On the one hand, stories can be better or worse. This is a critical tenant of our philosophy. On the other hand, sometimes people like or dislike something for their own reasons, which has nothing to do with how good a story is. This is where we must differentiate between quality and taste. Both are important to understand, but getting them mixed up causes problems.

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Or are you? Are you really Oren?

Oren: [laughing] Anything’s possible. You don’t know.

Chris: For listeners, Oren has a cold right now, and it makes his voice sound different.

Oren: Is it better or worse, or is it just different? We don’t know. Someone I used to date back in the day thought this voice was very sexy, so maybe that’s just an improvement.

Chris: [laughing] The cold voice is best voice?

Oren: That’s what she thought. [laughing] That’s literally what she said.

Chris: So I have to say, I think our best podcast episode yet is obviously 544 when we talk about pseudo-structures, because that’s where we get to make fun of all of the storytelling ideas that aren’t mine. [laughing]

Oren: I’m a rationalist, and therefore things that I like are rational. And I like that episode. So it’s rational for that one to be the best.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s clearly an impartial judgment. That episode is just objectively the best. I suppose if I have to choose a second, I’ll go with the K-Pop Demon Hunters episode you just did with Ari, because that’s just the best movie.

Oren: [laughing] I mean, the most people saw it. Therefore, it must also be the best.

Chris: It’s popular, right? Doesn’t that mean it’s the best? Isn’t that what quality is – popularity?

Oren: We had a lot of very enthusiastic commenters who have told us that over the years. [both laugh]

Chris: Okay, this time we’re talking about taste versus quality. How do we tell them apart? Can we tell them apart? Is it just all our taste all the time? Is storytelling just subjective and there are no answers to anything?

Oren: I can’t, and you just gotta trust me on that. Don’t ask questions. It’s fine. You don’t wanna know how this particular sausage is made.

Chris: Yeah. [laughing] It is really tricky, but I wouldn’t get anywhere of course if I just threw my hands in the air and said it was subjective. I generally consider subjective to be kind of a cop-out. I think I’ve said that a number of times on this podcast. Or sometimes “it depends.” Well, it depends is usually true, but it depends on what. I really try to pin down the answer as much as I can.

Oren: Something can be subjective, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get a grip on. Subjective just means that we can’t measure it in terms of story quantity particles. That’s not how stories work. Whether a story is good or not is determined entirely inside our own brain, but we all have more or less the same brain, so we can figure stuff out. It’s not just a question of like either hard science and/or wibbly, wobbly story-warmy whatever. [both laugh] There’s middle ground there.

Chris: And one thing I find interesting is just both the absolutist idea of stories being perfect or terrible, and the like, oh, well, you know, stories are all subjective, what is quality even really, it doesn’t exist, are both kind of ways to stifle conversation about craft and not engage in critical analysis of media. They’re both conversation stoppers.

Oren: Both of them would be very convenient for storytellers, because if it was either perfect or trash, then it kind of wouldn’t matter what you did because if there’s even a tiny thing wrong with it, then it’s trash. And if people like it, then it must be perfect. So do whatever you want. And if tastes are entirely subjective, and story quality is entirely subjective, then also do whatever you want, because everything’s the same. Nothing matters. The important thing is I get to do whatever I want, Chris. [laughter]

Chris: And I guess I can’t really blame – there’s a lot of successful authors out there, they find their audience, they have fans who like their work, regardless of what they do. Maybe because the fans just love the way they sound, or just like their characters or some part of their writing, and we see sometimes that their quality, in our opinion, goes downhill because they don’t have to really try anymore. But they’re successful and they’re happy. And I’m grumpy about it, but I can’t say that that’s really a wrong thing for them to do. It’s their life, it’s their work. [Oren laughs]

Oren: If you could sell your story doing whatever weird thing that you always wanted to do but that no one would read before you were famous, it’s like, okay, if you can do it. It’s good work if you can get it, I guess.

Chris: If we took, for instance, the average fresh beginning writer who has everything to learn. If they don’t adhere to some level of quality craft principles, it’s unlikely that they will get anywhere. Because there is so much to learn. If you have not seen what beginning writing actually looks like, you have no idea.

Oren: It is funny, every once in a while someone will find a self-published book that’s really bad and be like, wow, this is so awful. I’m like, yeah, that’s what reading an unpublished manuscript is like. They look at me with disbelief, like, how? How can you do that? I’m like, well, you get used to it.

Chris: Yeah, you get used to it. I don’t even see the code anymore. It’s just blonde, brunette, redhead. [Oren laughs] To add some sexist analogies to this equation.

Oren: And maybe he was really forward thinking, and that was gender-neutral blonde, brunette, redhead.

Chris: Uh-huh. Sure. I’m sure that was men that he was talking about. Uh-huh.

Oren: Yeah. He could have been. We don’t know. You can’t prove he wasn’t. [both laughing]

Chris: Let’s just talk about what quality is in theory. I mean, we get to the practice, of course, everything gets messier. Everything we talk about in storytelling gets messier when you actually look at stories in practice. When I find the signal in the noise to kind of talk about what story structure is and other things like that, there’s a lot of noise, okay? But in theory, our guiding theory of quality is something called pareto improvement, which is from economics – I took it from economics. Which is basically when you have a situation that is where you can make a change and it’s either win-win or win-tie.

As an example, we have somebody who has kind of a messy, convoluted sentence, and some people are like, yeah, I can read that sentence just fine. I enjoyed it. It sounded poetic. And other people are like, oh, that sentence, because of a misplaced modifier, it’s saying completely different things, and it just grates at me. The question is, okay, can you make a revision to that sentence where the person who originally liked the sentence is still perfectly happy, but the person who was bothered by the sentence is now happy too. We haven’t made it worse for anybody, and we’ve made it better for somebody. We would call that pareto improvement, or a quality improvement, because we just made more people happier. It’s kind of objectively better. 

Sometimes we have to have discussions about people because people do not necessarily know – like when people get defensive over stories, and I’m thinking about a particular conversation I had with somebody recently, they may be like, no, you shouldn’t change that because I wouldn’t like that as well. It’s like, okay, but you don’t actually know that. That’s one of the things that’s really tricky about these conversations. People get really defensive about stories, but they can’t actually know. The average reader doesn’t know what their experience would be like if things were different. They just don’t have that expertise. And so if somebody gets defensive, they might assume no, the sentence is perfect the way it is, and if you were to change it, I would like it worse. But that’s not necessarily true.

Oren: This is why it’s so hard to talk about classic stories that everyone loves and have been around for a long time. I could talk about how there are probably ways to improve The Lord of the Rings by not fracturing the story and going in a bunch of different places like he does in the later books, but it’s really hard to imagine what that would look like. And so like all readers can think when I say that is, “We wouldn’t get Helm’s Deep? Or we wouldn’t get the Ents?” And that just feels worse to them because they don’t know what this alternate version would’ve been. They don’t know if maybe they would’ve liked it better, but they grew up with Lord of the Rings as it is right now. So it’s just kind of a difficult conversation to have.

Chris: Same goes for a lot of plot holes. There could be an easy fix, put in a different explanation that is more believable and easily some people who are bothered by the pothole will like it better, and other people who weren’t are not gonna like it worse.

Oren: Plot holes are probably the simplest example of a pareto improvement, because unless you have to break something to fix the plot hole, in general, almost no one is going to like a story worse because it has fewer plot holes. But of course, people are diverse. It’s always possible there’s Plot Holes Georg out there who loves 10,000 plot holes a second just throwing off the calculations. That could always happen. But in general, I think that the vast majority of people will be perfectly fine if you fix the plot hole, even if a plot hole didn’t bother them. Whereas a lot of other people, the plot hole will bother them. So if you fix it, they’ll be having a better time.

Chris: This one might be a little trickier because we’re starting to get closer to taste territory, but we talk about how we’re annoyed with stories that are too edgy. Part of that is my assumption that I’m going off of here is that people who like edgy stuff mostly are looking for dark stories. And if it felt like that darkness in the story was better justified, I would think that they are probably still gonna like it just as well. Whereas some people are bothered by the edginess. So we can have dark stories without edge, and we can have dark stories that are edgy. And I feel like the dark stories without edge are more universally liked by people.

Oren: Of course, it depends on what you mean by edge. We’re saying edge in the context of an edgelord, aka a pejorative.

Chris: I’m talking about situations where we have dark material that feels kind of tacked on and sloppy and over the top and kind of careless, where it’s like spontaneous baby killing. [both laugh]

Oren: I am admittedly not a huge fan of dark stories. That is a taste thing. A dark story is not inherently any better or worse than a light story. But if it’s like a generally fairly light story, and then suddenly one of the NPCs gets barbecued alive, that’s, I would argue, a quality issue, because who is that for? The people who like that are probably not gonna like the rest of the story because it’s all light and happy, and the people who liked the light and happy part are gonna be disgusted by this super gross thing that happens two-thirds of the way in.

Chris: We can talk about situations where we think the quality is low because it is not catering to the same tastes. Now there could be – but talking about like how are these dark elements applied? There could be somebody who really just wants moral dilemmas about baby killing versus letting a city die. And if you put more restrictions on that dark material so that it is all tasteful, shall we say – I would say – then they will like the story worse because it just has less super dark stuff in it because it’s under more constraints. There may be some audience out there who really just want to see rampant baby killing and burning villagers and everything everywhere. [laughing] But generally, my assumption is that the story is gonna go over better if dark elements are just used in a little bit more intentional, less kind of comical manner.

Oren: It’s often gonna be a question of if you do want these really dark, really difficult moral dilemmas – at that point, often it’s a question of making them not seem contrived. We always joke like in this world, the magic system means that you have to punch a baby if you wanna stop the city from exploding. But that’s only kind of a joke. That happens sometimes in unpublished manuscripts and occasionally even in published ones. If you want a really difficult moral choice, you can make those. They just take a little more work as opposed to something like a recent Star Trek episode that was basically Those Who Walk Away From Omelas as an episode. And it was like, well, we have to torture this kid forever or our society won’t work. And I’m sorry. That’s silly. That’s too silly. I have to really be into this dilemma for that to not seem incredibly silly. And if you wanted to, you could create a situation where we had to inflict pain or suffering to keep our society going in a way that would be less silly. And I think the people who liked the Torture Kid plot would like that plot just as much. I don’t think they’re specifically here for a contrived kid torture story. [Chris laughs]

Chris: I don’t know. Maybe there’s some people who like the shock factor, like the Tuvix episode. I honestly think the Tuvix episode, it became well known because the shock created buzz, the same way that if you make web visitors angry, you get more views. It’s like, is that really quality at that point? So some other factors in these kind of like fuzzy situations – is it quality, is it not quality – one thing that I do try to pay attention to is which people are we targeting, and is it supposed to be a niche audience or a broader audience?

For instance, like when I’m talking about candy, we talk a lot about over-candied characters. There are characters that are so glorified that to me and many other people, they come off as obnoxious. However, I do try to be aware that there are some audiences that really like that. Specifically, if it is targeted towards them, and the candied character is like them, or to be perfectly honest, if it’s a white guy, it tends to go over better with everybody. People are used to white-male-centered stories. Try to be aware of that. At the same time when you have an author like Brandon Sanderson who is ridiculously popular, and he has super candied characters, I do start to doubt that that is a good strategy for him. Because he is like a name brand. He’s like a household name, and at that point, there’s gotta be other people who are finding this obnoxious. And I don’t think that’s really what makes his characters compelling.

Oren: Even with something that’s a little more niche, people respond to this character who to me is annoying, but people like them because they do cool stuff. Is it possible to have them still be cool in that way, but not piled on quite so much?

Chris: We go back to the pareto improvement, and I have a blog post talking about how do we make candied characters still have candy, but make them go over better with people who resent them or find them obnoxious. There still is a pareto improvement often to be had there, I think. That’s one of those tricky things. And by default, Mythcreants does tend to recommend the broader scenario that not having too much candy generally makes a character likable among a broader audience. And so generally that’s what we recommend. Even though with the right audience, maybe more candy would go over better.

Oren: One of the biggest issues of taste versus quality that I run into a lot is with certain genre conventions and tropes that I don’t like them, and they drive me up the wall, but it’s undeniable that their target audience at least seems to like them. The most recent one that I’ve run into is this concept of let’s do a Hunger Games to decide who’s the king. That happens in The Raven Scholar, and it’s not quite a Hunger Games because they’re not actually killing each other, mostly – spoilers for The Raven Scholar. But they have a contest to decide who gets to be emperor, and they do a series of mini-games and whoever gets the most points at the end is emperor. And I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It’s just too silly. As I’m reading, I’m constantly like, how would this work? Where is their power base? Where is their source of legitimacy? None of this makes any sense.

Chris: That must be one of the only spoiler warnings that is not actually followed by a spoiler. 

Oren: Yeah well, I’m getting to that. [Chris laughs] That’s like a taste thing, at the end of the day. I thought about, I would do an article like How to Fix the Government System in Raven Scholar, but then as I thought about it, I was like, I can’t. I can’t fix this and have it still be the thing that people want, so that I would say is a taste difference. But there are some things within that that I think are quality differences. Like I think this would be a straight up improvement, is that a lot of the contests that the protagonist has to go through are extremely vague and at the end the people just kind of hand out points however they feel like, which bothered me a lot. And I think we could fix that, and nobody who likes this kind of contest to be emperor would be bothered that the contests themselves made more sense. So I think that’s the thing where there is a taste issue, but then there are quality issues within that.

Chris: That is how it is with most books. There’s gonna be some quality issues in there. No book is perfectly optimized.

Oren: Masquerades are the same thing. I used to hate masquerades because I just couldn’t get over how little sense they made, and how there was basically no way to explain them. But as I got older and I read more fiction, I was like, okay, I don’t like the masquerade, but I like urban fantasy, and often you need a masquerade for that to work, so I’ll just deal with it. But you can still have better or worse masquerades.

Chris: I think one of the tropes that some audiences in the genre really like that bothers me the most is in romances when the heroine doesn’t have enough agency. That’s one where we know that a lot of people who read romance also don’t like that. At the same time, there is definitely a segment of romance writers and readers who want the heroine – this is of course in a heteromance, so we have the heroine is the female main character, and then we have a male love interest – who just kind of sits around like a little doll. [laughs] And the male character just does everything. Even at this point, really big romantasy bestsellers do not tend to do that, so I think that it’s a pretty large segment that does not like that.

Oren: Or at the very least, what they’ll try to do is sort of have it both ways where the protagonist will declare, “I’m not a damsel in distress, I can do cool stuff!” and then not do it. So that we could show off the male character some more. But the fact that the author felt the need to declare that suggests to me they know that there are people in their audience who don’t want the main character to just be a passive damsel. And so they are hoping that they can sort of trick them by saying they’re not gonna be one, and then just don’t look too closely at what happens after that. [Chris laughs]

It’s the same thing in romantasy with the question of is the abusive part actually important to people’s tastes, or is it that they like confident, aggressive male love interests, and a lot of authors don’t know how to write those in a way that isn’t abusive? Which one, I don’t know.

Chris: Or do they have a humiliation fetish, is that what’s happening? I kind of wonder if that’s what’s happening with Shield of Sparrows, where the male love interest, he just makes mean, sexually degrading comments about the main character in the beginning, and it’s just like, ugh. This is the least attractive thing I have ever read, and I’m wondering if there’s just a humiliation kink happening right there.

Oren: There could be, but it could also just be that these readers like the general concept of an enemies-to-lovers romance, and they aren’t really that fussed about the specifics.

Chris: It could be that the storyteller’s just trying to create enemies to lovers and just doesn’t really know how to create proper animosity and antagonistic chemistry between them, and it’s just impossible to tell without asking a lot of these things what’s going on there. So it’s quite possible that almost everybody could be just as happy if we made a few changes to make the love interest less awful. Especially since once they actually start romancing each other, suddenly his personality changes, and strangely, he’s no longer like that anymore. Huh, I wonder what happened?

Oren: Suddenly he’s really nice. It’s like, okay. That’s interesting.

Chris: I think another thing for a lot of these questions of, “yeah, some people like this, but is it good?” is bringing back to the topic of like compatible tastes that you were talking about earlier. Yeah, some people may like edgy stories, but if the story is really light and then suddenly has an edgy twist in it, that would definitely be a quality problem because it does not please the same group of people. And I have a lot of questions about stories that are dark but dull.

Oren: Yeah. Like they’re dark, but they don’t have any tension.

Chris: Exactly. So I’ve always told people to add tension to their stories. Tension, tension, tension. Every time I talk about plot, I talk about tension. But I have always known that there is a group, there is an audience, for very low tension or even no tension stories that are very tension sensitive. I know these people personally, so I know they exist. But these people also tend to gravitate towards comedies and cozies. In my experience, they don’t want a story that’s super sad and people die or has like graphic violence, but also has no tension. The question I have about, for instance, a lot of T. Kingfisher’s works where she tends to write things that are dark. She doesn’t seem to manage tension very well, and so a lot of her things just, it’s kind of dark. Like Sorceress Comes to Call is an excellent example of this, where the beginning of Sorceress Comes to Call is very dark but very compelling, and quite tense. And then it just kind of drifts off into a bunch of protagonists just kind of hanging out, scene after scene.

Oren: They talk about how they should make a plan.

Chris: They should make a plan.

Oren: Their plan is to make a plan, later.

Chris: They have the concepts of a plan. That’s kind of what the book fades into and it’s like, I don’t think that’s a good strategy. Because I think there are readers who probably love just a group of friends hanging out and chatting with each other with not much tension happening. Those readers do exist, but I don’t think they would want that really dark opening on there.

Oren: Or at the very least, they might not want the continual dark elements that are still in the book after that opening. They’re just not tense. They’re still dismal. My guess is that some people like really dark stories, and they like it enough to overlook the fact that it has no tension.

Chris: In Kingfisher’s case, I know some people just love her characters. Once they get enough attached to the characters, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the plot, and that’s fine, but then she’s not succeeding because of this dark but dull factor, but in spite of it, at that point.

Oren: Cozy fantasy in general is just a really interesting example of a taste difference more than a quality difference. Although again, within there, there can be quality issues. Some people just can’t stand cozy fantasies and find them dull or boring or frustrating. Some of them to the extent that they write weird think pieces about how cozy fantasies mean the death of literature. When in reality it’s just a different kind of story that maybe isn’t your thing. But within a cozy fantasy, you want it to be low tension, but if it’s zero tension, that becomes a quality issue. Almost no one wants zero tension. They just don’t want a lot. [Chris laughs]

Chris:  I have a couple cozy fantasies that I like to compare because one of them is low tension, but is clearly accidentally low tension, and the other is quite low tension, but feels designed low tension. So the one that feels accidental to me is Very Secret Society of Witches, where the thing about this one is that the author deliberately sets up stakes. They just don’t work. The stakes – there’s a lot of questions, it just doesn’t feel like this is a real problem. And one of the reasons that happens is because there’s a reveal that we’re saving until later. Again, reveals can often sabotage the plot because sometimes they just motivate storytellers to keep things secret that the story really needs.

Oren: A lot of stories have fumbled because of a reveal.

Chris: Because of this reveal, we don’t really have the information present to set up a compelling problem that actually creates tension, but the author is clearly trying. So that’s a situation in which the tension is actually lower than intended. It’s not really supposed to be a story that is that light.

Whereas Teller of Small Fortunes, I feel like that one is very low tension, but it feels like it does what it intended to do. The thing is that one has four different people that all have personal problems, but it doesn’t have community stakes, it doesn’t have world stakes, really. It’s just those people and there’s very low to no urgency. It gives the story something, but it’s definitely for people who are at least tolerant of almost no tension. The how it feels it sets up. There’s no attempt to create a larger plot. It’s those personal journeys that actually form all of the plot structure to that story. But it still is cohesive, though. It still has a notable start to their problems and a resolution. It’s just that we’ve got very low stakes and the way it’s set up, it just doesn’t create much tension. It’s more of a enjoy these characters hanging out with each other and enjoying the journey, that kind of thing.

Before we go, a last thing I think is kind of important to cover when we’re covering things that are like taste versus quality is the extent to which people think there is a specific quality to a book, and that’s not actually real. People become very convinced that a book is good or bad, and you kind of have to go in there and be like, slow down. Or they get mad at us for praising a book, because don’t you know that book is bad? Or criticizing a book, because don’t you know, that book is good? Or whatever.

Couple things that happen here is, I think a really big one is just the feedback loop. The more you enjoy specific elements of the book, the more leniently you look at all of the other elements of the book. So if you love the characters, you will look more leniently on the plot and notice less if there are plot errors. It’s a feedback loop where it creates an upward or downward spiral. So if you find a book really gripping, a lot of times people assume, oh man, that book was just so good, because it really gripped me and I stayed up all night and I finished it. Okay. It really was engaging for you, but that doesn’t actually mean that it’s objectively better. What it often means is that there was something that was really appealing to you. And it could be a quality thing, or it could be more of a taste thing, or something that’s kind of in between, like it did a really good job at writing a character that your demographic could identify with, for instance. And then you had enough – critical enjoyment mass happened and it took off from there. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a better book than the books that that didn’t happen for, like objectively better.

And people don’t really understand usually what creates their experience, their enjoyment, or oftentimes they’re more likely to know what caused them less enjoyment, but sometimes they don’t know that either. The other thing is the community consensus where everybody then just takes it as gospel, that a book is bad or good, and we just assume that’s a fact.

Oren: You also see community reinforcement. People make each other more extreme by sharing increasingly extreme views, and each one pushes the needle a little further. Stranger Things, spoiler for the penultimate episode, but it’s got Will’s coming out scene, which is a little long. It goes on a little longer than it probably should. I have watched in real time as people have convinced themselves that this is the worst scene that has ever happened. And obviously bigotry plays into that, because this is a gay character, and we’re in the middle of a conservative backlash right now. But beyond that even, I can see people who were like a little annoyed by it seeing meme upon meme of how terrible it is and being like, yeah, it was awful. And it’s like, yeah, it was a little long, maybe a minute or so longer than it should have been, right? So that sort of thing can also happen and it’s, you know, very frustrating to see in real life because there’s nothing I can do at that point. I can’t push that tide back. It’s just not gonna happen.

Chris: Or more classically – folks, Twilight isn’t that bad. It’s not any worse than most bestselling books. But it’s like it seems to be the book that everybody beats up on because they know that there’s a community consensus that book is supposed to be bad, and therefore they can beat up on it without having tons of ignorant commenters or something.

Oren: Yeah, come beat up on Wheel of Time like the rest of us! [both laugh]

Chris: You cowards! We’re over here beating up on all the popular books and criticizing authors before there are terrible scandals about them, not after.

Oren: That’s always a fun time.

Chris: That’s a fun time. So yeah, it’s just the idea that people have about quality to certain books, or like all books nowadays are bad, or all bestsellers nowadays are bad. A lot of that is just an illusion.

Oren: When you read more critically and pay more attention, you will realize that literature has always sucked about the same amount.

Chris: All the books have bad parts and good parts, and there’s nothing – grade everything on a curve. So it could always get much worse, but it can always get better too.

Oren: With that, I think I will make the objectively quality-driven choice to end the episode.

Chris: If you agree with us that our tastes are in fact quality, and we are very objective about everything, then obviously you would also agree that you should support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.