he punched a little better. And, that’s not something he should be rewarded for. Oren: This is definitely a thing that comes up in a number of stories that I’ve worked on where the character’s arc is that he shouldn’t do the thing that he needs to do for the plot to work. And it’s like, that’s just not a good arc. There’s no way that’s going to be satisfying. And this movie, it seems like Peter has this arc of not going and saving the day by himself, because that’s irresponsible. I mean, sure, you can make that argument, but he’s a superhero. That’s literally what he has to do. So there’s no way that character arc is going to end in a way that’s satisfying. Chris: Yeah, if there was something about his earlier decision, if he was supposed to call for backup and get help, and then he accepted help the second time or something, anything that’s different. But no, he just does the same thing again. And there’s no real learning. Oren: You could also set it up so that Tony is wrong, and that Tony is basically trying to prevent Peter from doing stuff because he doesn’t think Peter’s ready, but Peter is ready. And that’s possible. You could do that, too. It’s just, they didn’t. It’s just like, I’m going to do this again, but this time it works. Chris: Because. Oren: Yeah, because. Because it has to, because the movie’s almost over. All right, I got one more. It’s the ending of Wolfpack. Chris: Ohh, yup. Oren: Because–spoilers for the end of Wolfpack. What is even happening here? First, all of the main characters get sent off to their rooms, basically. One of them gets arrested. One of them gets non-consensually committed to a mental health facility. One of them, her brother and her get taken away by social services. And then Luna, the last one, she just stays in the car. [laughter] Like, as far as we know for that entire episode, she’s still just sitting in the car. Chris: Yeah, there’s no real turning point, unless you think of AU Buffy. We call her “AU Buffy”, it’s “Alternate Universe Buffy”, because she’s played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she has definitely been styled to look exactly like Buffy, like makeup and everything. So she’s AU Buffy. Unless she’s the main character. Oren: Right. She goes and has a final fight with a retired fireman. Chris: You know, a normal dude. They’re so scary. Oren: A normal guy, not even like a soldier or a police officer or someone who is good at fighting, just an ex-fireman who’s been working as a janitor for the last 10 years. And she has a gun, and is a werewolf. And she also has backup. She has another badass dude with a gun and her werewolf son is also there. It’s like, what is this? Why is this happening? Chris: And she’s presented as being somewhat antagonistic for most of the season. So she just kind of steps in and gets everything she wants. Nobody else really has any kind of turning point. It’s just like all of the Teenie characters had their turning point in episode seven. The one thing they do choose to do, that if we were going to change it, is they do have to make the decision in the final episode to go to a parent and tell their parent about the problem. I can definitely see, in a different show, there being an episode about that. But when you have the final episode, that’s just not really climactic enough. Oren: Right. Especially since it doesn’t even change anything. Because what specifically is happening is that they have a former werewolf. He’s been stabbed. So now he’s in human form, and he’s dying. And they have to decide whether or not to tell their parents, or the one particular parent, the one who knows about werewolves. And they argue about it for a while, and then they eventually decide to. But as I’m watching, I’m like, what is he going to do if they tell him?  Chris: He takes the werewolf to the hospital, and then the werewolf was just stolen from the hospital. Oren: Right. Because the hospital can’t do anything. He has blood poisoning with silver. What is the hospital going to do? Remove the silver from his blood? They’re going to put him in a centrifuge? It was so weird. And so they told him and it didn’t matter. Nothing changed. It was just, we’re in a different location now. So I guess that’s a lesson, is that moving locations is not the same as a turning point. All right. Well, I think we’re out of time. We gotta get out of here. Chris: All right. If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Most authors know that when a story ends, they should resolve all the plots they’ve opened. It’s the polite thing to do. But what if you’re only ending a single book in a series, or an episode in a season of TV? What should you resolve then, and are you doomed to be written off as a cliffhanger?! Don’t worry, this week’s episode is here to help. We talk about what needs to be resolved and what can be safely left open for next time, plus some tips if you find yourself with a problem. We also make time to complain about TV these days, because that’s just who we are.Show Notes Fractal Plotting  The Art of Prophecy  The Name of the Wind  Sailor Moon  Ishamael Andor  The Mandalorian  Arcane  Picard  Wolf PackTranscript Generously transcribed by James. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: And unfortunately, it’s just going to be the two of us. Wes is out for a few weeks, but he will return. And for now, we will entertain you with our storytelling thoughts. Chris: Before we get started, just letting everybody know we could use more audio editing volunteers. This does not take any experience. We will train you how to do it. So, if you have been frustrated with our likes and our uhms, this is your chance to kill it with fire. Just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer. Oren: I like the use of just getting their spite as a reason to volunteer. [laughter] Oren: That’s very clever. Okay, so for the topic today, I thought we would start talking about things to resolve at the end of a story, but then not go back to that. Instead, we can randomly switch topics around, maybe do a little world building, and then end the episode discussing the latest Mandalorian show. Chris: But we will continually tease that we might, in fact, do this. We’re not going to do it, but we might continue to hint that it will happen. Oren: And at the end of the episode, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, if you want to hear about resolving things at the ending, you could keep listening next week.’ And we’ll just do that. Chris: And then just rinse and repeat. Yeah. Oren: Yeah. Forever. So, we’re talking about what needs to be resolved when you’re ending a story that is part of a series. This can be the first novel in a series, the second novel in a series, an episode of TV, a novella in a series, a series of short stories, whatever. You come to the end of an installment in which you publish the story, and we want to talk about what you should resolve when you’re doing that because this is something that my clients struggle with often, and I also see it in a lot of professional stories that are clearly struggling with this too. So, my clients are not alone, but I thought it would be useful to have this discussion as something I could point them to, because there’s just a lot of things going on here. Chris: I think it’s useful when talking about this to think about what the actual borders of the story are. Because we’re used to thinking ‘Okay, we’ve got a book/we’ve got a movie/we’ve got a TV show.’ But when we look at story structure, when do the storylines actually end? For instance, in a TV show, it could be that the story is just one episode and it never stretches beyond an episode. In a lot of TV shows, there is a story per season. But in each season, there is basically a different story happening. We don’t see any problems that then resolve in the next season. Or it could just be the entire show is one story. When we’re looking at a book, it’s like, ‘Does that book have a self-contained story or is it in essence only part of a story?’ So, if you’re looking at the end of the book and you want to figure out how it’s supposed to end, but the story keeps going, you are looking for a mid-story resolution which you would actually have similar things during the book too. Oren: Mm-hmm. Because it’s all fractal. It’s all the way down, baby~ Chris: Should we talk about why resolutions are important before we get to the end of the story? Oren: Uh, I think we promised we were going to move away from that topic, actually. So, let’s talk about something else. Chris: [laughter] Oren: A resolution at the end of the story is what makes the end of the story feel like the end. It’s what provides the S in A.N.T.S., the ‘Satisfaction’. It’s what makes it feel like there was a point to reading this. If you don’t have it, you get to the end and you’re like, ‘What was the point of that? Things happened, but it didn’t ever come to anything. It didn’t feel like it mattered. Often, it felt like you could just skip over that, and you wouldn’t really have to watch it too much.’ And that’s not always true but it feels that way anyway. It’s like, ‘Nothing is particularly different from when we started.’ Depending on how the problem is manifesting, it often feels like the story has gone in a giant circle. Especially if this is one of those stories that opens with a really tense, important plot and then just ignores it for a while and then at the end is like, ‘Come back next week if you want to hear about that plot we opened at the beginning.’ And it’s like, ‘Alright, I feel like I’m just back where we started now.’ Chris: If the story is really short, you may just have the end – [laughter] – and you don’t have to worry about, ‘Okay, wait, I have to end some things but keep other things going.’ But if the story has any length at all, a mid-story resolution, whether that’s the end of a book that’s part of a series, the end of an episode that’s part of a whole season, what have you, tells your audience that you care about their experience and that you keep your promises. Because when you introduce a problem, you are promising to deliver a resolution. If you don’t offer any resolution, don’t offer any satisfaction, you know, you just keep hooking them and hooking them, not giving anything back, and it feels like you’re just stringing people along, they may get pissed off. If they end a book and absolutely nothing is resolved, they may leave. Even if they otherwise like the story. They may feel manipulated, like you’re just doing everything you can to keep them engaged in the story, but you don’t really care about their experience. Oren: And to a large extent, this is basically the same thing as a cliffhanger. A lot of people tend to think of cliffhangers as the character being in immediate physical danger or a sudden new problem appearing at the end, but it’s the same effect if you open the story with a big problem and then don’t resolve it or do anything that moves it closer to resolution or what have you by the end of the story. It’s like, ‘Well now, that just feels like I’ve been left hanging. I didn’t get anything out of that.’ And this is tricky because if it’s a story that’s part of a series, you also want to leave some things unresolved so that the series can continue. It’s not like you need to resolve everything, but you need to resolve something, and we’re here to tell you what that something is. Chris: I do think it’s good to look at the difference between just not having a resolution, having a cliffhanger, and having an ending hook. Because it is okay to have a little plot hook at the end of each book, and that’s actually different than just not having an ending. Oren, you’ve said that your definition of a cliffhanger is a problem that’s urgent. I think that’s a really good definition, especially since there are other reasons a problem can be high or low tension, because usually cliffhangers are specifically really high-tension problems. But if the stakes are low, nobody’s going to bother doing a cliffhanger, like, ‘Oh no, somebody stole my sandwich!’ Oren: Find out next time! Chris: Come back next time. And I’m hungry. Nobody’s going to bother with that. So really, the difference is usually the stakes. For instance, if we have an end that’s like, ‘Ninjas are attacking!’ and we just end it right there, that’s a cliffhanger. If we have, ‘Hey, we just found out the villain sent some ninjas after us,’ that’s a hook. Because ninjas are coming, but they’re not immediately about to chop your head off. But a resolution may or may not happen before either of these hooks. It’s just more satisfying if you end one problem, and then your ending hook is opening a new one. Or if you have a lower-tension problem in the background, bringing it back to the forefront as opposed to just not having a resolution at all, and the same problem that we introduced in the beginning is essentially not changed. Oren: There are usually two broad ways that this manifests. Either there is some kind of urgent problem that was introduced early and it looks like it’s going to be the throughline and then it just gets abandoned or we’re told it will be resolved next time, or sometimes there just isn’t one. That also has a similar effect of, ‘Well, it feels like nothing was resolved here.’ I have two books that are examples of one each, if I may. First is The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu. This is a martial arts story, and I’m going to give some spoilers. It’s a pretty recent novel, and it starts with this pretty interesting problem where the protagonist is a mentor, and her student is going to have to fight an evil bad dude as part of a prophecy, but he’s not ready. She has to try to get him ready for training to fight that guy. Okay, that’s kind of neat. That’s a cool twist on the Chosen One arc. But then that arc goes away, because the guy he was supposed to fight randomly dies in an interlude. Chris: That’s just such a weird choice. Oren: Everyone’s expectations were thoroughly subverted, I’m sure. The book then has a brief chance where it could have pivoted the problem to being them trying to keep the Chosen One alive because the leaders of their country want to kill him because he’s politically inconvenient. But it misses that chance, and instead the book just kind of does other stuff until the end. It has a bunch of mostly unrelated storylines. Then at the end, it’s like, ‘Okay, well, we survived that random battle that we just had, and now, now young Chosen One, now I will train you, because I’ve discovered that actually the prophecy refers to another fight that is still going to happen.’ And it’s like, ‘Wait, this is where we were at the start of the series.’ Chris: Wahh, wahh [sad noise effect] Oren: We’ve just gone in a giant circle. We could have just started this earlier. Chris: Backwards movement. Very bad. Oren: So that was the first kind. There is a problem, but then the story just abandons it and is still interested but doesn’t want to do it in this book. It’s like, ‘Buy the sequel if you want to see the protagonist train this young Chosen One.’ And then the other one, that is more of a case of there just isn’t really a problem, is The Name of the Wind, which has a really interesting, tense conflict in the framing device, but then we leave the framing device so that Kvothe can tell us his autobiography. Chris: It’s tense at first, but then after you see five scenes of Kvothe just cleaning, it’s just like, ‘I guess this problem must not be very urgent, because I think Kvothe would be doing something to take care of it if it was.’ Oren: Maybe he’s cleaning so that when the demons come, he won’t be embarrassed, Chris? What will the demons think of the place? It’s all dirty. But in Kvothe’s autobiography, there isn’t really a problem that needs to be solved. When it’s introduced, you could argue that he’s trying to get justice for his parents because his family is murdered fairly early on, but that’s such an abstract goal. There’s no threat. There’s no reason he can’t just take as long as he wants to get vengeance. There’s no particular reason to think that these demons who killed his family are going to kill anybody else, other than being trope savvy. In character, there’s no reason to think that. And so, the entire story is just him going from place to place, and then at the end he has a boss fight with an angry dragon in the woods, and we act like that resolved something, but it didn’t. And it’s like, ‘Stay tuned next time for Kvothe finding who killed his parents’. And it’s like, ‘Well, that was not a very big problem to begin with, but I still feel cheated that there was no resolution on it.’ Chris: It’s interesting to see that one of the few things that writers come in knowing, almost every time, is that they need to have an exciting climax near the end. But often they don’t understand that the climax is supposed to be part of a bigger structure, part of a bigger arc, and that it’s supposed to take all of the things that are already in the book and bring it to a head, and that’s what gives it a really nice payoff, as opposed to just, you know, random ninja attack. We had a fight scene now. It was very exciting. Yay, done? Oren: Yeah, very common. I’ve seen authors try to substitute a character arc conclusion for resolving their big tense problem. Or maybe moving to a different area, that’s another one that I see a lot. The Art of Prophecy actually did both of those things, because at the end of it, it’s like, ‘Ah, you, young Chosen One, you have finished your character arc, and you have stopped being arrogant.’ And it’s not a very good character arc, because he had already stopped being arrogant way earlier, and the book just kind of told us he was arrogant. But even if it had been a better character arc, and he had been arrogant, and he’d finally stopped, that wasn’t the big conflict we started with. That was not the big high-tension storyline that the book opened with. It was not him being arrogant, it was that he had to fight this dude, and he wasn’t ready. Chris: And to be clear, I think it’s absolutely great when you have the character arc come to a head around the climax, often in conjunction with the external throughline. Often, them growing as a person allows them to solve that higher-tension problem. That’s great. We’ve talked about high and low-tension arcs in another podcast, about the fact that tension just grabs attention. [laughter] Sounds very awkward. And so, it’s what creates structure. The highest-tension problems are what creates the biggest pieces of structure for the story. So, if you introduce a really high-tension problem, and then you only solve a super low-tension problem, like a character arc, that’s not going to feel like you gave a significant enough resolution. Oren: If you want your character arc to be the big resolution, that’s possible if that’s really what your story is about, if you are prepared to tell a story about that character arc, which is challenging, but doable, but also not what most of these stories are doing. That’s not what they promise us at the beginning. Chris: So, we talked about how, obviously, it’s helpful to know what your throughline is, so you know what kind of ending is unexpected. At the same time, what can happen in these situations is you have a series, you have something like a big bad or another big problem. You’re not planning on actually resolving that until the end of the series, so then what do you do at the end of a book? That is often what keeps people from having a nice resolution that kind of pays the reader back for getting that far. So there are different options, and these are basically child arcs. When we talk about fractals, we talk about an arc, and then if we break that arc down into smaller arcs that are like obstacles that move the story forward in that bigger arc, those are called child arcs. And you can have a resolution for something like a subplot, a romance subplot for instance, but that’s not really going to be the same. It’s not really what the audience is expecting when they get to the end of a book or episode for the most part. So, if you have, for instance a big villain, usually, dealing with a minion is one of the most common things. In fact, sometimes you need to insert a minion to be the fall guy at the end of the book. It’s like, ‘Hey, maybe your big bad villain was behind it all along, but you can’t take them down, but you need to take down somebody. And it has to make a difference.’ So put in a minion that is dangerous to be the more immediate threat. And to be much more hands on. If you have a villain, you want to insulate them from failure. And that’s one of the hard parts about creating these resolutions and letting your heroes get some wins, but also not making your villain look incompetent. So, if you keep your villain remote and distant for a little while, so that it doesn’t feel like the failure is on them, that can be helpful. Then put in a minion that is working preferably with little direction and then you can just take down the minion. The key then is that in the next book, you don’t want to feel as though the minion is still there. You don’t want to Sailor Moon style it. Oren: Oh my gosh. Chris: I mean, again, this only works for so long. Sailor Moon has this whole routine where every episode they defeat a minion, and the evil queen puts in another minion that’s identical to the previous minion. After a while that does get very silly. Oren: But on the bright side, we, as novelists, don’t need to do this as often as the people making a multi episode per week cartoon show. Chris: Yeah, there are a lot of Sailor Moon episodes. Oren: There are a ton of them. We only need probably two or three endings for our series unless we’re really ambitious. And even then, it’s not going to be nearly as many as there are animated episodes of a cartoon. You have less risk. It can still happen, like in The Wheel of Time when Rand fights Ishamael like three times over the course of three books. And it’s like, ‘Okay, I wonder if he’s going to lose again. Probably.’ Chris: But yeah, you just want to make sure that there is some difference, right? You’re not just having the same fights over again in the next book. We need movement, we need some variety to keep the books interesting. You don’t want to get repetitive. Besides a minion, there can be other smaller problems that are created by the big problem. And again, anytime you do this for a child arc, you want something that encompasses the whole book. You want to introduce the big problem, but also the smaller problem that is more urgent than the big problem so that you can kind of bring it to the forefront. For instance, if you have brewing tensions between two planets that are going to get into conflict, in the first book, the brewing tensions cause a trade war and then you’re trying to solve the trade war, and then other problems that are created by the friction until you for the last book do the outright war. So, you can have those kinds of smaller, more immediate problems created by the big problem. They can be caused by a villain or not caused by a villain. Oren: Okay, I have a thought on how I would fix The Art of Prophecy if I was given it to dev edit. Can I workshop this with you? Chris: Sure, let’s do it. Oren: Okay, right. So, we would start the same, with this prophecy that the Chosen One, his name is Jian, is going to be chosen to fight the Great Khan of the Katuia hordes. And the protagonist, her name is Taishi, she has to train him. We do the same subversion where the Khan dies. Then we have the local rulers want to kill Jian because he is now politically inconvenient. So, she has to save him. But then here’s where we make the change. Instead of just dropping him off somewhere, like she does in the existing book, she takes him with her, and they go to investigate the prophecy, which is, in the current book, a thing she does, but by herself for some reason. I don’t know why. And so then, Jian can still be with her. They can be part of the same story. She can still teach him how to fight or try to as they’re dodging assassins and trying to figure out what’s up with this prophecy. Then they eventually find out that there is more to the prophecy than they thought. It hasn’t actually been ended prematurely. There is still going to be a big battle. The book climaxes with Jian having to fight a major lieutenant of the final bad guy to show that he has actually gotten better and that Taishi has trained him and made him good. Chris: The one concern I have is, what are the stakes of this Chosen One fighting the big bad as presented in the beginning? Because usually those stakes would be higher than the Chosen One’s life. The risk is when you change from that to it just being about the Chosen One’s life, you’re reducing the stakes and actually lowering the tension by doing that. Now, you could possibly change that. You could possibly try to avoid making the stakes that big and just be like, ‘This is the Chosen One to tackle the big bad but he’s actually disposable. We have four Chosen Ones waiting in line.’ So, it’s not like if this person loses, then everybody’s going to be crushed. It’s that this boy is being treated as though he’s disposable. And so, the main character wants to give him a chance. The stakes then are still his life and that probably would go over better when the big bad dies and then people try to get rid of him. Then you could create a twist later where once they understand the prophecy, not only does it turn out that there’s another big bad that he has to fight, but now we find out he is not as disposable as we thought, and all of those other trainees aren’t going to do it anymore. Oren: The book does have some context that’s a little similar to that that I didn’t think to include, but your version is still better. So, if I was given this book to edit, I would be like, ‘Hey, Chris, I have this thing. Can I run it past you?’. And then Chris would be like, ‘Yeah, you could do that, but it would be better if you did it this way.’ So now you guys have all seen a window into the content editing process here at Mythcreants. Chris: I will say though, obviously, when we work with actual story examples, they’re always very complicated with a lot of moving pieces. If I were to start it from this at the conceptual stage, I would have tried to think about, ‘Okay, are these big twists actually worth it?’ Or would it be better for me to just be like, ‘Hey, here’s the Chosen One. First step, keep people from killing the Chosen One. Step two, train the Chosen One.’ That is opposed to presenting this as ‘I need to train the Chosen One. Oh, wait, no, I need to protect the Chosen One.’ And obviously, that change comes with some twists and maybe those twists are good, but it’s also really easy to be like, ‘Ooh, twist’, and not think about what kind of experience it actually creates. Oren: Sometimes we have to go for the smallest viable change in content editing. Chris: Yes, if we were content editing this, we would have to go for the smallest viable change. Oren: But it might be a little different if we were just working with it on the outline level. Chris: Mm-hmm, exactly. Speaking of which, the example I just gave, another way for a child arc is that you need something to tackle the big problem. And so, you have to either acquire it or keep it from getting destroyed. So, we have a Chosen One. First step, protect the Chosen One from dying before we can even train the Chosen One. You could have something else, like there’s a looming environmental disaster and people are trying to shut down the EPA. First book, save the EPA. Oren: I do want to save the EPA. That does immediately resonate with me. Good stakes. Chris: But then the looming environmental disaster is still there. Those kinds of like side objectives. Meanwhile, you can have your big bad also reach their objective, electing somebody who wants to shut down the EPA as president, so that you have that kind of escalating tension. It’s tougher for relationships. People have trouble with relationships because it’s really easy for tension to go down as the people become closer and you get closer to solving the problems. If your relationship arc is your highest tension arc, you kind of need to create layers of problems. Just give them ten problems to work through, so as soon as they cross one barrier they run into another one. You know, first, got to free my love interest from the hell dimension. Okay, they’re back, but they don’t realize that I’m the one who saved them or even know I exist. Oren: Oh no! Chris: Got to overcome that problem. Okay, now they’re into me, but duty calls and it’s pulling us apart. Layers of problems to uncover. Because if you just have one and then you start solving it, there’s nothing to get through. Oren: This is challenging for me. I have a hard time with character arcs that are more complicated than ‘Character makes bad decision, learn lesson, now makes good decision.’ It’s about as far ahead as I typically think on characters. Something else that is interesting is that I’ve seen this in a lot of client works, but one place I wasn’t expecting to see this problem, but it keeps popping up, is in big budget TV shows. Chris: Yeah, what happened to the episodic arc? Oren: I don’t know. Chris: Are we too cool for episode arcs now? What happened? Oren: It’s like Andor happened and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, I guess we don’t need episode arcs anymore.’ Chris: Andor is such a weird case though because it has arcs for three episodes. For a set of three. That’s also cool now. Arcane did it. Andor actually did it better than Arcane. But people were complaining about Andor and the fact that they have a mid-episode of an arc of three episodes that just starts in a random place and ends in a random place. Like, ‘What was that I just watched?’ Oren: Yeah, it really feels like Andor is meant to be watched as three hour-and-a-half long movies instead of ten episodes. The numbers on that are wrong, but you know what I mean. At least Andor felt like it was doing it on purpose, even though I wouldn’t say that was a good choice. But then we have Mando season 3, which just has a number of episodes that just have no arc and don’t seem to be in service of anything. Chris: And I was surprised because, again, the previous two seasons didn’t have this problem, but the previous two seasons were following a very specific plotline they set up with a very specific method. We’ve got our kind of samurai-Western story happening. And so they had a model to go off of. And I guess we have to remember that these are also the people who made the Book of Boba Fett. [laughter] Chris: Oh, Book of Boba Fett, you’ll be the butt of jokes for many years to come. Oren: It’s a beautiful thing. We all have a thing we can all be united on and be like, ‘That was boring. Why did that happen?’ And then for a show like Picard season three, mild spoilers, some of its episodes have arcs, but there was this two-to-three-episode period where they were all stuck in the nebula of plot stagnation, and nothing happened. I was like, ‘Will you please leave this nebula.’ And they eventually did. And the show got a lot better. Still not good, but it’s better. It’s not as mind numbingly boring. Chris: Why did you think the nebula was worth three episodes? Oh my goodness. Oren: It was like, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to spend three episodes in this nebula so that we can redo the Star Trek tropes of the nebula is alive and we’re going to ride the shockwave out.’ Neither of which made any sense in that context. I don’t even mind Star Trek nostalgia. I love Star Trek nostalgia, but I could see that you were just awkwardly putting it in there and it didn’t fit. I was like, ‘Why are you doing this? My gosh.’ Chris: Do you think they were trying to make room for Picard father-son bonding? Oren: Yeah, I guess we had to trap them in a location so that Picard and his plot son would have reasons to talk, I guess. I don’t know. Chris: I’m sure there’s a better way to do that though. There’s no reason they can’t just solve problems together. Oren: I also think it has to do with a problem we’ve seen in some other shows where I don’t think their main plot has enough meat to it for them to actually spend ten episodes solving it, so they just spend three of them inside a nebula. Chris: The Wolf Pack problem? Oren: Yeah, that’s the Wolf Pack problem. Wolf Pack also has a complete lack of episode arcs. Chris: Except for episode seven. Oren: Right. Chris: Episode seven is the magical episode that has an arc. None of the other episodes do, just that one. Out of eight. Wolf Pack is an interesting example. I wrote an entire article about this one if you’re interested. It spoils everything. I’m not going to spoil everything. Now, I’ll just say that the writers are incredibly focused on their reveals. And I won’t say what they are, but they kind of trap things into a corner that makes it hard for them to produce material for the show. They also don’t give the protagonist agency. That one’s a little weird. I think there’s multiple reasons and maybe they just don’t realize it’s important, I don’t know. But they seem to mistake moving the story forward with giving clues about their reveals. It’s like, ‘As long as we give some clues every episode, that’s movement, right?’ No, that’s not what movement is. Things have to actually change. The characters actually have to make progress. You have a bunch of pointless scenes that make no difference. Giving clues is not really going to solve that problem. So, each episode is just kind of a collection of scenes. Oren: I’m not sure if this is what’s happening. I’m hoping not. I’m hoping that this is just a weird coincidence that we happen to see so many shows doing this at the same time and that we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was a weird time in TV.’ But I can’t help but wonder if this is a reaction to seasons being shorter. Chris: I’ve been wondering that as well. Oren: And writers having been used to the idea of ‘Yeah, sure, I’ve got twenty episodes to slowly hint at my big reveal.’ And now it’s like, ‘I’ve only got eight. All eight of them have to reveal hints.’ It’s like that’s the whole thing. Chris: If that’s the case. I think that they’ll just adjust over time. I also wonder if moving to streaming has given people more freedom and they don’t really know what to do with that freedom. They’re like, ‘Ah, I can do whatever I want. I don’t need episode arcs anymore.’ Like, don’t get rid of that, that was good. Oren: Alright, well, I think we are pretty much out of time here now that we’ve gotten the chance to vent our spleen about the lack of episode arcs in TV. Bring those back. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there is the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have 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. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

Dive into the fascinating world of narrative perspectives and discover how they shape storytelling. Explore the emotional impact of first vs. third-person viewpoints and the quirky nuances of epistolary styles. Uncover the mystery of future tense narration and why some think A Game of Thrones is omniscient. The discussion is sprinkled with humor and literary references, making the complexities of narrative choices not just insightful, but entertaining. Enhance your writing by understanding how perspective influences reader engagement!

There comes a time when even the most prodigious writers among us have to put a story away for good. Despite how certain writing memes might make you feel, this isn’t a failure. Everyone trunks a story sometimes, and the trick is to know when you’ve done enough and it’s time to move on. That’s our topic for this week, with a focus on how different types of writers handle the situation in various ways.Show Notes Process Advice  The Writing Process  Five Activities I Use to Beat Writer’s Block Harnessing Your Passion to Strengthen Your Stories Shattered AscensionTranscript Generously transcribed by Linda Ndubuisi. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [Opening theme]  Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…  Wes: Wes  Oren: And…  Chris: Chris  Oren: So our topic for today is trunked stories. I was going to do a little bit about not finishing the podcast, but honestly, that sounded kind of sad. And I realized this is a little bit more of a serious topic. For definition time, a trunked story is a story that you have decided to stop working on and you have no immediate plans to go back to it. That could mean that it’s half drafted, it could be that it’s finished but it needs to be revised, or that it’s 2% of the way from being published but you just can’t hunt down that last run-on sentence, so you just throw up your hands and run away. So, it just means a story that you have put down and have just not planned to come back to it.  Wes: Why do we trunk them?  Oren: I think it’s because you put them in the trunk. Put them in a trunk! Wes: Of your car? Or like, steamer trunk?  Chris: No, like a chest.  Wes: Why don’t we chest stories?  [laughter]  I don’t have…I mean, I don’t know. Do you have trunks? I don’t.  Oren: I had a piece of furniture growing up that we would refer to as a trunk.  Wes: Okay.  Oren: It was a little bit chest shaped, but it was like… For some reason, I think of chests as being more solid, whereas this had kind of a leathery surface, which to me is a trunk for literally no reason. Like, I don’t have a justification for that. It just is.  Chris: Yeah. And I guess this would have been when all the stories were on paper—it’s probably where this term is from—so you got to actually put it physically in a storage compartment.  Oren: I did a little Googling to see if I could easily find the origin of the term trunked and nothing came up. And I was like, “I’m not spending more than five minutes on this.”  Wes: I’m not suggesting we should, I’m just wondering because…yeah, it’s just kind of funny. Like, car trunk is the most immediate thing that comes to mind for me. And then it’s just like, every time you run an errand, it’s following you around. It’s never…you’re never going to quite let it go.  Oren: I mean, I do collect a lot of weird stuff in my trunk over the years— like in the trunk of my car. So I guess that makes sense. It’s like, “there could be some manuscripts in there. No one knows.”  Chris: Do you think it’s good to note that everybody trunk stories, right? I think when people trunk a story and they’re not feeling good about it, they might feel very alone. I suppose if you’re working on your very first story, maybe you haven’t trunked a story yet because you haven’t had the chance to. But even if somebody tells you they finished lots of stories and have never trunked one, it’s still most likely they forgot about some story they trunked. Right?  Oren: Or they’re defining trunked differently. Right? Like, they might be in their heads being like, “I’ve never trunked a story. I finished every draft. And then I, you know, put the draft in like a little word file that I haven’t looked at for 15 years.”  Chris: And I think it’s just the reality of the fact that stories are a big time investment. They’re relatively big projects. And if you continually do projects that are that big, sometimes you will not finish the project.  Oren: And there are a lot of reasons that you might not. I mean, sometimes if it takes you a long time to write a story, you can find that you have gotten better as a writer, and you are so much better now than when you started, that trying to update the story to be up to your current standards is just too much work. And I mean, honestly, I think if that’s the reason, that’s not a bad thing. Like, you’ve improved to the point where you have to start something new because you’ve gotten better. That’s not the only reason you might do it, but I have seen that happen. Chris: For sure.  Oren: I’m not going to say that I’m great at writing, but I used to be way worse. And I’ve had a couple of stories that took me so long to write that I was like, “All right, you know, I was just awful when I started this, and I don’t really feel like going back and trying to bring it up to the moderately mediocre level I’m at now.”  Chris: Right. This might be a good time to talk about the “magnum opus,” which usually ends up in the trunk. So when we talk about magnum opus, we’re not talking about the traditional definition because we just don’t really believe in the magnum opus. We refer to… A lot of times when people start writing or they really get into it for the first time, they take on a super huge project, and usually it ends up being a whole series. Sometimes, they don’t know it’s a whole series at first, but it’s something that’s just like big and overly ambitious. It’s kind of like a writer’s first love. And often the writer’s really, really into it, but it’s just a very large project. And it motivates us to start writing, right? To do this thing that in our minds is our big masterpiece. But that’s a really very difficult thing to do when you are brand new. So it’s both a very ambitious project and we’ve got a very inexperienced writer. And generally it becomes extremely complicated because the writer isn’t used to simplifying, because they don’t know how big their ideas are, and often because they’ve been thinking through every detail of the story in their heads before they even sit down and try to make it happen. And so for that reason, the kind of magnum opus is usually something that a writer can work on for years, but ultimately puts in the trunk. Not universally, there are a few people who beat the odds, but the trunk is usually where it’s destined for.  Oren: Yeah. I think mine was a badly disguised Final Fantasy fanfic where I was going to unite Final Fantasies 7, 8, 9, and 10 into one mega story—that was my magnum opus. And you can imagine that didn’t turn out super well.  Chris: My magnum opus was a trilogy about three characters who were going to destroy themselves. It was very edgy.  Oren: So dark, so mature.  [laughter]  I work with a lot of clients, and I’d say probably a good third of them, maybe a quarter if it’s on the low end, are in the magnum opus phase, where this is either, if not their first story, it’s their first big story. And so they don’t really have a concept of how difficult this is, or a concept of how much complexity their story can handle. They haven’t learned the concept that your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything. So that just becomes untenable after a while, and you eventually have to—in most cases, unless you’re one of the extremely lucky few—acknowledge the things that you learned, and put that story away and work on something that you can actually achieve.  Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think that the magnum opus has a role in providing that initial motivation to learn, and get over that initial big learning curve. And of course, some of that comes from the fact that, you know, especially since we have all these cultural messages that are like, “Oh, you know, just pour your heart onto the page and it’ll be great!” It’s like, “That’s not how it works.” We don’t know what we’re getting into, usually, but that is what gets us there—to a certain extent. But they’re so big and so complicated that what happens is you get so much better, but you are constrained by all the things you made up when you knew absolutely nothing.  I put my magnum opus down because I was just so much happier and more productive working on short stories. Like, when I started working on a short story, I made progress—I actually got it done. I went back to my magnum opus, I just felt stuck, right? And just couldn’t get anything done and didn’t know what to do. And after a while, I was like, “Okay, I guess maybe I should just do the stuff where I am productive and happy”—after a while.  Oren: And that’s actually an important point here. I think that some people get a bit too fixated on the idea that they can fix anything in revisions. Revisions are powerful, and you should absolutely do them, and they are important, and you can make a lot of improvements in revisions. But revisions aren’t infinite. Nobody has infinite energy, and you are sometimes going to hit a point with some stories where it is just not worth the effort it would take to revise this into something you’d be happy with. That’s just going to happen. And I’ve encountered some people. And I went through this phase where I thought you could just revise anything. The threshold is different for different people. Some people can revise way faster and to a much greater extent than I can, and some people are even worse off than me and have an even harder time. So, you just have to learn to balance where your time and effort is going.  Chris: I do think it’s worth thinking that one person’s trunked stories is another person’s completed, because it’s not just about how good the story is, it’s about what your goals are, and what standards you’re holding your stories to. So you’re most likely to trunk something when you’re at the  stage where you’ve become really discerning because you’re learning a lot, but your writing skill isn’t quite up to your new discernment. Like, you can now tell what good storytelling is and what great wordcraft is, but you’re still practicing and trying to get your own skills to measure up—and you will get there. Right? Because discernment… Once you have that discernment, you’ve unlocked additional levels. Then you just have to get to them. But it can be a really discouraging time, so you might be more likely to trunk something simply because you’re not proud enough of it to show it to the world, and you’re not motivated to get it there. Whereas somebody else could take a similar story that’s of the same level and just be like, “Okay, well, I’m going to move on to something else, but I’m happy enough with it that I’m going to put it out there. I’m going to independently publish it, or I’m just going to share it,” or whatever your personal goals are, because everybody can have different goals. Some people, they write a story that’s really just for themselves to read, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere. So it’s mostly about where you want your stories to be before you consider them complete—whatever that finish line is for you. And for different people, that’s going to look different.  Oren: The reason why we keep focusing and emphasizing so much on different people is that this is the much-discussed process advice that we talk about sometimes. We don’t give process advice that often, just because it’s so individual and it changes so much. But trunked stories are such a sore point for a lot of writers, and I’ve actually had people ask me to talk more about them, that I decided a podcast was a good idea because I’m not sure if what I have to say is coherent enough for an article.  [laughter]  Chris: Well, on the site, we have 86 articles marked the “writing process” so that’s not actually much compared to our hundreds of articles. But there are some topics where people do find process advice really helpful. It’s mostly that it’s just not a replacement for craft advice, especially if it’s a craft topic. Whether or not you trunk your story is definitely more about process, because it’s not really a craft topic.  Oren: Yeah. And you just have to look and see where your situation is. Because for one thing, most of us don’t depend on our fiction writing for our income. And if we do, then that’s a different scenario, right? If you’re depending on hitting your word deadlines so that you can pay your rent, then you’re going to look at this with a different priority. And you’re going to be like, “All right, well, maybe even if I don’t like the story and I’m not happy with it, I need that money so I’m putting it out there.” But if you don’t, then you’re not losing anything financially by not finishing a story that you’re not into writing anymore. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t finish it—that’s up to you; that depends on what you want out of it—I’m just saying that there can be a lot of pressure to finish it no matter what. And I don’t really think that’s helpful. Chris: I do think that if you’re even asking yourself whether you should trunk a story, it suggests you’re already losing motivation. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should trunk the story, but I think at that point, the question becomes, “Are you having an ongoing problem where you’re not able to finish your stories?” Because that sets a very different context than “I can’t finish this story.” Because in many cases, if you’re miserable working on the story and your income is not dependent on finishing that story, and you have another story you can work on instead, then that’s often just the best choice. Now, of course, there’s other factors like, “Are you almost done?”  [laughter]  But if you’re not finishing anything, then sometimes that might give you a reason to try pushing through and just see what happens. But even then, I would say that sometimes, the issue has to be fixed upstream in the process. Right? Sometimes, if you’re not finishing anything because you’re not actually interested enough in the story concepts that you’re coming up with, that’s not necessarily going to be fixed if you keep going. But you might find what works for you if you try new stories. Right? Or if it helps you to plan your story out, if that allows you to finish, right? Then that’s something that you can stop mid-story and plan it. But that’s, again, something that you would try and see what process you need to start. But in that case that might be a reason to try just seeing if you can get to the end if you push yourself a little harder.  Oren: Yeah. And if you… You also can think about it in terms of what is the most efficient way to use your writing time? And is it worth spending that time to try to break through a block you’re having on a story? Or are you just staring at a page and not making any progress when you could be spending that time on a story you’d actually write? Just because you started this one first doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the one you want.  Chris: If you’re wondering, “What is the alternative to trunking a story?” Some people do find some success in rediscovering what is important about the story. I mean, I had a client tell me that he took his story out of the trunk after reading material about Centering Darlings because he realized what it was about the story that he loved. And sometimes finding out what’s actually important to us improves motivation. And you realize that you spent the story working on that action plot that you thought you had to have, when really the personal relationships was the thing that got you to write. And sometimes in those cases, once you find out what your darling is and then reimagine what the story would be if you really focused on that and put it front and center, that can be motivating sometimes. Oren: It’s also worth looking at what you’ve already learned from a story that you’re thinking about trunking, right? Because we’re all afraid of, or at least most—I am—maybe not all of us, a lot of us are afraid of having all of our time and effort wasted. And to a certain extent, I would argue that you don’t really waste time with writing as long as you’re thinking about how these things work and trying to do better because that’s just practice. Now, the tricky part there is knowing how to judge your practice because this isn’t like practicing for something that has an objective measure. It’s like… It’s not like you’re trying to get a ball in a basket and you know if you did or not because the ball went in the basket. You’re trying something much more abstract, but that’s what reading about how storytelling works on MythCreant.com will help you out with. And at that point, you can learn a lot from your trunk story: you can learn what things actually interest you; you can learn perhaps which storylines became too chaotic to manage; you can learn which ones you actually found yourself trying to go back to, and that maybe is what caused the problem because maybe this character should have been the main character in the first place. There are so many things you can learn there.  Wes: Would you encourage somebody then, Oren, to consider repurposing or salvaging aspects of a trunk story?  Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s… I think that’s a great thing. I think people can definitely do that—I’ve done that a few times. If that gives you the energy to write, then go for it. I mean, the nice thing about the trunk is that it’s not the fire pit.  [laughter]  Wes: Fire pitting stories.  Oren: Your story is not gone, probably. So you can go back to it. You can reimagine it for later. I had a story a while back that was just kind of completely untenable after a while, but it had some ship combat in it that I really liked, and I took that and made it on airships instead of regular ships. And that’s the story I’ve got on the site with airships in it. Can you tell I like airships?  [laughter]  Wes: Kicking yourself for using actual boats the first time around.  Oren: The problem was actual boats the whole time. I mean, the actual problem was that the protagonist and the antagonist had a relationship that wasn’t good to write, but also I couldn’t figure out something to replace it with—that was what actually killed that story. So I started fresh with a clean set of characters who didn’t have that baggage. And then I was like, “Oh, hey, I remember all that ship combat that I used back in the day. I’m going to go ahead and don’t mind if I control copy paste, but just do a control F for C and replace it with air, not L.”  [laughter]  Chris: I had a story once that I had kind of outlined, and then when I started to draft it, I realized that I didn’t have enough sources attention and I didn’t really have a lot of content to fill it out. But more than that, the story’s appeal was based on a few jokes that I liked. And this was probably a novelette-sized story. I just wasn’t motivated enough to finish this draft because the things that pulled me in weren’t a big enough part of the story inherently, and the idea just didn’t have the potential that I originally thought it had—that was still a good learning experience. Now when I think about story ideas, I really try to think about how motivated I am to write that idea and how much content I really am interested in writing, and then kind of slot it into what I think the appropriate length is for that story based on how much writing I really want to do in that vein.  Wes: I am very curious about what jokes inspired you to write the story. Chris: There were sex jokes.  Wes: Okay, nice.  [laughter]  Oren: There were 69 of them.  [laughter]  Wes: Oh boy. That’s great.  Chris: I think the working title was called Sex Portal.  Wes: Okay, nice. I would probably stop and thumb through that. Like, “Oh, what’s this book? This is a joke book. What’s happening?”  Oren: And you can, of course, come to the sort of the other side of this where, if your story is nearly done, if you only have like 5% left to write, or you’ve done like several rounds of revisions and you only have a little bit left, at that point it can be worth just pushing through, even if it’s not a pleasant experience, just so that you have the thing that you already put in most of the work for—that can also be a valid tactic. I don’t want to say that you should just stop writing the moment you encounter a problem, it’s just you have to be able to decide when it is worth pushing through. Like, when will pushing through the story be good for you in the long run, or when will it just be causing yourself unnecessary mental anguish? And that will depend on, “What is it like for you to write a story you’re not into?” Because some people can just do it, and those are the people who are most likely to be able to make money off of this, because if they’re the kind of person who needs to have a really steady update schedule, they need to be able to write at all times, and for them, maybe just go, whatever. But if you’re like me, and writing a story you don’t care about is one of the hardest things, then you have to be pretty close to the end for it to be worth pushing through on that one.  Chris: This is one of those reasons why I’m always telling people they should try short stories.  Wes: Yeah.  Chris: Because again, when you’re in that magnum opus stage, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you want to trunk an entire series, or push through, that’s a pretty big decision that involves a lot of time, and you’ve got like the whole sunk cost fallacy, right? Where it’s like, “Oh geez, I put so much time into this.” And again, that time is never wasted, because a lot of times, writers learn a lot of storytelling by working on their magnum opus, even though they made things as hard for themselves as possible. But the nice thing about a short story is that if you get bored of it halfway through, then you can see, okay, what is it like to actually finish this and get that sense of accomplishment without forcing yourself to finish three more books to get to the end of the series you planned.  Wes: The other thing that might help with inspiration with short stories—I’ve been thinking about this—and obviously it depends, but talking to your support network can be helpful for this kind of stuff. And feedback is always nice if you have people willing to provide it. But time is a big ask of people. You don’t want to drop your magnum opus on their footstep and say, “I’m stuck, please help.” When you could say, “I can’t quite wrap up this 2000 word short story, do you have a little bit of time?” I think that’s why a lot of us who took writing classes in college, for better or for worse, it was… I think that there’s value in talking through some things with drafts, more or less complete. Because at that level, then, you’re dealing with some external accountability, which can be helpful for some people.  Oren mentioned, “What’s at stake with your writing? Is this professional? Are you getting paid for it?” And if you decide to open up to a friend or colleague or something and ask for their advice, you’ve kind of brought them in. And that could be a little bit more motivating now, because it’s not just you working on it, somebody else is kind of coming to help you a little bit. And that might be the juice that you need. It’s not for everybody, but sometimes getting out of your own head for a while can help avoid the trunk.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, if you know someone who is like a person you can talk to about your stories and will enthusiastically talk to you about them with you, that can be invaluable—and be nice to that person.  Wes: Buy them chocolates.  Oren: Because let me tell you, that is not a guarantee when you go to writing social circles, whether they be in person or online or whatever—those are the Wild West. And you need to be careful who you choose to do this with, because you can be like, “Hey, so I’m sort of stuck on my story about the necro-industrial complex.” And you can have someone be like, “I don’t like skeletons; they’re boring. What about dragons? Like, what if it was the dragon industrial complex?” And you’d be like, “This is not what I wanted.” That’s not uncommon. I went through a phase where I went to every writing group in Seattle I could find, because I was convinced that if I just went to enough of them, I would write more. And this was what I encountered—people who would just… you would tell them what you were trying to do with your story and they would be like, “Well, what if you did something entirely different that I think is cool?”  Wes: Oh no.  Oren: And it wasn’t really until MythCreant started that I met more people who I could actually talk to about my stories, and then they would respond in a way that was helpful. And I’m not going to pretend I was never that guy, right? I’m sure I was. I’m sure someone came to me and was like, “Okay, so I kind of want to do a story about sand crawlers.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, sure. Sand crawlers, whatever. Have you considered making them airships?”  [laughter]  They probably have their own podcast now to complain about me. [laughter]  Chris: But yeah, there is a lot of people who… It’s not about necessarily the story or working on the story, it’s just about being discouraged about your skill level. So finding that one person,who sometimes is your mom, but may not be your mom, who will cheerlead—who will be a cheerleader—is very valuable. Oren: All right, well, with that perhaps surprisingly upbeat and heartwarming note from the cold, cynical hearts at the MythCreants saddle of sadness, we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: If you found this episode helpful, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/MythCreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plotter; you can find out more about them at plotter.com. Next, we have Callie McLeod. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. After that, it’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo; she lives at  therambogueeks.com.  We’ll talk to you next week.  [Closing theme]

This podcast delves into the fascinating world of dragons, examining their depth and exploring whether it makes sense for them to hoard gold. They discuss the different names for dragons, the size and subversion of dragons in fiction, and the appearances of dragons in popular media. They also explore dragons as protagonists and their natural enemies in Dungeons and Dragons.

There’s something exciting about this podcast. You could say it’s electrifying, which is fitting because this week we’re talking about some of the many energy sources that can populate your world. Are you the kind of person who spends hours wondering how castles are heated and how spaceships get their fuel? No? Too bad! We’re talking about all of that, plus more about cranks than you ever wanted to know.Show Notes Harvesting Lightning  Mako Energy Mist: Final Fantasy IX Soul Gem  Solarpunk  A Half-Built Garden Engineering in the Ancient World  Fuel: Star Wars Holodeck Reactor Deuterium: Voyager Three Parts DeadTranscript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is… Oren: Oren Wes: …and… Chris: Chris. Wes: Make sure your batteries are fully charged or you’re plugged into the wall and get ready, because this podcast is going to zap you full of energy, because we’re talking about how power and energy affects your worldbuilding today. Oren: Wow, my hair is standing on end. Wes: Oh, I know, full of electricity. And right out the gate: We are not experts in how power is made, we just are fans of it. And so we’re going to be wrong about probably several things on here. Oren: I am going to talk like I’m an expert, though. Wes: Yes, yes. Oren: I’m going to be very confident about the things I say. Wes: I’m just getting this disclaimer out of the way. And it’s done. We are consummate professionals on how this stuff works, so let us tell you. When we’re talking about energy sources, this very much leans into either the magical or the technological level of your world. But I think it’s kind of an important thing to focus on. If you have the means of generating power, then those means can affect the world. Not only just how the power is extracted or used, but any side effects from the power and how much power is around also affects just exactly what your characters can even do in the story. Chris: So, here’s a question: Do you two think it’s possible to have a resource scarcity with infinite energy? Wes: No, not a meaningful one. Oren: What is infinite energy sandwich discourse? Wes: Tony Stark made it in the second Iron Man movie and then he jealously hoarded it. Oren: You’re going to need to get pretty specific. This is a problem that a lot of very high-tech Star Trek type settings have. Not technically infinite energy, but they have so much that it’s effectively infinite. So, they do one of two things: They either ignore that and just hand wave it or they carve out exceptions. Like, we can make almost anything because we have infinite energy, but there’s this one special, hard-to-make-anium substance. And we need it, because otherwise we’ll die of the hard-to-make-anium deficiencies. Chris: Or dilithium crystals or something? Oren: It could be dilithium, although they never really used dilithium for that. There’s a couple of mentions of dilithium mining, but it doesn’t come up that often. You can have a thing where it’s like, we have this thing that produces a ton of energy, but to use it we need this specific catalyst, and the specific catalyst is very rare. So you can do stuff like that. But if you have a machine that just spits out infinite energy, you are going to have a harder time generating resource scarcity. Chris: I think something interesting that you could do, is have lots of energy, but have trouble transporting that energy. Because we don’t think about that much. That’s why batteries are so important. But battery technology is kind of separate. So, if you have a world that has a natural geothermal on steroids or something, people have to be in specific areas to harvest it, it’s much harder to transport it. The farther away you get, the less energy you have. Oren: That’s why we don’t generally harvest lightning as a form of power. Wes: Unfortunately. Oren: Yeah, it’s too bad really. I read a couple articles on this and assuming they are correct, the argument they made is that we do have the technology. If we spent a lot of money, we could create a system robust enough to absorb and store the energy from a lightning bolt. But this thing would be extremely expensive and huge and it would just sit there anytime there wasn’t a lightning storm. Chris: This is the issue with wind, but it would be more so if we actually needed a lightning bolt. Wes: I’m trying to imagine just how big this thing would be to absorb 1.21 gigawatts. Oren: My favorite story about energy production is Final Fantasy VII. I just love that story. It’s a great game. It’s one of my favorites and it has this whole thing about how in this world, everything is run on mako power, but mako is bad for the planet because it comes from the life stream, which is what everything needs to be alive. So, they’re kind of harvesting life energy to power everything. And it’s like, all right, I’m totally with you. This is a very cool metaphor. I’m into it. And they’re like, you know what we need to replace mako energy? Good clean coal! That’s like, oh boy. Wes: I like how then in Final Fantasy IX, Mist Continent that makes people kind of irritable and can start wars and mutates things that can all live in it for too long. Some of the people are like, well, actually, that’ll power these engines. We can have our airships run on mist as long as they’re still kind of touching the bottom of the fog. So, it’s kind of cool because it’s, you know, a boat on a sea of fog. Toward the end of that game, you realize that the mist is just souls. Oren: Oops. Chris: Whoa. Got super dark and edgy very quickly there. Wes: Yes, because the whole point is a second planet was dying and they want to like colonize the main planet of the story. So, they set up this organism to create the mist that prevents the souls from presumably being reabsorbed into some kind of life-stream-type thing. So, they just float, and cause trouble, and also power engines. I remember finding that out and I was just like, uh, what? Chris: What a downer to find out at the end of a game. Sounds like somebody is really into their edgy shocking twists. Wes: Yes, of course, you know, previous to that, they did develop some airships that worked apparently on just normal engines. They don’t specifically say coal, or anything fun like that. It’s a good way to say we can move past powering our ships on the souls of the dead. Oren: There is no ethical consumption under Square Enix. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m totally in the clear to sail my skyboat across a sea of ghosts. Wes: I do like those problematic energy sources, but the Elder Scrolls games do that with soul gems. It’s like, oh, so you want to enchant things? Well, you need soul gems. Well, what’s in a soul gem? Well, it’s a soul, of course. Oren: I mean, that’s probably just a euphemism. That’s a thing they call it. Probably like a little static charge or something that’s in there. Wes: If you don’t want to power things on the souls of the dead, you might consider cool ways to harness the energy of the planet without sucking its life force dry. Chris mentioned wind. Solar’s good. I’m a big fan of the tidal ones that aren’t really doing that well yet because, you know, salt water and all that stuff. But I think that’s a cool way to kind of take advantage of ocean tide. Pretty much you just need to figure out how do I spin this turbine to create a charge? Oren: All right, so hear me out. Skeletons. Wes: Go on. Oren: Just get some skeletons. Chris: It is a leveling up of human powered machinery, which is a thing like human powered water mills and all that stuff used to be in common use. Oren: You all forgot about the Necro-Industrial Complex, but it’s back, baby! Wes: Oh, man, how could we have forgotten? Oren: Cast raised dead on a bunch of skeletons who can work forever and never get tired and don’t need to eat and don’t need wages or anything. So, you just make a bunch of skeletons and you have them turn a crank. And it’s easy-peasy. Wes: But now I’m wondering: What level of sentience do these skeletons have? Oren: That’s not something you or the ethics board needs to look into. But I mean, there’s clearly a demand for more stories that have a lot of renewables in them for, I would assume, obvious reasons. Solar punk is a very popular aesthetic. There aren’t that many solar punk books. Not yet. There are some. I just read recently A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. That’s definitely a solar punk novel. It has a huge focus on people coming up with efficient, non-carbon burning energy sources and trying to make those viable and using those to preserve things that we need, while also not cooking the planet. Chris: I think another good thing to think about when we’re talking about renewables versus fossil fuels—besides just that fossil fuels obviously are very dirty, they’re bad for our health and bad for the environment, all that—is just the different dynamics of having a fuel source that is ready to go, that you just grab from the ground, versus most renewables, that take a lot of skilled labor. You have to set up machinery, you need technicians, People have to maintain them. And the difference there is that for renewables, the wealth is actually shared a lot more. Whereas whenever it’s something that’s just ready to be ploughed in the ground, what you have is a resource that is valuable, that people would be more likely to fight over. Then the people who benefit from that are more likely to be a small group. Honestly, it encourages things like colonialism and other atrocities. Because if you can just go and grab somebody’s land and take their fossil fuels, that’s different than, no, we actually need to develop a labor force and have skilled labor in here. The other thing about renewables is, the difficulty transporting it also means that the skilled labor is local. So that just creates two very different types of economies. Oren: You say all that, but just wait until I set up my giant mirror over your solar plant that redirects all of the light over to my solar plant. There you go. I have now imported fossil fuel conflict into the renewable industry. It should also, of course, be mentioned that a lot of renewable technology still depends on other resources that may not be hydrocarbons, but that are difficult to acquire and that can have its own set of ethical concerns. Which, I’m not an expert on, it’s a thing to be aware of. Chris: I do like the fact that non transportable energy gives you a justification for people being in weird places. Imagine you were harvesting energy from deep sea trenches and so you had to have technicians down there. Oren: In some kind of abyss, you might say. Wes: It’s true. I mean, you get the cool environment and that level of skill to extract the stuff brings in natural element of risk. Chris: What if all of your cities were around some kind of supernatural energy source instead of being on rivers? You could kind of change the geography and where humans tend to settle. Oren: If you’ve got big magic crystal formations and the magic crystals are what power your magic system? Yeah, absolutely. You’re going to have settlements form up around magic crystal deposits. One thing also to keep in mind is if you want to get really into the technical weeds of this, which a lot of people won’t, I don’t usually, but it’s still interesting to think about, is that beyond the source of energy, do you have a way to harness it to create something useful? Because it’s not immediately obvious how being able to boil water is going to allow you to have an industrial revolution. There are a few steps in between there and you need different kinds of cranks and the ability to spin different things and then ways to harness that spinning to do useful stuff. There’s a book that I should have grabbed before we started. I’ll put it in the show notes that describes this, and it talks about how one of the reasons that we didn’t have industrial revolutions before the actual industrial revolution is that it took a number of technologies existing at the same time in order to make that possible. It wasn’t just as simple as, well, you figured out how to boil water, so steam engine time. Most stories don’t need to go that far into it, but if you’re one of those people, you know who you are, who’s really into the technical stuff, then that can be really interesting. Wes: Well, it just fleshes it out too. If you’re determined to say that steam power is what my world is going to run on, I think that’s what’s going to happen. What are all the techs involved in making that happen and what helped make that possible in the first place? Oren: It can help with realism a bit. It’s why you’re probably not going to have a steam industrial revolution in a society that doesn’t have access to a fair amount of metal working. It’s hard to make a steam engine out of wood. I’m not saying you can’t. I don’t know if you can or not. I’m just saying it’s probably pretty difficult. Chris: I also think it’s worth thinking about what are the differences between what society looks like before and after industrial revolution that could change if you add a lot of energy to your setting and you want to make it realistic. With that much energy and of course technology to harness it, we can have big factories, but also efficient transport, so that we can have bigger markets. If we don’t have the energy to do fast transportation, it’s really hard to engage in widespread trade or have commodities. That’s why in a fantasy setting, we have our local smithy and our local cabinet maker and those town craftspeople because you need all of your goods to be produced in town because you don’t have tons of shipping. And so then, once you have energy, you can produce things on a mass scale and also ship them on a mass scale. And so, we don’t have that fantasy town feel anymore. Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point. Even large cities that are powered by magical energy. Yeah, the bigger the industrial complex, regardless of the fantasy or the sci-fi of it, more people are going to go to the cities and there’s going to be less of those specific jobs that you just noted kind of lose that small town fantasy feel naturally. Or you probably would, and people might notice the differences. Chris: In some ways, it’s a little sad because having cheap consumer goods probably raised the quality of a lot of people’s lives. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t actually a decline in quality of a lot of goods between when you had a person who was investing tons of time making something that was expensive, but then it was really important to make it last because it was so expensive, to when you have cheap commodity goods. Oren: I have read some interesting back and forth on to what extent mass production decreased quality, and there’s apparently a lot of disagreement about that. It’s worth thinking that when we think of a handmade artisanal craft, we’re usually thinking of something that a person is spending a huge amount of time on and really using their expertise to make it as good as possible. In most cases for us, if you have the income to do that, the reason you’re doing that is because you want a really nice one. Otherwise, if you didn’t care, you would just go and buy something that’s mass produced. It’s worth noting that that isn’t always the case if you don’t have access to mass production. Like, you still need a shirt, and you might not be able to afford to have a really good tailor make a really good shirt that will last you a long time. You might just get a crappy shirt that some apprentice made. And if that’s the case, then having mass production of shirts might actually increase your quality of shirt. Chris: I think people probably got a lot of hand-me-down shirts too. I mean, there was also a lot of reusing and patching and those times. Oren: All I’m saying is that, I have read different accounts of to what extent the quality of goods does or does not drop based on automation. Wes: But all this for the world, the presence of shops and services and goods and all that stuff, definitely would have been a bearing perhaps on your main character, your other characters and skill sets that they might have or not have otherwise. Chris just made a good point about hand-me-downs and stuff. So maybe there’s not a great tailor around or there’s just not an accessible opportunities to Amazon a bunch of stuff to your farm. You probably would be handy with a needle, among other things. If you’re in a higher energy environment with better transportation capabilities, you might not have bothered with something like that. It just wouldn’t be a known skill because you don’t have a use for it. So that’s another way to consider how your energy needs can affect just basic skill sets. Oren: Zooming back out for a minute. One of my favorite tropes, if you’re looking at power sources, is to have some kind of supernatural or otherwise magical power source in your setting that has adverse effects, but like, fun adverse effects. Because in real life, we have plenty of power sources with adverse effects. But— Chris: I don’t want to read about it. Oren: That’s going to be a little bit more somber than maybe you want. Instead, you can have some kind of weird glowing metal that is used to create these really futuristic-y reactors. But it has the minor problem of it kind of weakens the dimensional barriers where it’s being used. And so then demons come out. It’s like, that’s fun, now we can have a fun demon adventure. And it can kind of be a global warming parallel if you want just a more exciting one. Chris: That’s definitely more fun than the Star Trek warp global warming parallel. Oren: Oh, my God. Chris: Gotta adhere to the warp speed limit. It’s like, hey, guys, so the entire premise of our show is exploring space at warp speed. What if we introduce an episode where we said, that was bad and you shouldn’t do it? It’s like, well, I don’t think that’s going to last very long. It’s like, hey, guys, what if boldly going where no one has gone before was actually bad for space? And it’s like, well, that’s kind of our whole thing, man. What do you want from us? Wes: Any story they’re deciding to say, OK, we’re going to have a problem with the power in this one. And it’s like, well, has there ever been a power problem before? And they say, no, that’s a bad idea. The Star Wars movie where they run out of fuel. They’re running out of fuel? What? Oren: Yeah. Suddenly in Last Jedi, fuel is a thing you can run out of. Let me put it this way: I’m not against the possibility that ships in Star Wars could run out of fuel. I am bothered by the fact that in Last Jedi, they run out of fuel extremely quickly, which has not really been a thing before. You need to put a little more thought into it. Chris: I think in any story, if you’re going to use resource shortages, you have to make sure that you are consistently thinking them through and not just using them when it’s convenient for you to use them. Or they don’t feel real anymore. They just feel like a plot contrivance every time it happens. So, if it’s like you have your characters wandering around in their ship for weeks, without stopping anywhere, and they’re having no problems with fuel, and then another ship goes for a day, and they’re like, oh no, we’re out of fuel. That doesn’t feel real. Whereas if you actually are rigorous with it and make it consistent, then that can be really interesting at that point. Oren: It’s rude to personally attack Star Trek Voyager like that, Chris. Chris: Voyager, which manifests new shuttles whenever it wants to use the… Oren: New shuttles, new torpedoes. Voyager is a thing where they just had a bunch of conflicting desires. In the early episodes, they wanted the idea of, okay, our ship is trapped far from home, which means we have limited resources. We can’t just go back to a star base whenever we’re low on space gas. And okay, sure, that’s a decent premise for a Star Trek show. But they still want to do their regular Star Trek episodes, which include holodeck episodes and replicators. And so, they just kind of ignore it whenever it was annoying. They’re like, okay, well, we can just use the holodecks because they run on a different power source than the rest of the ship. Chris: It’s a very weird premise for a show that basically has a reset button, where we start every episode with everything being fine, and then there’s no continuity. You get damaged in one episode, the next episode, everything’s repaired. You would expect if you’re going to have an ongoing show that’s dealing with resource storage as part of its premise, that things just won’t go back to reset every episode. Oren: And it also doesn’t help that in Voyager and Star Trek in general, we have no idea what powers their ship. Their ship power just goes. It’s like, we’re going to be low on power. And it’s like, are you? Can you not get more of whatever it is? Later in the show, they eventually were like, it’s deuterium because they decided to go with deuterium because they decided that the ship was powered by fusion reactors, which has always been in the tech manuals, but the show never really acknowledged it. And so, they were like, it’s deuterium. That’s what our ships are powered by. It’s like, all right, but deuterium is really common. And they even acknowledge that in one of the episodes. So it’s like, all right, this is why we don’t have resource problems anymore. Chris: Another thing I want to mention that you could use to restrict energy a little bit is just make it require really expensive infrastructure. Oren: I was going to say human sacrifice, but your idea works too. Chris: I mean, if we’re getting into the speculative energy sources, we can get all sorts of things like human sacrifice. Maybe you have to do constant rituals. But infrastructure can also create a big off-the-grid-effect. And if you have a lot of political strife, it can be a matter of do you have the political stability for a large enough group to pile their resources together to make energy infrastructure and an energy grid and maintain that? Or maybe the power goes out every time there’s a war and nobody can keep that power running by themselves. And then as soon as you go outside where there’s a powerful empire or something, that energy’s gone. Wes: And a good extension of that too is just, is the grid centralized or decentralized? As we experience our current world, things happen to affect power systems. Like in the United States, for example, we see the different effects that that can have on different states and things like that, depending on the nature of the grid. Is it powered by one source or does it have a diversity of sources to draw on? Is it centralized system or is it a decentralized system? You often hear about that pretty quick, depending on how many people are without power. There can be massive implications there, that could play into a political story like you just mentioned, right? It’s like, well, this state’s controlled by fossil fuel. And so, all of their centralized power systems are done by gas and that’s it. Chris: I think it would be funny if your power grid ran on divine energy and your God was very fickle. It’s like, oh no, something happened that was in the news, and it pissed the gods off, and all of our clerics are on it. They’re trying to communicate to the God and find out why the power’s out and what we need to do. Oren: God just went through a breakup. We’re trying to counsel them through it. It’s going to take a little while. Okay. You can expect some more thunderstorms as they cry it out. Chris: And to patch this, I think we’re going to need a hero to go on this quest to appease this God, turn the power back on. Oren: That’s one degree of separation away from being the next Three Parts Dead story. Three Parts Dead has a very similar premise to that, which is a book that I really like. Chris: Another reason I need to read this book. Oren: No, don’t read it. Then you’ll critique it and I’ll be upset. Chris: Oh, oh! Should we give Orin a taste of his own medicine? Oren: No, the whole point is that I give that to other people. Chris: I’m pretty sure we have lots of listeners that could use some vindication by having Orin listen to his favorite book critiqued. Oren: Look, Bonnie already had to go through this because she had to hear me critique it and she likes it more than I do. What I’m saying is that it would not be fair for me to have to go through that. Chris: I have to say the only reason I haven’t read this book is because a certain somebody wrote an article about a plot twist in the book and so it was spoiled for me. And then I was like, I might as well not read it. Oren: Do you really remember that plot twist? Chris: Yes. Oren: That article is like six years old at this point. Chris: Yes, I do remember the plot twist. Oren: Well, I’ll bonk you on the head. And then that’ll give you the plot amnesia. That should solve everything, right? Chris: All right, listeners, if you would like to hear Orin’s favorite books critiqued on this podcast, you can help make it happen by supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First there’s Plotter, the popular book planning software, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.

We love Klingons, Twi’leks, Time Lords, and all the other aliens who are basically just humans with a bit of makeup. But sometimes we need aliens that are more, well, alien. In fact, that’s the topic of this week’s episode. We talk about what it takes to set aliens apart from humans, why you might want to do that, and what the costs are. Plus, have you ever heard of wolves forging plate-mail armor in the woods? Inquiring hosts want to know!Show Notes Heptapods  Babel-17 The Abyss The Presger Old Man’s War Aliens  Eridians Astrophage Crystalline Entity  A Memory Called Empire Species 10-C  The Tines  Yeerks  Andalites  Mimic Angels Transcript Generously transcribed by Shu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [opening song] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is Wes: Wes Chris: And… Oren: Oren Chris: I have to confess, I am an alien. I have chosen a form all of you are comfortable with because you just wouldn’t be able to perceive my true form and my name is unpronounceable by human vocal cords. Wes and Oren: *laughs* Oren: I mean, I assumed you were an alien because who else could understand human storytelling but an outsider. Wes: *laughs* Oren: Ah, yes. Just cut through all of it straight to the heart with such ruthless efficiency of a cold alien mind. Wes: Of course, now we don’t know to what end Chris, that’s not even your real name, is doing these things, which makes it tense. Chris: Tense, maybe? Oren:  Yeah, very tense. I’m tense right now. Wes: Maybe? Chris: We’re not too sure what the stakes are. Wes: You don’t seem bad *laughs* I don’t know actually anything about you or what you’re doing behind the scenes, but sure, I’ll be afraid of you. Chris: So this time we’re talking about alien aliens, as opposed to just aliens that are not aliens. Wes: Right. So Star Trek and Star Wars aliens. Oren: What do you mean? I can’t just put some bumpy foreheads on them and call them an alien? What have I even been doing with my life? Chris: The thing is most aliens are a bit human-ish. I mean human-ish rather than humanoid because a humanoid is a specific body shape. And that is not the only way in which we make aliens like humans. Oftentimes it’s more a matter of culture and personality than the way that they look. And we do that just so that they’re relatable to humans since humans are consuming our stories. And that’s kind of how we make them characters that people can understand and get attached to, is by making them more human-like. And so when we depict aliens, they often have really uncanny similarities to humans. So for one thing, so that they can talk to us without us going to too much effort, etc, etc. But they’re also pretty low in realism. So they work better for low realism stories than high realism stories. And to be clear, this does not come with a value judgment. High realism is not inherently better. And sometimes we want alien aliens that are closer adhered to what we imagine aliens could be like. Oren: Yeah, we want big old Heptapod aliens that we got to hold up signs that we’ve drawn their circular language on that gives us time travel powers. Chris: Yeah, I like the rival Heptapods. Oren: Yeah, they’re great. Chris: What if cosmic horror but friendly? Wes: They are cool. Oren: I don’t really love the language that gives you time powers, but I do love the aliens. They have a great design. Chris: Admittedly, learning an alien language that gives you time powers does kind of stretch believability for me a little bit. Oren: Just reminding me of Battle 17, where it was like this language makes you better at code breaking. And I’m like, all right, I can kind of see that languages and codes are sort of the same thing. And then it also makes you better at tactics. I’m like, all right, maybe those are both mental exercises. And then it also makes you better at kung fu! All right, you lost me there, bucko. All: *laughs* Wes: I do like the Arrival aliens. They’re a great one because I immediately also thought about the movie The Abyss, which featured on our underwater podcast. Chris: Oh, yeah. Wes: Because this is probably getting into the cosmic horror stuff, but alien aliens that definitely are inspired by Earth sea creatures. It just does it for me. Chris: Mm hmm Wes: Because I guess that’s the point. The thought of there’s still so much in the ocean and we don’t have any idea of what’s going on. And how does anything live in there? Instead of empty void of space, okay, whatever.  But the ocean, it’s just got a lot more going on. It’s completely alien. Chris: Those deep sea trenches where things glow. Wes: Yes.  Chris: There’s heat vents. Wes: Yes. Chris: A totally different environment. Wes: So creepy. Chris: Yeap. Oren: Wes, did you write this article that I read a while back that was like mad that NASA got all this money and wanted that money to go to ocean exploration instead? Wes: *Laughs* Oren: That’s the weirdest article. It’s like, come on, man. Wes: I didn’t write that, but I regularly go on anti-space rants and how all that money should be spent here on Earth. And yeah, half the time it’s definitely on the ocean. So stand by it! Chris and Oren: *laughs* Wes: The abyss aliens are great because they don’t talk. And at first you don’t really know what they are until the end. And even then it’s iffy because they just kind of shaped the water in the underground rig to kind of take forms and make faces at the end of a little tentacle and stuff. And it’s got a good mystery, but there’s still some personality with the play aspect that then suddenly turns violent when it gets attacked by the underwater Marine or whatever. Oren: Mm hmm. Wes: I think they do a lot there without any kind of verbal communication to kind of, like, make you side with these weird underwater aliens. Oren: Right. And of course the basic rule here is that the more time your characters are going to spend around these aliens and the more interactions you have, the harder it is to maintain them being non-human. Right? Because eventually you’re going to run into a point where it just starts to feel like they don’t make sense if you spend too much time with them and they’re still just being weird and inscrutable. That just gets harder and harder to maintain. And that’s why the aliens in Old Man’s War are a lot less weird than the aliens in Ancillary Justice.  Because the aliens in Ancillary Justice, they’re around, but the humans don’t interact with them very much. Like the aliens show up and will do something for their own weird alien reasons and then the humans just kind of have to deal with it. But in Old Man’s War, the aliens are all part of a big galactic community that has diplomacy and a space UN and space wars and space treaties. And they can’t really have that if they’re all operating on like completely different levels. So they have to be much more human in their actions, even if they are described as looking very different. Chris: I would say that if you’re going to have really alien aliens in interaction, it’s just a much higher investment. Oren: Mm hmm. Chris: And it depends on like, do you want your story focused on the nitty gritty of communication? Oren: Yeah. Chris: So that’s what Arrival is about. It’s all about a translator who encounters an alien species and has to teach them English basically from nothing. Oren: Right. Chris: And it kind of breaks down how you would do that. But that obviously takes a lot of story time, right? It’s not something that we can just move on to the next scene. Okay, we can talk to the Heptapods now moving on. Oren: You can’t like to meet a Heptapod and then immediately go on like a space adventure with it. I mean, you could, but it would stop being the kind of alien we saw in Arrival. It would be a more human-ish alien. Chris: I think a great story for talking about alien aliens is Project Hail Mary. And there will be spoilers for about halfway through, FYI. So we have first just the astrophage, which are just microbes. Oren: Right. Chris: Which has really high realism, right? If we found aliens, chances are pretty good they would be more microbe sized than humanoid size and shape. And then when we do meet an alien that’s sapient, there is some effort. It’s not Arrival level effort put into communication. This alien does eventually take on some human-like characteristics, but Andy Weir still puts a lot of effort into the differences and into how the characters have to work really hard to bridge the gaps. So we have a whole sequence where the main character comes upon an alien spaceship and then they have to figure each other out. They have to figure out what kind of environments they can live in. They have to figure out how they can sense what materials they can sense each other through because they don’t have sight. They have a different perception. And do that language building. They definitely used shortcuts to make that go faster. Wes: Mm hmm Chris: Definitely kind of. Oren: Yeah, a little bit of handwavium there. Chris: There’s a little bit of handwavium that makes it go faster than it does in Arrival.  But at the same time, the idea is that there is an upfront legwork that is done to get them communicating with each other. And then we established that they eat totally different things, live in totally different environments, and have completely different anatomy.  Rocky is basically spider-shaped and they can’t live in each other’s environments. And that Rocky has a much longer life cycle. Just lots of details gone into it. So Rocky is still more human-ish than, for instance, the Heptapods. But it is about, I think, as if you want just another character in your story, is about as alien as you can make a character while still having them be a named person that you get to know. Wes: Yeah. That’s so important. So you want to include an alien-alien. Okay, how much screen time are you giving them? Because it’s going to determine quite a lot about what they’re going to be capable of and how many human qualities they’re going to need to take in some capacity. Because otherwise it makes no sense. Chris: Or they can just be the threat. They can be monsters. Wes: Yes. Chris: That’s the other option. They can just be monsters. Wes: Yes Chris: Yeah. Like the Crystalline Entity. Oren: The Crystalline Entity is weird. *laughs* Why does it want to eat humans specifically? Chris: That’s really what I want to know. There is this big universe out there. It’s a crystal. How did it evolve to predate on meaty flesh beings that run around? I don’t… Wes and Oren: *laughs* Oren: The first Crystalline Entity is also hilariously inconsistent in their description of it. Because in the episode where it’s destroyed, it’s supposed to be like a tragedy. They described it like an animal. Picard is like a sperm whale. It’s not evil. It’s feeding. And it’s like, do you remember two seasons ago when it talked to Lore and plotted with him to eat your ship? Chris and Wes: *laughs* Oren: Because I don’t know any sperm whales that can do that. Wes: Moby Dick. Oren: Yeah Chris and Wes: *laughs* Wes: Yeah. I ran into similar problems. I quite enjoyed Memory Called Empire and I read the second book, Desolation Called Peace, and Memory Called Empire. We’ve talked about it before, the ending of how they used this weird thread of Cthulhu space aliens to solve their conflict or whatever. Oren: Hey guys, there were Cthulhu aliens the whole time. Wes: The whole time. Oren: Well, that’s good to know, I guess. Wes: And then in the second book, obviously those aliens are like the feature of it. But the main point is Mahit and Three Seagrass go to strike up communications with them. Because their ships are the most Cthulhu non-Euclidean thing going on because they dissolve the other spaceships and stuff. Oren: One second. I just want to say we’re probably going to do some spoilers for that second book because that second book is still pretty new. Wes: Before I continue, definitely a spoiler notice. I’m going to spoil this book so hard because I need to get this out. Oren: Yeah, go for it. Wes: So Mahit and Three Seagrass go to try to set up communications and talk to these things. But all they have is this really weird recording that when humans listen to it, they basically vomit and get headaches and nosebleeds and things like that. It’s horrible, but they listen to it and they think they pick out a type of syntax to get these messages going. Anyway, long story short, they land on a planet and the aliens show up and they’re just open to a random page in a monster manual and point at one. It’s not memorable. But what makes them alien is apparently they’re connected by a mycelial network in their brains. So they consume a spore that they call a people maker and then everybody’s linked mentally. This reveal was so underwhelming because up to that point in the book, they spend so much time emphasizing the technology that they have for the space ship, like the fighter pilots for those, being linked together through like technological neural networks. And so it’s kind of like running in parallel. And ultimately at the end, the aliens realize that there are other people, just not with people makers. And then the spaceship fighters get to go in and join with this to get a sense of empathetic repair because they feel it when their fellow spaceship pilots die and stuff. But I was just like, wow, way to really just make it so boring. Oren: It’s like the solution is that they were a hive mind. Wes: Yes, that’s it. And it’s a challenge when you make your entire story focused on just trying to communicate with these things. And it’s like, okay, well the secret is just that there’s actually this alien is in a symbiotic relationship and you can communicate with it if you also eat this spore. Oren: Done! Chris: That’s all you had to do the whole time. Wes: The whole time. Oren: Solved! Wes: And Mahit and Three Seagrass aren’t even the ones that figured that out. Chris: Oh, boo, boo. Wes: It’s a random character introduced in that book. They don’t even get to eat the spore. They just watch somebody else do it. Oh my gosh. Okay, I’m done. *laughs* Oren: Admittedly, one of the things I was wondering about when I started that book is, why on earth were Mahit and Three Seagrass picked to go and talk to these? What qualifications do they have to do this? Wes: Yeah, none. I think really Three Seagrass gets wind of it because she’s working in intelligence and then just makes a stop at the station or wherever, at the station. Oren: Yeah, LaSalle station. Wes: To just grab Mahit and drag her on an adventure. *laughs* Oren: Right,I mean, I remember how, because I read about a third of the way into the book, and it’s like, okay, so sure, she grabs Mahit because Mahit’s her girlfriend. She wants to hang out. That’s fair. I can even kind of buy that she grabbed the job before anyone else could see it because she’s a spy or whatever. Wes: Mm hmm Oren: That seems like an odd thing for Three Seagrass to do. It doesn’t really seem in character for her, but sure. What I don’t understand is why when they get out there, the admiral in charge of the Imperial fleet isn’t like, who the heck are you? Wes: *laughs* Yeap. Oren: Someone, someone get me some real experts. You sent me like a VIP escorter and a disgraced backwater ambassador. What am I supposed to do with these people? Wes and Oren: *laughs* Wes: Yeap. Oren: Although this actually hints at another problem that you often get with like big alien aliens, because very often what you’re trying to do is have them be like, whoa, the things they’re doing, they don’t make sense. Like, why are they doing these things? It must be because they think differently, but then it turns out that they don’t. Wes: Right, yeah Oren: The 10-C in Discovery has this problem where – spoilers for season four of Discovery, the 10-C are basically strip mining our galaxy for stuff. And they have like this giant black hole type thing that just floats around the galaxy, hoovering up anything in its path as part of their mining process. And everyone’s like, wow, I wonder why they’re doing this? They must be really weird aliens. And they go out and talk to them and they’re like, “Hey, so we live in the galaxy. Could you please not send that big old black hole thing near us?” And the 10 C are like “Oh yeah, good point. We didn’t realize there was anything living in that galaxy.” Wes: *laughs* Oren: I don’t believe you. Like I just, that just, that answer is not believable. It feels like you’re lying and you’re upset you got caught. It’s kind of, is what’s happening here. Chris and Wes: *laughs* Wes: It’s the same thing with the aliens in Desolation Called Peace. Because they’re supposed to not recognize that the humans are people. And it’s like, how many non-sapient or in your case, non-sporient and species do you run into with spaceships? Right? It’s like, you know, it, yeah, sometimes it can be hard to recognize intelligence and there are huge debates of whether or not certain animals have certain levels of intelligence. But like if some wolves came out of the jungle wearing plate mail armor that they had made themselves and we could see them making it in big forges, I think we’d probably be like, you know, those wolves are probably about as smart as we are. Like even though that technology is less advanced than what we have now, it’s still clearly not something a regular animal can make. Right? Oren: *laughs* I really want that to happen. Wes: Just some wolves show up to be like, “Hey guys, we built a trebuchet. This is our most advanced engineering is we’ve have the math for trebuchets. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.”  And people being like, “I don’t know. I mean, can animals, maybe some animals can make trebuchets. Do you, do you need to have human intelligence to make trebuchets? It’s like, they haven’t figured out airplanes yet.” Chris: This is our Discovery/Fire Upon the Deep Crossover. Fire Upon the Deep with the, the wolf, the dog aliens. Oren: Yea, the Tines. Tines. Chris: Tines. That’s another one that is really creative while still being understandable enough. Right? But still feeling very different because they have a pack mind. So not quite as far as a hive mind and they look kind of like dogs. That’s the other issue is a lot of these aliens, if they’re not looking like humans, they look like animals, like all the space whales in Star Trek. Oren: Everyone loves space whales. Chris: Does speed things up by giving us something to at least compare them to because otherwise just describing an alien might get kind of tedious. And the fact that they work together as a pack just gives them lots of novelty and lots of big differences. And again, the story takes some time to work out the communication differences and how, you know, humans and the Tines learn to relate to each other. So it still invests some time. Wes: I think with some alien aliens, you can run into a chicken and the egg situation. We’ve been talking about Animorphs a fair bit lately. And so the Yeerk, I’d like to know how that happens. Oren: Yeerks Wes: Sorry, the Yerks. Like, okay, you are a very intelligent slug-like alien, but definitely have to have hosts who have extremely good technology. Oren: Are you asking how did the Yeerks evolve that way or how did the Yerks make a space empire? Wes: Both. Yes. Oren: Okay, okay. So the answer to one makes more sense than the other one. Wes: okay hit me Oren: So the answer to how the Yeerks evolve that way is that they were originally just regular brain parasites that weren’t sapient. They just lived in the brains of various creatures on their home planet and got nutrients that way. And over huge stretches of time and evolutionary time scales, they were selected for ones that could make their hosts do things that increase the viability of their life cycle. That brought along with it intelligence. If they were more intelligent, they could make their hosts do more complicated tasks which would then increase their chances of survival and breeding. So, to a certain extent that makes at least broad sense. There are a lot of problems you can raise with some of the individual execution of it. But on a very broad level it makes sense. The way they have a space empire is complete nonsense. It’s super contrived. Wes: *laughs* Oren: The way that it happens is that the Andalites find them and they are just very low tech. The creatures that they have are kind of like monkeys that don’t have a lot of capabilities and the Andalites are like “You guys look cute”. One day the Yeerks steal some Andalite ships and fly away and kill a bunch of Andalites and basically declared war on the Andalites. For the next 20 years, the Andalites just can’t find them. The conceit of this book is that the Yeerks just went out and hide and in 20 years, the Andalites, despite combing the galaxy for them, couldn’t find anything. Basically the answer is by being off screen for a while. Wes: Riight Chris: *laughs* Wes: That’s so weird because they also have to like soak in a hot tub. *laughs* Oren: Well, the whole Kandrona race thing is a little weird. It’s funny because the obvious solution when you’re trying to figure out how did these parasitic slugs get a space empire? The obvious solution would be that they infiltrated the Andalites when the Andalites first arrived and the Andalites didn’t realize it until the Yeerks had already, you know, were in control of a large part of their military. Right. That’s the obvious explanation. But they can’t use that one because Visser 3 has to be the only Yeerk with an Andalite body to make him a very scary bad guy. So that explanation, the one that actually makes sense is right out. So we need to have this bizarre contrivance of the Yeerks are just really good at hide and seek. Wes and Chris: “Laugh” Oren: Is there an explanation? Chris: When we get to predatory aliens, there’s a lot that don’t really make that much sense. I’m trying to remember if we knew the Mimics from the Edge of Tomorrow/ Live Die Repeat why they are attacking the surface and what they want Oren: Do we find that out? There was a queen, I think, that Tom Cruise had to kill on his last run. Chris: She has time loop powers. That’s what makes them distinctive, because they have time loop powers. Oren: Do the aliens have that? Is that where he got his powers from? I forget. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Because they have this, it’s basically a hive mind, but with different levels. I don’t know if it was another queen or a higher lieutenant or something, higher level blood got in him before he died. And so basically how it works is whenever I think a queen dies, they reset the time loop because they don’t want their queens to die. So then he gets that power to reset the time loop whenever he dies. Oren: Maybe they taught him the language that you get from the heptapods that allows you to go back and talk. Chris: But just like in this case, we just defeat them and then we don’t ever have to learn what their supposed purpose is. Why do you want Earth so bad? It doesn’t seem like there would be that much stuff here for you. Wes: That’s kind of a good example though of alien aliens also where interacting with them, despite maybe how knowable or believable they are, there might be a conference of ability on a human character. Maybe it’s magical for all intents and purposes. But something like that where the aliens possess an ability to take your memories and control your body and these other things that clearly humans cannot do. And I think that helps set them apart from your standard different styled forehead alien who has just a humanoid body and likes shooting blasters. Chris: Or if we’re talking about the Expanse, what is it like the Protomolecule or something? We can create a sexy version of the dead lady you’ve been stalking. That’s your special ability at the end. Oren:The Protomolecule does a lot of stuff, okay? It’s a very flexible molecule. It can fill in any plot holes we might have. Chris: But it’s alien based, right? The Protomolecule? Oren: Yeah, yeah. It’s some alien nonsense. Although that was one of the problems in the later expanse books is that the aliens were too advanced. I guess this isn’t really making them more alien problems. This is really more a technology issue because the plot of the books is that the big overarching plot is that something wiped out the gate builders – the Protomolecule makers. Something wiped them out. And it’s like, what was it? And we’re going to have to deal with it. That’s what the series is building towards. But by the time we have exhausted all of the human political conflicts, we are nowhere close to being ready for that. And so instead, the books insert a 30-year time jump to invent some more human villains to fight. And it’s like, wow, okay. That’s where it lost me. I was out at that point. I’m like, I’m sorry. This 30-year time jump is too jarring. It’s 30 years later. They’re all doing the same jobs with the same character dynamics on the same ship. I refuse to believe their lives are that static! Chris: But for some reason in the show, and I don’t think this was in the book, right? The girl doesn’t reappear in Protomolecule form. Oren: Does that happen in the show? Yeah. Is this when Miller dies in the show? I barely remember that. I don’t think that happens in the books. But the first book I read so long ago. And I also get the first book confused with the second book because they have almost identical plots. So I’ll be remembering things that I thought were in the first book. And it’s like, that doesn’t happen until book two. It’s like, Bobby’s not even in book one. And I’m like, man, what a dark time when there was no Bobby. But I mean, the whole question of a person interacting with an alien and being changed is that’s very cosmic horror-y. That’s very fun. That’s your Delta Green thing. One of our agents spent too long looking through this gap between worlds and now they have psychic powers, but probably they’re going to snap and kill everyone at some point. So be on the lookout for that. But they’ve got psychic powers for now. So it’s cool, right? It works out. Chris: Yeah, I’m guessing the Protomolecule, again, part of the reason it did that is so if you want your super-alien alien to talk, that’s the whole, I thought you would be comfortable with this form. After a while, it becomes really, really cheesy. Oren: Right. Well, at least in the books, the Protomolecule creates a ghost Miller to hang out with Holden for a few books so that Miller can still be in the story despite dying, which is the aliens who made the protomolecule are all dead. We never interact with them directly. So instead we have ghost Miller who is sort of an alien and he’s like, I’m acting like this so that you can understand me. And also because the authors really liked Miller as a character and weren’t really ready to let him go yet. Chris: Yeah. Actually, Fire Upon the Deep does something similar with Pham, his golden boy character. Oren: Yeah, the super cool guy. Chris: The author clearly likes the best. But he’s there to be a mouthpiece for the super intelligent entities that rule the galaxy in that setting. So here I’ve got a little puppet person who I can kind of speak through to be at your level without demystifying that big super intelligence. Oren: That’s not a terrible way to do it. I do think at some point you have to go beyond that though. If you have your weird alien aliens and then they’re like, I have created a human mouthpiece. All right, I’ll accept that for a while, but I’m going to need a little more eventually. Chris: Right. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it has to be distinguishable from just being a human. Yeah. Which is a lot of like, I thought you would be more comfortable with me in this form. A lot of times it doesn’t pass that test, right? It’s like, well, for all intents and purposes, you just are the form that you’re showing up in because you can perfectly mimic human behavior, for instance. Chris: Man… Supernatural does that a lot. Especially with its angels. With Castiel, they at least spent a while making him weird, but with the other angels, they’re just very human the moment we meet them. Chris: So yeah, I would say if you’re going to do that, try not to make it a perfect resemblance. Try to show some of that alien personality in there. Oren: Make them little weirdos. Chris: All right. If you enjoyed hearing about alien aliens, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to https://www.patreon.com/Mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Plottr, the popular book planning software which you can learn about at plottr.com. Next we have Callie Macleod, Kathy Ferguson who is professor of political theory in Star Trek then there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel and finally we have Danita Rambo she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing theme]