Hark young traveler, for not all is as it seems in this strange land. In fact, nothing is as it seems. If something ever is as it seems, that’s just a sign it’s extra not as it seems. Sounds confusing, but that’s just how it works in the weird and wacky worlds that fairies and dreams inhabit. This week, we’re taking a stab at such settings: their strengths, weaknesses, and why everything always seems to come in threes.

• Area X

Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is-

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: -and.

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: Welcome to my dark and twisted game. Don’t you know that this is what happens when the number is five and then two and then two again are put together? We are going to play a tricky game of dice, which could be your doom. That wailing? That’s the souls I’ve trapped within the dice. Barter your true names or you’ll never leave here.

Oren: This sounds very whimsical and surreal. I’m into it. I like it.

Chris: I don’t. I’m not sure I want to roll these dice. Maybe I could play a different game instead.

Bunny: Well, there’s the spooky chess board, and this rarely seen game of Uno. That’s also spooky.

Oren: Spooky Uno reverse. Okay, I’m into that. I think I can make that work.

Bunny: But if at any time any of these sets come up, all threes I turn into broccoli. And if you know my true name, then I become a mollusk. That’s just how things work.

Chris: What if I just put the dice, all of threes? Because I want you to be broccoli. Can I do that?

Bunny: No.

Chris: Yes, I won.

Bunny: No, you’re too witty. You have outwitted the trickster I am. But maybe I’m lying. Maybe I’m lying. Maybe I won’t actually turn into broccoli.

Bunny: It’s 16-dimensional chess that’s also dice; that’s also Uno reverse.

Chris: Maybe I’ll have to suss out the pattern in your lies. To find out what is lying, and what is truth. Do you have a twin and one of you always says a lie and the other says the truth?

Bunny: Exactly. So, today we’re talking about “Fairylands and Dreamscapes” and basically places where things are all weird and trippy and normal rules don’t apply. And there’s probably someone challenging you to a game which is very surprisingly common.

Oren: I’ve been preparing since 2014 to argue that Area X from The Southern Reach is basically a fairyland, so I’m ready for this.

Chris: I see your Area X and I raise you, the Holodeck.

Bunny: Fight.

Oren: I mean, it’s not wrong.

Computer and program.

Chris: I feel like the holodeck is used for this in so many Star Trek episodes. There are also Star Trek episodes that basically become a weird alternate reality that don’t use the holodeck, but holodeck is a common one.

Oren: They use the holodeck for that when they don’t feel like coming up with an exposition to explain what’s going on because the holodeck exposition is always the same. It’s like, “Oh, man. Ensign Bradley’s abstract milk painting holodeck program came to life. I guess we’re all in abstract milk paintings now.” It’s the same thing every time. They just do whatever they want.

Bunny: There is usually, as with both of these I assume, I haven’t read Area X, but I do know that the holodeck frequently does this. There is usually an element in these stories of like nothing is as it seems. What you think is there is not actually there. It’s like it’s to trick you and there are mind games and word games and chess games and consequences if you fail the games.

Which are usually existential consequences like losing your name or your memory, or taking years off your life, or being forced into servitude. I think a lot of these are coming from literal fairy tale, fairyland. They will kidnap you if you step in the fairy circle type of mythology.

Chris: When I tried to think about– okay, what are the various settings that we have where they have the elements of you don’t really understand how the world works? And the reality is weird, and you have to figure it out. But there’s fairylands, there’s dreamscapes, there’s spirit realms. Mindscapes, also very popular.

But I would even go so far as to say some mystery box TV shows like From and being the big one kind of do that. From, probably more than others because in that one, it’s like they’re not even living in a regular reality anymore. Whereas if you have something like Severance.

This is a really weird workplace. It does not work like other workplaces, but I guess technically we could say that physics is the same here. People are very strange though.

Oren: This is often down to feeling more than anything else, but I would argue that there’s a pretty distinct difference between a place that we might call a fairyland because it’s weird and different versus just a world that’s kind of unusual but still feels like it more or less operates on the same cause and effect that we’re used.

I always bring up The Broken Earth because it has a really interesting world. But it doesn’t feel like a surreal place. The world is very strange because of all the seismic activity, but you could figure out how it works without too much trouble.

Chris: Here’s one for you. What about Piranesi?

Oren: No, Piranesi absolutely has elements of a fairy world. It’s not the most extreme, especially because the main character has been in the house or the labyrinth as if it were long enough to learn the rules. But there is elements of it for sure. If you were going there for the first time, it would have a stronger fairyland-type feel.

Chris: But that one doesn’t have any overt magic. It’s just very strange. It’s just statues everywhere and I guess what is a big house with an open sky that’s flooded with water.

Oren: You’ve got the really chaotic examples like Wonderland and then you’re slightly less, but still pretty chaotic examples like Oz. When you see a bunch of munchkins, you don’t really wonder, “What is their food production?” You don’t ask the question, “What do they eat?” Because you know this is a world that does not have a good answer for that.

Chris: I think this– the surrealism really is the distinguishing factor here to some extent because surrealism generally comes with low realism. I think it’s that low realism that kind of takes away the questions of like, “Okay. What do the munchkins eat?”

Because we’re not doing something really and super realistic feeling. I wouldn’t normally say that Oz would be kind of a dreamscape, but at the same time there’s no hard line there. It’s just become surreal enough.

Oren: And you can do stories where characters can move from the more real grounded world into the weirder one. For example, if they were to go on some kind of witches’ road as a possibility.

Chris: Man. Okay, spoilers for the end of Witches’ Road for anybody who’s not seen it.

Oren: Which is Agatha All Along is the name of the show in case anyone’s curious.

Chris: Yes, but the witches’ road is what matters to me.

I was so disappointed at the end of the show– when we made that not real and I understand that the reveal that the witches’ road was kind of an on-the-spot invention, fits other aspects of the show, and is in its own way. But I just wanted the road to be a permanent part of the setting. That’s all I wanted, and they took that away.

Oren: Don’t worry, Chris, because this is the MCU. So, anything that was fake but popular will become real.

Chris: And bring it back to life like, “Oh, I thought you thought that that was dead, but actually, we should go to an alternate universe and it’s just like this universe, except for the witches’ road is real.”

Don’t you want more, and more, and more?

Oren: Or they’ll be like, “Well, actually, you thought that Teen invented the witches’ road, but he was actually just channeling a much more ancient magic of a real witches’ road. Don’t worry, the witches’ road can rise again whenever we need it.”

Chris: But part of the nice thing about Agatha All Along is that it didn’t feel like the rest of Marvel. So, I don’t know. It’s like the Zombie Resurrection. Like you loved somebody, and they were brought back, but they were brought back wrong.

Oren: Do you not love it when Marvel brings back a thing you like, but not as good?

Chris, you’re terrible at consuming things. My favorite classic fairyland, as it were, is of course the Staryk realm from Spinning Silver. Well, a big surprise or unlike Spinning Silver, we never heard this one on the podcast before.

Chris: I thought about that because we also started a series called Wicked Lovely that had kind of fairies that were initially invisible, and the protagonist learns more about that and kind of becomes a fairy. And I think one of the things that really distinguishes the Staryk, is that yes, that’s a separate universe, but it is the fact that Miriam has to learn how they work.

Whereas in Wicked Lovely the protagonist just doesn’t have enough agency, and it never feels like she has to figure out the rules and then use them in a clever way. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the Staryk realm just work so much better in Spinning Silver than it does for most of the other stories, with Fae in them.

Oren: Well– and the Staryk have– strike this very tricky balance between a world that is weird enough to be cool and novel, but also stable enough that people can live in it.

Because I have seen other authors try that and they tend to end up in, well, this place is either so weird that it feels like nothing matters or it just seems like kind of a slightly more colorful version of the real world.

Chris: What did you think about the Vinland in Strange and Norrell? I know in that story there’s a woman who half of her time is bartered away to a fairy, and so whenever she goes to sleep, she ends up in fairyland and has to dance all night.

Oren: I haven’t read the book in a long time. My memories are mostly of the TV show, so I’m going to go with that.

Chris: The TV show was good, the mini-series. I think it’s six episodes. I’ve never read the very, very long book, but the mini-series is great.

Oren: Find someone who loves you as much as the people who made that show love the book, but I thought it was good. Again, it’s not a place where you could go and spend long periods because they use the fairy world in that show like spooky and creepy and weird.

There’s like a bizarro party that this girl has to dance at constantly, and that’s kind of scary. She never gets to sleep. She wakes up in the morning and her feet hurt from dancing all night. That’s mildly horrifying. It’s very uncanny, I think, is the word I would use, and it works great for that. I don’t really think you could have large parts of the book set there with the civilization of the fairies the way that you do in the Staryk realm in Spinning Silver.

Chris: You might lose some of its mystique, I suppose.

Oren: I think you would either be forced to lose a lot of mystique or just feel like this doesn’t seem like a place where anyone can actually live. It’s too weird.

Chris: Yeah, the forest is the reason to read Uprooted in my opinion.

Oren: That’s why I find the Staryk so impressive is because it feels like they managed to thread that needle. Although honestly, Novik is really good at that in general, like her forbidden forest in Uprooted. I didn’t like Uprooted at all, but I liked the forest. It’s spooky.

Bunny: I think that both of these examples you’ve mentioned and Piranesi to an extent touch on a really common feature of stories that have like fairylands, which is that the protagonist is an outsider to them, which means that it’s time for me to pull the mask off our Scooby-Doo monster and say, “Oh, hey. It’s portal fantasy. Discourse.”

Oren: Let’s see who you really are.

Bunny: Oh yeah-

-but it’s true that a lot of fairylands, dreamscapes, fairy stories, types of things, are portal fantasies because you kind of need an outsider who doesn’t understand the rules for it to be-

Chris: Mysterious.

Bunny: -yeah, for the mystery. For the weirdness.

Chris: I think having them being mysterious and– really requires an outsider to come in and kind of gives it that sense of mystique. And also, a part of the point is you have to learn the rules and you feel off balance.

Bunny: I think because a lot of them come from those like original literal fairy tales that are about, “Don’t go in the spooky woods because there are fairies there and they’ll make you dance for them all night or whatever.” There are some common features in a lot of these types of stories that the book, The Butcher of the Forest, has pretty much all of.

Which is, I made a list, let me go through the list really quick. Don’t eat the food; a tricky guy wants to play games; it’s all an illusion; don’t tell anyone your name; spooky animals; disembodied voices; pretty things are evil; recognizable things are fake; children; things come in threes; and everything is kind of proper and genteel, even when it’s killing you.

Chris: That definitely seems very Fae.

Bunny: Yeah. They’re not all necessarily Fae, but it seems like these are pretty common features of worlds like these, and they’re also– speaking of the outsider’s thing, they’re usually contrasted with a normal fantasy world or a more normal world, right? So, even when we have a fantasy story that takes place in an alternate world, if there’s like a fairyland or a dreamscape, it’s usually another section of that world.

So, in Butcher, the Elmever, which is the fairyland area, is part of the bigger fantasy world. Like a dissection of it rather than the entire world being the Elmever. So that our character, who’s from a fantasy world is still an outsider to this world within a world.

Oren: Oh man. When they’re trying to tell their kids not to go in there, do they say Elmever, more like Elm Never.

Bunny: Oh.

I don’t even want to dignify that.

Oren: Having the weird, surreal part of the world be in either a specific place or separate from the rest of it. That’s pretty common. You’ve got your Dresden Files, which is written by Jim Butcher. So maybe there’s a butcher parallel here, but it’s got your regular urban fantasy area, and then you can go into the magical world, which is called the Nevernever, I think.

And that was a little boring. Honestly, it’s been a while, but it felt very like– after a little bit of being there, you’re like, “Yeah, Okay. This is sort of the normal world, but everyone is a little more colorful, I guess.”

Bunny: Yeah, the real world but quirky doesn’t quite cover what a fairyland is.

Oren: Or at least what I would argue it should be. I don’t know. Not every fairy world can be as weird and surreal as I want it to be, but I still want them to be. And one of the big perks of this sort of thing is that you can design the setting around fulfilling very specific plot arcs that you want, especially character arcs.

Like if you want your protagonist just wrestling with some kind of issue from their childhood, good news, the world can reconfigure itself into the house they grew up in. That’s very helpful.

Chris: I do think that there are some tricky things about– once you have your protagonist there and you’re going to have some conflicts there and some plot there, there can be some tricky things on making the realities work and how much this becomes an issue can depend on, how much time you are spending there?

For instance, Lockwood and Co. has a spirit realm at the end of the series, and they just have to travel from point A to point B and they get colder the longer they’re there. So, it’s a pretty simple; we know what they have to do, we know how it can go wrong.

But a lot of times the farther you get from reality, if your world is really, really weird, the more you have to kind of make up in order to support the story and have people kind of understand how things work and that can be challenging. Because you have to do things like, “Okay. First of all, make sure people can still– there’s still stakes.” So, if you have a spirit realm and everybody’s dead.

Which is– we talked about this before in the previous podcast episode about making it so that people can die in the afterlife, which is strange.

Oren & Bunny: Double death.

Chris: Double death. But you need something. What are people capable of doing and making sure that’s balanced? So, if reality’s an illusion, how do we know what the protagonist’s chances are of getting through this.

Oren: Well, it’s very simple, Chris. They get into a duel with somebody, and they say, “I am a super-fast snake.” And the other person says, “Well, I’m a creature that kills snakes.” Then they say, “Well, I’m a creature that kills things that kill snakes.”

Bunny: Oh my gosh. Oren is referencing Sandman, if anybody– we’ve made jokes about this before.

Oren: That was so silly.

Bunny: It is the silliest magic duel, like-

Chris: Scribblenauts.

Bunny: Yes.

Oren: It’s just kindergarten. I have Infinity plus one.

Chris: But literally, it’s like, “I’m the hope and I’m the death of hope.” Really?

You could just do that. So, whatever your opponent says, you can just be like, “Well, I’m the death of that.” Done.

Bunny: I’m A. Well, I’m not A.

Oren: The only way that dual makes any sense if the real test is it’s just about who can keep talking at a quick pace. It’s like those games where you’re supposed to name words that end in a certain letter or whatever. There’s no shortage of them, but eventually you stop being able to think of them.

So, I guess that’s the real part of that game. It’s just who can keep improvising new stuff the fastest.

Bunny: I need to put that in my oof with chess and Uno.

Chris: We basically need rules that make it so that your protagonist doesn’t die instantly, but it’s also not too easy. And if things are very very strange, just narrowing it down to be like, “Okay. This is the problem. This is what the protagonist has to do to solve that problem.”

Like, “Hey, the longer we’re in here, the more we die.” “This is what the protagonist specifically has to do to get out.” “Oh, there’s a door that can appear, but it will only appear if the protagonist cries enough.”

And then now we have a challenge that we understand, “Okay. The protagonist has to make himself cry.” And now we’ve put it in terms that the audience understands. So, we know what the conflict is and what we’re trying to do, and how hard that will be. Because otherwise– yeah, you get that fight where it’s like, “Okay. Well, I summon a waterfall.” “Well, I summon a bunch of fire.”

Oren: And I would say that most of the time in these sorts of more surreal worlds, usually things like riddles, then you’d solve a puzzle, or they need to admit something about themselves or whatever. Those usually make for better conflicts than a Kung Fu fight.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s usually about wits over who has a bigger sword.

Oren: Right. Because sword fights or gunfights or whatever, those all depend on physics to work. And if the whole premise of this place is that physics are weird, it’s not impossible to do in physical conflict, but much harder and hard to do in a way that your reader will care about without the world just seeming boring.

You don’t want to end up as Inception, which is theoretically in a dreamscape, but just feels like a series of action scenes in regular normal places.

Chris: And also, even if you have wits, this can be an issue of what I call the clever Ex Machina where you’re doing a bunch of technobabble like Star Trek technobabble, or it could be magic babble.

And the protagonist is, “Oh, I know. My solution is to run clockwise three times because of the moon and being at this angle and blah blah.” If the audience can’t follow the logic and it can’t click into place for them, then you’re just making up random stuff at that point.

Bunny: The world might run on dream logic a bit, but your story still has to follow cause and effect. Otherwise, it’s going to be a very frustrating experience and Butcher of the Forest is a book that does this. There are weird rules, but the protagonist is clever about it.

There’s a scene where she has to play dice with a tricky Foxman for her soul or whatever, and she’s clever about it. What happens is that the Foxman is like, “We’ll do best of two.” And she’s like, “What if we tie?” And he’s like, “Well, we won’t tie.” So, she’s like, “Oh, he’s going to cheat.” And so, she cheats.

And it’s like, “Okay. She gamed the system. She learned information by doing something clever and then she exploits it and that gets her further along the path that she needs to go.” If it were just the Foxman going to play dice with me, but instead of playing dice, I howl at the moon for two minutes and he lets me go. That would make a whole lot of sense.

Oren: If I was playing dice with someone and they just started howling, I would probably encourage them to leave, to be fair. I think that would work on me.

Bunny: It would be pretty awkward.

Chris: And if you do have to, sometimes if you are making up a lot of stuff about how this works because it’s really fantastical. You have to be careful that you make up stuff that feel like they are thematically consistent and that you are building off of a few elements.

Having that good theming, world theming makes a difference that it doesn’t feel like you’re arbitrarily making stuff up. So, for instance, I have a world where everyone is a floating bubble and wait, I need a reason why these two bubbles don’t pop when they run to each other like normal. It’s like, “Well, the supercomputer designed them not to.” And then it’s like, “Wait a second. Why is there a supercomputer here?”

Oren: Because a wizard made it, obviously.

Bunny: End program.

Chris: Exactly. It feels made up, and that may seem like an extreme example, but that happens all the time. If you don’t come up with an explanation for why these two bubbles don’t cut pop in this case, that feels like it builds off of what you’ve already established about this area.

You kind of have to choose some common themes and some common traits and kind of reuse those things in your explanations, or else things just feel made up.

Bunny: And I will say Butcher of the Forest does actually stumble at the very end. Spoilers, but there’s a point at which the character needs the price of continuing means she needs to tell her worst memory to the tricky Foxman, and she tells a pretty brutal memory. And then later, they are confronted by the lord of the Elmever, who’s like, “You lied about.”

We’re just kind of supposed to be like, “Oh, he knows somehow.” But even with all the dream logic and stuff, there’s been no indication that he’s done anything– that any of the creatures in this place have automatic access to your memories. They pretty clearly need to be told to them, which is why they’re a valuable resource.

But I don’t know. I guess the guy just knows them now and in a regular story– in a normal world that doesn’t have all the dream logic going on. That would be a lot more noticeable, but I think readers in a squishy surrealist fantasy fairy tale world are more willing to skim by that, but I would say that’s a place where the book, even within this place, where things aren’t supposed to make sense, like the story itself seizes to make sense, which is not what you want.

Chris: There is going to be some fun in having a protagonist sort of outwit people or learn the rules. If you get the sense that there isn’t actually a consistent rule set for them to learn, that really puts a damper on it. You don’t want to feel like the protagonist succeeded because the author said so, so you need some feeling that there are rules to learn, even if the place is really surreal and mysterious.

Bunny: You want them to win because the wizard said so.

Oren: Hang on. I’m going to pull a double Scooby-Doo and take off the mask that we didn’t think was a mask. We thought it was a face, but it’s actually the podcast’s other mask and reveal that this podcast was actually, “Why you should theme your world?” A blog post posted by Chris Winkle on August 26th of 2022.

Bunny: Oh shoot. It’s masks all the way down, isn’t it? Spooky.

Chris: I’ve just had some clients recently make some really imaginative worlds which are really cool, but it’s really just highlighted the challenges that come with having a world that’s really different and how much burden it puts on the storyteller to figure out how the world works in a that supports the story and is actually believable. And that’s just harder than if we’re taking the real world or a typical genre with setting conventions that you could just reuse.

Oren: I’ve had some clients who I think have been led a bit astray by the current state of the romantasy market, with the way that it portrays Fae as just kind of asshole magic people. So, as a result, their fairy worlds are kind of boring because there’s just not a lot going on. It’s just normal people live here except their wizards and their jerks, is the entirety of what makes Fae different.

Chris: I think that happens a lot when you have some starting works in the genre and then you have people copy it a lot of times. Some of the magic is lost and it almost becomes more cursory. It’s like the difference between Lord of the Rings that spends a lot of time building up things like the elves and making them feel magical, and having a current fantasy where elves just walk in.

And it’s not that those elves that are just walking in are bad, but now they don’t have nearly the mystique that they did in Lord of the Rings because they’re just familiar and we’re not spending all this time setting them up. I think there is a common pattern when something becomes popular and people repeat it a lot, it becomes more and more like cursory and less and less effort is put into it.

Oren: Do fairies good is the good place to end the podcast, I think. Just write them good and your story will be gooder for it.

Bunny: If you enjoyed your time in this land of the Mythcreants podcast, consider supporting us in the mysterious land of Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: It’s very strange there. You give us money and then we have some. Weird.

Bunny: The rules. Can you figure them out?

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then, there’s Kathy Ferguson, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme. The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.