What’s better than an ally you can trust? An ally you can’t trust! For storytelling purposes, of course. In real life, you want your allies to be dependable and steady; in fiction, they should be wild and unpredictable, plus a bit sexy. If you’re going for the drama of an unreliable ally, that is. And after listening to this week’s podcast, you’ll obviously want to. Unless we were the unreliable allies all along. Oh, noooooooo-

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

[Intro theme]

Oren:  Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: Did you know that one of us is actually a shapeshifter? I tried to look up what the shapeshifter archetype actually is, because I only use it kind of casually, and I discovered that nobody knows. I found various definitions, and I always assumed that the Shapeshifter was a character whose loyalties we were uncertain of.

Like, maybe they were gonna betray us. Maybe not. That’s what I thought it meant. I have now seen it defined as first any character who ever does anything sneaky has become a shapeshifter. But also, you have to be an actual shapeshifter according to some definitions, which is very funny, and I tried to look up the original definition in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and I found it. I found the chapter labeled Shapeshifter, and I have no idea what the heck he was saying. I don’t know what any of this means, guys. I don’t know. 

Chris: No, Campbell does not write in a clear manner. He is very hard to understand, anything that he’s saying

Oren: And to my surprise, it doesn’t look like Vogler mentioned it.

Chris: He must. He must. 

Oren: I couldn’t find it. 

Chris: I’m pretty sure he’s who I got it from. 

Oren: I searched through his book, The Hero’s Journey, or whatever vastly specific title.

Chris: The shapeshifter is listed on my Hero’s Journey Archetype post. And that is largely inspired by Vogler. So if Vogler had not mentioned the Shapeshifter, I don’t think I would’ve put it in my post either.

Oren: Maybe he does somewhere, but I couldn’t find it either by searching the text with Ctrl+F or by looking in the table of contents or the index. So, if it’s in there, it’s very well hidden. Maybe he spelled it weird

Chris: Spelled with lots of hidden GHs. Some silent GHs. Several times.

Oren: S-H-A-E-P-E. The sheeAPEshifter.

Chris:  There isn’t a very good word. I don’t really like the word shapeshifter for this anyway, but there just doesn’t seem to be a great term. I looked it up on TV Tropes. And TV Tropes has like 20 different categories, which is not helpful. Depending on the exact shade of untrustworthiness or the pattern of behavior this character shows. For storytelling purposes, we just want to group together characters that are between team good and team evil. 

Oren: That’s just how I’ve always used it. I thought it was a pretty useful term for that. I thought it was easily the most applicable of the various Hero’s Journey terms that get thrown around, but now I have no idea.

Chris: We really just need one term for this kind of character. And Shapeshifter is what I got. I don’t got a better one. 

Oren: Specifically, we’re thinking about unreliable allies today, and shapeshifter is kind of the cool way of referring to that character type. They may or may not actually change shape. 

Chris: We have disagreements about a lot of terms, like TV Tropes, for instance, is very insistent that you can’t call something a MacGuffin if what it is matters to the plot at all. Its only purpose has to be for people to fight over it, and it doesn’t matter what it actually is. And it’s like, that’s not useful. Okay? That is too narrow. That’s like the original meaning of ironic. Yes, I know what the original meaning of ironic is, but that’s too specific, and it’s not a useful word if we use that definition.

Oren: LOL. We got our MacGuffin purists over here being like, “Don’t you call that a MacGuffin. They used it at some point! It does something.” Seriously got into an argument one time or watched other people be in an argument about whether or not you could call something a Mary Sue if you didn’t have proof that it was an author insert character.

Chris: Now we need proof! 

Oren: Okay, well, I don’t like Mary Sue as a term for other reasons, but that seems kind of unreasonable to me. 

Chris: So yeah, unreliable allies. These are generally good characters to have. First of all, they’re generally extremely helpful because they make it easy to add more tension and conflict, especially to down scenes that are not normally that exciting. These are the scenes where something exciting has already happened and now your characters are resting, recovering, planning their next move, that kind of thing. But you still want a little something. You still want a little light conflict, a little light problem-solving to happen in those scenes.

Maybe some emotional growth or some heated conversations, and so, these shapeshifters−now I’m thinking about it every time I say it−just make it really easy to add a little more drama. Because, do we want them around? Who invited them here? What should we tell them or not tell them? And then you can have them, “Oh, I could help you with that.” Make them very suspicious. 

Oren: It’s not my fault that it’s hot, okay? We were all thinking it. 

Chris: And then you can also have their help come at a cost more easily. Maybe they make demands, which are difficult to deal with, or maybe their advice isn’t actually trustworthy. It’s technically−at best−kind of correct, and then the heroes get into trouble that they have to deal with. Just opens up so many great opportunities for tension and conflict and makes those easy to add. That’s why they’re usually great characters to have around. 

Oren: Although I have discovered a fun little contradiction, or maybe it’s more of a conundrum of the unreliable ally, which is when you spend a lot of time asking, can we trust this guy? It’s really difficult for the answer to be no and have it not be disappointing. Most stories that I know of that have an unreliable ally where we make a big deal about it, that person ends up being on team good. And, on the rare instances where that’s not the case, it’s always disappointing. And I have a few theories about why, about why this is more difficult. 

The first one is that if someone’s trustworthiness is questionable enough that you have to ask, “no” is already the least surprising answer. It’s like, oh look, that guy’s acting hella suspicious. Can we trust him? Well, uh, probably not. He’s acting really suspicious. A trustworthy person wouldn’t do that. That’s the obvious answer. And then it can also make the heroes look really silly because why did you trust this person who was being really shady before? 

Chris: Or be frustrating in the same direction if they are deciding to trust a character that is clearly, obviously not trustworthy−which is not what you want for your unreliable ally; they need to at least be partially credible−and you see the character decide to trust them anyway, that’s just going to be frustrating. And then it blows up in their face. That’s not good. 

Oren: Also, I’ve noticed you build attachment to unreliable allies if the story’s doing its job. And then, if you are attached to them, you don’t want them to be evil. You don’t want them to die or be put in jail for forever or whatever. You want them to win because you like them. So, it’s like, no, be a good person. Come on. I need you to be a good person. Still edgy. 

Chris: I do think it works well for them to be partially trustworthy, which is why I’m joking about like, well, technically what they said was true. A character that makes deals and follows them to the letter but there’s a little catch there that hasn’t been mentioned, that’s the kind of thing that we could justify. Okay, we got in a lot of trouble, but we still ultimately were able to achieve our objective that we couldn’t have done without taking this character’s dangerous advice. And now we know their word can technically be trusted if you pay close attention, so surely it will go fine next time. 

Oren: I’ve also noticed that at least some stories tend to−I’m not just thinking about Teen Wolf, but I am thinking about Teen Wolf−use former big bads as their untrustworthy allies or unreliable allies.

Chris: Teen Wolf is so funny because they refuse to kill any of their villains. There’s a couple villains that die, but for the most part, I think they kill some early on, and they’re like, you know what? That was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done that. Let’s never kill a villain ever again. And so they just collect! There’s six seasons and some of the seasons have two parts, which are basically two seasons. On top of that, every season has two villains. Okay? So there’s so many former villains in this show. They just are really useful. 

Oren: They are, but there is a problem when occasionally they try to turn them back into main villains, and it often doesn’t work because we already beat this guy. 

Chris: Right. Only Kate. 

Oren: Kate works because she went through a whole transformation process, both literally and figuratively, to become another main villain. Whereas with Peter, we beat him in season one, and he was a great villain in season one. Then he was a great unreliable ally for several seasons, and then we fight him again. But we’re all 10 levels higher than the last time we fought him.

Chris: No, Peter can never be a villain again. Why did you do that?

Oren: I’m pretty sure we can take him, you know?

Chris: There’s also Sylar in Heroes. His problem is he continues to shift between a hero and a villain so many times you want to just get rid of him. You get so sick of him. With Peter, okay, he’s a big deal in the first season, but then he is a minor side character who’s untrustworthy, and he works well in that role. We’re not making a big deal out of him, but with Sylar, we’re supposed to care about his fourth transformation between hero and villain, and I just don’t. I can’t care anymore. He’s just annoying now. 

Oren: Heroes, man, I haven’t thought about heroes in a while. 

Chris: Oh, I know. Oh, I know.

Oren: That’s classic. That’s the show that most exemplifies monkeys banging on typewriters producing Shakespeare, because it really looks like that. The first season was kind of an accident. Obviously, the second season was pressured because there was a writer’s strike, so we accept why that one’s bad, but every season after that is equally bad or worse.

Chris: Although I should point out, we had an episode about storytelling constraints. That it’s also true that the first season is always the easiest to plot because it has the least constraints. Unless you’re doing a prequel or a mid-quel, even. 

I think luck is unfortunately−in storytelling−a much bigger factor than we might think it is. There are lots of authors who just have one book that is much better than the others because they happened to hit on the right formula, and things worked out and were easy for them, and then they did something different and didn’t realize its ramifications and didn’t know how to adapt to it, or didn’t realize that it was different from what they were doing before, and suddenly nothing works anymore.

That’s unfortunately a repeating pattern, so I’m sure luck had something to do with it, but also constraints are also a big deal. So, if it’s easier to plot, and you can just do whatever you want, then you can solve your problems more quickly. Besides having an unreliable ally that’s on team good, another thing you can do is have somebody who is on team evil but is sympathetic to team good. 

Oren: Yeah. The unreliable evil vizier kind of character. 

Chris: Right, that way if your protagonist gets captured and thrown into a dungeon or something, you would have the lieutenant come up and be like, here, maybe I can help you.

Oren: There may be a price to pay. 

Chris: Should I trust you? Well, your alternative is remaining in the dungeon, so…. You know?

Oren: This is convenient for storytellers because you really don’t want your characters hanging out in a dungeon. It’s real boring. 

Chris: As soon as they get in that dungeon, you should show some way forward for the story to move forward. Whether it’s making friends with one of their guards or something to make it seem like they’re gonna solve this problem. 

Oren: Personally, I’m just a huge sucker for unreliable ally love interests. Like I said at the beginning, they’re hot. I’m sorry, they just are. It’s just the law. If you make them of questionable loyalty and sexy and a little bit mean? Yeah. Gets me every time. Not a hard formula to crack. 

Chris: It’s true. Elsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, she’s a great character that goes back and forth where she starts with Indy, betrays him, then she ends up on the bad guy’s side−team evil−but then is still kind of sympathetic, and eventually also betrays team evil to side with Indy. She’s a great character that works really well for that story. 

Oren: Then she has an unfortunate end. 

Chris: She has an unfortunate end, but it’s still one of the best downward turning points I’ve seen. There’re so many great downward turning points in the Indiana Jones movies. They’re really about people doing bad things and getting divine comeuppance.

Oren: Shouldn’t be using these spooky artifacts, man. That’s not what they’re for. Don’t look at the arc. Don’t look at it. 

Oren: They belong in a museum, or usually they belong buried somewhere. Failing that, a museum. 

Chris: Yeah, that one definitely did not belong in a museum. 

Oren: Here’s something I noticed, and this is similar to the thing I was thinking about with villains is that when I was thinking about unreliable allies that stuck in my memory, they’re all from TV. I could think of maybe one from books off the top of my head, and that’s Little Finger from the first Game of Thrones book. We know that he can’t really be trusted. He even tells Ned he can’t be trusted. He also plays up how he super cares about Catelyn, so maybe we can trust him. Spoilers: No. 

Chris: What about Dresden Files? 

Oren: It must, but I can’t think of one. They must have one somewhere, because Dresden Files does every noir trope, and noirs love the femme fatale who you can’t be sure if you can trust or not. I’m sure Dresden Files does that. Maybe Susan counts?

Chris: Oh, I know! Skull. From Lockwood and Co. 

Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. The skull. The skull’s good. Skull’s great. 

Chris: The skull is a fantastic character. Lockwood and Co. is like a ghost post-apocalypse, almost a ghost dystopia, we might say. 

Oren: A ghost-calypse. 

Chris: Ghost-calypse, where in the setting, everybody stays inside at night because there are too many ghosts roaming around and young people can sense ghosts, but past a certain age, like 22 or something, they can’t anymore, which gives a reason why we have a team of teenagers who are doing ghost control. So they’re a little ghost teen ghost control agency, and they have a talking skull in a jar. And Lucy, the main character, is the only character who can actually hear the skull because that’s her special power, and the skull is very rude, says many mean things about people, and they can’t let the skull out of the jar because there’s a ghost embodied in it that will probably just kill them all. But slowly! Over the course of five books, Lucy and the skull grow closer together and they are more pals. And the skull grows less evil.

Oren: To be fair to the skull, it does say mean things about people, but so does Lucy. Lucy is really mean. 

Chris: This is one of those unintentional characterization things where there’s too much telling about negative things about characters, and that is interpreted as Lucy being a negative person, when I think it’s that the author is a negative person. Anyway, this happens sometimes, and I don’t think it’s intentional that Lucy just thinks negative things about people, but so many people are described in really negative ways except for crushes, golden boy Lockwood, who she has a crush on. But again, I still think it’s unintentional.

But the skull, being a ghost, can sense things that everybody else can’t and has information, which is how it is with most unreliable allies, especially former villains. Obviously, we need a reason to keep them around, and it’s usually that they have really valuable information or expertise from their days of villainy that nobody else has access to.

In this case, it’s a ghost with access to ghost information, but ghosts are for the most part malicious in the Lockwood setting.

Oren: The needing a reason to keep them around thing is important. Teen Wolf got a little lazy about that sometimes with the hunter dude−Gerald, I think is his name−he was the evil leader of the hunters for a season, and they keep him around because he’s been really badly poisoned and he’s been dethroned from the leader of the hunter clan, so he doesn’t pose a huge direct threat, at least as far as they can tell. Turns out he has got some plans going on, but it’s pretty obvious that they think that they can handle him, and he has information that they need. But they also have characters like Deucalion, who is super evil and murders tons of people, but then he stops being blind.

Chris: Oh God, it’s so ableist. It’s not good. 

Oren: It is ableist, but I also need everyone to understand that beyond being ableist, it is… so silly. It just makes them look really not smart. 

Chris: He was only murderous because he was blind, and now that he is sighted again, somehow he is not murderous. 

Oren: They don’t even say that out loud. They just kind of imply it because I think they know how silly that would sound. They would sound so ridiculous. They can’t bring themselves to say it. 

Chris: I know that he murdered tons of people, even people who were his own followers in his own pack. But it’s fine. I think he’s a good guy at heart. 

Oren: Yeah, he is fine. They give him a stern talking to. They’re like, if you ever try this again, we’ll come get you. 

Chris: Meanwhile, the Druid that season gets like a permanent end, and she’s a sympathetic character! She’ll only sacrificed a few people!

Oren: Who among us! You know? 

Chris: I do think that if you were going to take mercy on one of those characters and leave the character alive, you should leave the Druid alive.

Oren: I even liked Deucalion in the later seasons when he showed back up as a good guy. He had a cool role, but man…

Chris: It’s a charismatic actor. Maybe that’s why it’s less common in books. 

Oren: I do think that’s part of the reason, but I think it’s also that TV shows have an easier time developing characters other than the protagonist. A big draw of using an unreliable ally is the character arc, which you can do in a book. It’s not that you can’t; it’s just a little easier on a TV show. So I suspect that’s part of why it’s more common. 

Chris: One thing I do think is worth mentioning with the skull is one of the things that made the skull work is the skull’s utter helplessness. That allowed the skull to be more evil because I think that is one of the tricky things, especially if you don’t have a charismatic actor. I do notice that a lot of writers have trouble creating a certain level of antagonism, making their characters a bit of jerks, without going too far and pissing off readers. You just need to make them a little bit of a jerk. Readers are really sensitive, and it’s easier to underestimate how sensitive they are and make a character much more of a jerk than you needed to.

In this case, when you have a character that is a bad person or a selfish person, making it so that they are in a fix and can’t really do any harm can be important, and the skull is able to just insult people all the time and just be overtly evil because it’s a helpless ghost inhabiting a skull in a jar. It is completely unable to do anything to hurt them. All it can do is scream at them. So it has no teeth behind anything it says. Anytime they don’t want to listen to it anymore, they have a little valve on the top of the lid of the jar. So if Lucy doesn’t want to listen to it, she can just shut the jar. And she does eventually figure out that it’s lonely, so we can use a lack of contact as consequences when it does bad things. 

Oren: We can send it to its room.

Chris: Sit in a corner and think about what it did. 

Oren: The fact that it’s such a jerk is also what makes that premise not super sad. If the skull was a better person, it would be like, oh man, this is really mean. But the skull’s a huge jerk, so who cares? 

Chris: If you have a character that needs to be a little more of a jerk and you’re having trouble with that balance of making them only slightly jerky, making them more helpless is a good balancing factor. And you could do things like, if they were an intimidating villain, like Spike for instance gets the chip in his skull that causes him pain whenever he tries to inflict harm on anyone that’s not a demon. So we have some sort of fantastical restraint on him. 

Oren: Season four is not great, but Spike with the chip in his head was a stroke of genius. That worked out super well. 

Chris: That worked out really well. And then later we had a conflict when Spike had grown enough as a person over whether he should still have a chip in his skull. And then Buffy argued that, no, at this point it’s immoral to keep it in him. We need to take it out. So that could also be an interesting conflict if you have. Some kind of fantastical constraint on a former villain, then at some point, if they redeem themselves a bit, there can be arguments. Have they actually changed or did they just behave that way because it offered them personal benefits? And can we trust them if we take the constraints off? 

Of course you can also have a character that’s like, here, I’ll make a deal with you, but I can’t fulfill my end of the deal unless you take off the constraints because I have to use my magic for this. That’s always a fun one. 

Oren: And at that point you get into the redemption arc, which is a whole other pile of discourse. We have several articles about redemption arcs. In general, you just keep in mind how bad you showed this character being and what the mitigating circumstances might have been. And there’s so many factors that go into it. With Spike, it’s one of those things where if you think about what Spike is actually said to have done it’s like, nah, he’s an irredeemably evil. But if you look at what he actually does and then compare to how long he has had the chip in his skull, it’s probably fine. It’s probably fine. Don’t worry about it. 

Chris: Look, we didn’t personally watch all of those murders, so…

Oren: He did a lot of murders, but I don’t know what the principal in season seven is so mad about. I didn’t actually see his mom die, although I did see the fight where she died at the end of it, but I didn’t see the actual death, and I didn’t know her, so I don’t know why he’s so upset. 

Chris: A more recent example that’s also interesting is Saw Gerrera from Andor.

Oren: He is really interesting. 

Chris: He’s a really interesting character. In this case, we have not really on the same team as the heroes. One of the things I liked about Andor and Rogue One is capturing the fact that just because you have a resistance doesn’t mean that everybody’s united on the resistance side. 

Oren: I loved how Saw is basically a bandit. He does like hurting the empire, but he’s also largely in it to get rich. He likes money. A lot of revolutionaries start out that way. Truly fascinating to see that on television. 

Chris: Or you could have a situation where there are two groups that could be allied with each other, but they want to go about things in very different ways. Maybe one group wants to be nonviolent, and the other one is using violent means, for instance. Or have some other disagreements where they both have a common enemy, but they actually have very different objectives. That kind of thing. In Saw Gerrera’s case, it’s really interesting because we see scenes where it looks like other resistance groups are trying to collaborate with him against their common enemy, but he does not care about maintaining those relationships. He’s happy to sabotage other resistance groups so that he can do his own thing. 

Oren: The problem with Saw was that he had one scene where he listed a bunch of different rebel groups and their affiliations, and I think one of them was Neoseparatists. And I’m like, hang on, tell me about those guys. What’s their deal? And no, we’re moving on. We don’t have time for that. 

Like, no, bring back all those random rebel groups you were talking about. I want more interesting rebel politics. 

Chris: They’ve been afraid of politics since the prequel trilogy. 

Oren: They did add some back in Andor. Maybe if Andor had gotten the number of seasons it was clearly supposed to have, we would’ve gotten more of that.

Chris: Oh yeah. So many good TV shows that would’ve been better if they’d just gotten the amount of episodes they were supposed to have. 

Oren: It’s okay, Chris. We all agreed to pretend that Andor’s sister was never supposed to come back. We have been told it was always the plan for her to be dropped and never mentioned again. That’s just how it is, and we all accept it. See, I’ve now become the unreliable ally. 

Chris: How could you! Well, if you didn’t find us too suspicious, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our most reliable allies, that is, our patrons. First is Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Outro]