Prequels: Why? We’re honestly curious. Despite just about everyone knowing that they’re a bad idea, they keep getting made. But since we can’t know the minds of media producers, our only recourse is to spend a whole episode talking about the constraints a prequel is under. Those are often a much bigger problem than fears over readers already knowing the ending. Also: Star Trek is still a pretty awkward setting for a xenomorph plot.

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So Chris, I am thinking that I’m gonna write my very own Star Wars prequel. ’cause as we all know, there haven’t been any of those yet.

Chris: Mmm, yep. Never.

Oren: So I think it’s gonna be easy because all I need to do is explain a few things, like how Anakin became Vader and nobody knows, how the Jedi are a myth after just a couple decades, why Obi-Wan barely changed his name, why Yoda is hanging out in a swamp, how Vader doesn’t know about his two kids, who Owen and Baru are, how a good person like Anakin could fall for the obviously evil Dar– Oh, well actually this is hard.

Chris: Just remember you also have to explain how Han Solo got his last name. Everybody’s wondering about that.

Oren: Mm-hmm. Because that’s definitely not just his name. There’s definitely a big ceremony where an Imperial guy gave him the name Solo. [quietly] Oh my God. [normal] Okay. I don’t hate the movie Solo, but that part is just real brain dead. It’s just like, who thought this was a good idea? It feels like that was put in there to be mocked. So we’re talking about prequel constraints, and the reason why is I am reading one of the two Kyoshi tie-in novels for the Avatar franchise. And it opens with this little author’s note talking about how prequels are challenging because the audience already knows how things turn out. And the implication is that there isn’t suspense. And while I won’t discount that entirely, I actually don’t think that’s the big problem here. I don’t think it’s that so much that the audience isn’t gonna feel tension ’cause they know how things go. I think the big issue is that you need things to end a certain way and it turns out that a lot of the things that go into making a good backstory don’t make a good story story.

Chris: I also think with Kyoshi in particular, we don’t really know… I mean, if you read all of the tie-in fiction, maybe people will know more about Kyoshi. But if you’ve just watched The Last Airbender, we know very little about Kyoshi. We know that she had to succeed in defeating Chin, the conqueror, but we don’t know if she died immediately after that, for instance.

Oren: Kyoshi is far enough back in time that I actually wouldn’t say this is under too many constraints. There are a few. Just because of the way that the Avatar setting works, with Kyoshi in particular, you have to explain, and this part has just never made sense to me, why Kyoshi only tries to stop Chin when he gets to her island. That’s not avatar behavior. And that raises this question like, does the avatar just not do anything about internal problems? Is the avatar’s only job to prevent nation-on-nation conflict? So there can be this huge civil war going in the Earth kingdom and the avatar just sits it out? That’s an interesting possibility, but I really don’t think that’s what we were supposed to take away from that. So that would be kind of hard, but also a Kyoshi book doesn’t necessarily even have to get to that part of her life. We could just ignore that.

Chris: I think Darth Vader’s backstory is obviously more challenging because we have a lot of the same characters, and so we just have a lot more detailed knowledge about how this is gonna turn out. And, and that can, again, it can, we get asked a lot, does it matter if people know there’s a happy ending? Can they still feel tension? The answer is yes. But there is a variety of ways in which knowing the outcome can affect the experience. In particular, it can dispel mysteries. So like for curiosity, it matters more than something that’s really tense, for instance. But a sense of mystery can also create more tension because it can make something seem scarier. So if you lose that mystery, you can not only lose the curiosity, but lose a little tension too. There’s a variety of ways. It does, you know, affect the experience, but it’s not like we can’t get tension out of a story where we have some idea of the ending and certainly with something like Kyoshi where we only have one event we know about, right. We could still definitely create tension in that situation.

Oren: Absolutely. And what makes Vader more challenging than Kyoshi is both the fact that we know so much more about him from the movies, but also because his backstory was changed between movies so that he could be Luke’s dad. That’s not part of the plan, and it raises a lot of questions when you look back at the first movie and you’re like, wait, wait, huh? Huh? Is Owen Anakin’s brother? Because that doesn’t make any sense. And so Lucas tries to explain it with this convoluted Tatooine plot that doesn’t make any sense, and it’s challenging. I would be hard pressed to explain that connection. It’s weird, right? It’s a difficult job.

Chris: Yeah. This honestly reminds me a lot of working with a client that has a magnum opus series, where it’s their first project. And of course, because it’s the first project, it’s often very, very big and it’s epic and they’re in love with it. And it’s a whole bunch of books. And what happens in those cases where normally when you start a series or somebody more experienced or more mercenary even starts a series, they’re really focused on that first book because they don’t know if the rest is gonna happen, right? So they focus on the first book and making that book great. And then sometimes they think too late about the sequels and they don’t have anywhere to go, and the sequels aren’t very good. That’s the risk here. But they focus on making that first book good because the rest depends on it. But when you have somebody who’s brand new and the idea gets away from them and it’s super huge, a lot of times what they’re in love with is where it ends, right? So they’re in love with that last book, and what that does is it turns the first book into like a prequel with all of these constraints. Because it’s like, okay, this book, it’s your first book, so of course it needs a lot of work. Then they’re like, no, because it has to all end this scene that I’m imagining in the final book that I’m completely in love with. And if we take out that character, then that character won’t be there to perform their role. And if we don’t have this event, then this won’t happen. And so it’ll ruin this scene in the last climactic volume

Oren: They end up putting the first book, possibly the first several books, in the role of building a story that will be fun once we get to the final installment.

Chris: Right. It’s like they get last priority when really the first book is by far the most important. If people don’t like the first book, they’re not gonna keep reading. That one absolutely has to be a success. The rest depends on it. So that’s the most important book. But when you’re thinking of the big story and you’re like, oh, well of course the climax is the most important, and that happens in the last book… This can happen if, again, too early in the process, especially before people know much about plotting and cohesiveness, they get really in love with that climactic volume. It can create a very similar problem where we’re only willing to change the first book where it doesn’t change that imagined last book.

Oren: Yeah, that is rough. I’d say that’s actually the most likely scenario that most people who go to Mythcreants are gonna run into this problem at, because the prequel problem tends to come up most often in Hollywood. Because I guess someone thinks that prequels are an easy way to make money on a setting without taking risks, and I don’t know why they think that. I have never been able to figure that out. Like, why is a prequel considered lower risk than a sequel? I don’t know, but they seem to think it is. So that’s strange. But most of us aren’t writing big franchises where this is a thing. So I’d say the magnum opus stage is very common. It happens to lots of us. But even for a novelist, you could still end up in a situation where you know you have the setting you really like, and now you want to tell a story earlier in the timeline. You wanna tell a story in the same setting and you know it’s not really gonna work to set one after your current story because your current story ends with your protagonists defeating the source of all evil. And so now there’s no conflict up left in the world or whatever. So you’re like, oh, that’s fine, I’ll just set it up a couple generations earlier. You think it’ll be easy and oh, now there are different problems for you to deal with

Chris: For one thing, sometimes you’re still facing the evil, but now it’s hopeless.

Oren: We can’t beat the evil because it still needs to be around in the later books. That was one of the big problems with the big courtroom episode of Strange New Worlds because they’re having a big courtroom episode over a legal problem that they can’t actually defeat, because it still needs to be there for Deep Space Nine. So if they actually did a bunch of stuff to try to defeat it, that would end up seeming pointless and frustrating because they would still end up losing. So instead they just don’t, really, and they spend the whole episode kind of giving speeches. It’s very strange. It’s a very strange episode.

Chris: One thing that comes to mind is the Dark Crystal TV show. Because in the Dark Crystal movie, there are only two Gelflings left. They were genocided. Now the show takes place where there’s still like Gelfling civilizations around. It’s like, oh, oh, this is not gonna go well. Are we sure we wanna watch this?

Oren: No, and that one’s perfect too, because it’s a prequel where they suddenly have to explain a thing that if you think about it for five seconds, is impossible to explain, which is, how on Earth did these nine Skeksis kill all the Gelflings. How did they do that? And the answer is offscreen. Don’t worry about it. There’s a part where, because the Gelflings, there are a bunch of them and they are the royal guards that the Skeksis have guarding their palace. So they have all the weapons and the combat training and then the Skeksis decide to kill them all. And we cut to later after they have killed them all.

Chris: Didn’t we see they were just starting to build the Garthim at the end of the first season. But they had to have some sort of force that was offscreen in order to be… How are they the rulers of the world? We’re not really sure.

Oren: And we also know that by the time of the Dark Crystal, yeah, they have some minions, but not a lot.

Chris: It really feels like in the movie that they’re in decline. They’re the evil overlords, but they’re the evil overlords in decline. I don’t know. I expected them to be a lot stronger in the show, but yeah, no, they’re exactly the same except for without their most powerful minions. So that was strange.

Oren: Which I think is another prequel constraint, which is that, especially if you’re using the same characters that audiences like those characters for who they were in the original story, that’s what they wanna see. They may not want to see the prequel version of these stories. Now with the Skeksis, I think it probably would’ve worked fine to have them be way more badass and powerful. But I can see why the people making the show we’re like, well no, we gotta make them like they are in the movie. Because that’s the thing everyone likes. Solo is another really funny example of that. Han Solo’s arc in New Hope is to overcome being a selfish jerk who only cares about himself, which is a tall order to make audiences like a character like that as the main character for a whole movie, which is what he would logically be in his solo backstory. There are probably ways you could have made that work. The most obvious is you could have had him fighting even worse people than him, and instead they decided to have him fight rebels for some reason.

Chris: I think we could have had him like working directly for the Empire and then breaking free of them is his arc. So then he’s no longer part of the Empire and that’s good, but he hasn’t learned to fight for the forces of good yet. Now he’s just in it for himself.

Oren: There are ways to do it. But you have to overcome these inherent problems. You have to be way more creative and be able to solve them. There are a bunch of new problems that you have, that you wouldn’t have if you were just telling a new story.

Chris: Yeah, for sure. And again, working with a character that already has that flaw that they have in their character arc can just be tough. Another one that I find really funny is when we have these franchises and they’re doing a prequel and they wanna include a team of two or more of the same characters that people love, but those characters met each other for the first time in what would become the sequel work. So it’s like, okay, what happened then iff they’re meeting for the first time. Do they get amnesia after this? Do we do…? And of course there’s the Discovery solution, which is hilarious.

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.

Chris: We’re like, okay, everything, all the adventures we’ve gone through together are gonna become top secret for some reason. And you never, never speak of this again. Like, okay.

Oren: And that one’s weird because, unlike most Star Trek series, the original series doesn’t start with the characters all meeting each other. They have in fact known each other for a while by that point, and their backstory is very vague. So in this case, there’s room for young Kirk to be hanging out with young Scotty. Now in Strange New Worlds it does start to strain credulity that so many of the future Enterprise characters are showing up on Pike’s Enterprise, and that was clearly something that they were doing in a now probably doomed attempt to get another show made. Which is a little sad. But you know, the Discovery thing where it’s like, yeah, actually Spock’s sister was super famous and like everybody knew about her.

Chris: But we’d never speak of her.

Oren: Yeah, we don’t talk about her because at the end of season two, everyone pinky promised not to. Like, guys, why is this a prequel? Why are you doing this to yourselves?

Chris: It reminds me of the Obi-wan midquel show, where it’s like, oh, apparently Obi-wan and Leia like had a lot more experience together than he had with Luke. Which is…

Oren:  The idea that Obi-wan and Leia had this whole adventure when she was a kid is just, it’s wild to rewatch New Hope with that idea in your head.That’s so obviously not what happened.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is hard, often, to get them to line up perfectly, though. We made the mistake, after watching Andor, of watching Rogue One.

Oren: Yeah. [cackles]

Chris: You know, when I had not watched Rogue One again right after watching Andor they appeared to line up, but then when we watched Rogue One again we were reminded of things that do not seem to be true at all. Like, Andor’s statement that he’s been in this fight since he was six years old. It’s like, what are you talking about? No, you haven’t.

Oren: My favorite is that in Andor, K2SO is invincible. A choice I didn’t understand even in the show, but it certainly doesn’t line up with what he is in, in Rogue One, where he’s powerful, but he can still get shot and it still hurts him. But in Andor, blaster bolts just bounce off of him. Don’t even worry about it.

Chris: Such a strange choice. Don’t you want some tension? What are you doing?

Oren: I mean, in that case, okay, your prequel can sometimes be good enough that this doesn’t matter. Andor is so beloved that nobody is going and looking them up and seeing how much they don’t match. And the Obiwan midquel is, I think about as good as it reasonably could have been under the circumstances, but it’s still a lot harder.

Chris: Yeah. Obi-wan midquel was surprisingly good. Not perfect, but again, for what it was. I mean, we had a whole episode talking about constraints, and the fact that when you have lots of constraints that make your job harder, you could just expect the whole story quality to be worse as a result, because the storyteller had less options. So in many cases, they weren’t able to choose the best option. And they had to work a lot harder to figure out how things would fit together and all those other things.That’s why sequels and prequels are rarely as good as a first installment.

Oren: And we’ve been talking a lot about plot and character constraints, which are important, but there are also just setting constraints and these can get you, even if you do the clever thing and set your story so far in the past that none of the characters or plot points are super important. They’re not likely to interfere with each other because chances are that your world has changed over time and the way that people liked it, is it the way that it was in the main story, and was it like that in the backstory? Eh…

Chris: Well, what if I revealed that the big bad that the heroes defeated in the setting wasn’t the real big bad, it was just a minion for the big bad. And then I could just do it again.

Oren: Yeah, that could probably work. But I’m thinking about stuff like, okay, if you look at Avatar again, we like things like metal bending, we think metal bending’s cool. We like women being allowed to bend. Those are things we like. But if you go back in time, there’s no metal bending and the north pole is hella sexist because Katara hasn’t given her speech yet. I ran an an Avatar RPG one time, and. I really struggled with the fact that one of the Earth bender’s core abilities it gets is metal bending and that doesn’t exist yet. So I had to figure out how to house rule that real quick.

Chris: Yeah, so we’ve decided this is classified, so every time you metal bend –

Oren: You have to sign a waiver. Sign an NDA. I never really cared for the Northern Water tribe being sexist because I don’t find Katara’s defeat of northern sexism to be convincing anyway. So I just retcon that. But if you’re someone who cares about continuity more than me, then you’re gonna have a problem there. And it’s hard to deal with that.

Chris: Imagine if you did a story about childhood Katara and Sokka and you’re like, oh, well I guess I have to make Sokka sexist now because he is sexist in the first four episodes of The Last Airbender.

Oren: Which would be wild if you think about it, because nobody else in Sokka’s life is sexist. So if you did a prequel with sexist child Sokka, you’d have to be like, where is he getting that from? 

Chris: Who taught him to be sexist? This is awfully strange.

Oren: Is he, like, sneaking off to like watch Avatar YouTube? He is like watching an avatar manosphere guy, what is happening here? That whole thing is weird. The one that I find the funniest is in the Rings of Power, how devoted they are to the fact that orcs in the backstory of middle earth cannot travel by daylight. It’s so silly. If your enemy can’t travel by daylight, you have basically auto defeated them. There is no way you can lose a war against an enemy that can’t move around during the day. Unless you have, like, one guy and they have a million guys, but like Rings of Power commits to that bit, at least until season two, where it was too much trouble. But for the first season, the orcs are going around digging their tunnel and moving their whole army underneath big canopies to keep the sunlight out.

Chris: We’re just gonna pretend that tunneling is much easier than it is.

Oren: Right. They are just really into this concept and it’s wild. It’s such a bad thing to introduce that before now your enemy couldn’t do basic stuff like move around during the day. 

Chris: It reminds me of Lockwood and Co, where the main characters do hauntings and how every ghost story, it’s like, okay, but we wanna fight the ghosts at night. It’s like, how does it end up being dark every time they go to face a ghost  or go to the haunted house? How does it get dark so quickly?

Oren: Prequels are also, this can happen with sequels too, but prequels are a good way to discover that your setting only really has one type of story in it. You see that in the Alien movies. For example, you know the first alien movie is, hey, what if there was a monster and it was spooky. And then the second one is, what if there were a bunch of monsters and we sacrificed some spookiness to have more action? Those are basically the two plots you can have in the Alien universe. And every new Alien movie just confirms that those are the only two Alien plots, and they start to try to do prequels and you got Prometheus, which is just a bad movie and barely an Alien movie. And granted, if it had been good, maybe no one would’ve cared that it was barely an Alien movie. But I think people go to see Alien movies because they wanna see the aliens, right? They wanna see the Xenomorphs. I think that’s a reasonable expectation to have. And so going to like, oh, it’s actually about the engineers, and there’re weird biblical connections. Even if that wasn’t garbage, I think people would probably have been not happy that their expectations were not met.

Chris: But Oren, the Strange New Worlds alien episode was so good. All of them. All of them. 

Oren: That’s a different problem. 

Chris: Look, it’s just alien eggs. They just defeat all of their medical devices in Star Trek. They just don’t work. Yeah, no. They also break the laws of conservation of mass. 

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it. They’re just immune to technology. It’s fine.

Chris: They’re immune to technology. They somehow accumulate matter without consuming enough matter and yeah, it’s fine.

Oren: That’s an example of taking a story that worked well in one universe and it not working well in another universe, because the characters in Aliens are either space truckers or Marine Corps soldiers. And so they’re either fighting one alien and having a lot of trouble with it, or they’re fighting a bunch of aliens with all their tech. And for some reason in the Star Trek episode, they were like, what if we gave our characters all the tech and had them fight one alien? And I was like, well, that’s not gonna work. And it didn’t. The Hobbit is also an interesting one ’cause technically the Hobbit is not a prequel. Technically the Hobbit comes out first, but is easily overshadowed by the Lord of the Rings. So when you’re trying to adapt the Hobbit, this seems to create a weird Catch-22 where the Hobbit is absolutely not the Lord of the Rings. And if you try to turn it into the Lord of Rings, you get the Hobbit movies and they’re not very good.

Chris: Yep. It’s true. It’s a story that really demands a very different tone.

Oren: Right. And you know, maybe that’s the thing. Maybe audiences would accept something that’s much more like The Hobbit, but at the same time, I don’t know. I feel like maybe they want Lord of the Rings again. So who knows? I don’t know what would happen if they actually released a Hobbit movie that was appropriately made for what The Hobbit is as a story.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing about Lord of the Rings is it has a way to get rid of Gandalf, which is honestly really important because Gandalf is OP. And if you look at the Hobbit, the issue with making it into a super tense story is the fact that Gandalf is supposed to be with them the whole time, but he’s not. And what happens is you can see that they don’t know how to create danger for any of the protagonists. Well, Gandalf is there, so he just periodically takes off somewhere just so that the characters can get in trouble and then Gandalf shows up and saves them again. And that just happens repeatedly and it would be a little easier to accept if it was presented as a lighter story. But when we make it really epic, then it really calls attention to the fact that Gandalf can just take care of everything.

Oren: Another one that comes up a lot with prequels is that the arc that you want your character to have is often the one that they go through in the original story because that’s the thing they’re known for. And so with Solo, we saw already that they just decided he was a nice guy from the beginning. Don’t worry about it. But in Strange New Worlds, they have the same problem where they’re like, hey, Spock’s one of our characters. What should we do with Spock? Well, obviously we’re going to have him learn about his human side and explore his emotions, all right. But that’s what he does in the original show, and this technically takes place before then. So I guess he already knew all that stuff.

Chris: I mean, I’m guessing a big part of Spark’s appeal is the fact that he learns about emotions, right?

Oren: Like, what else would you do with that character?

Chris: Right? You can’t really not do it with him. It would be like a Data who doesn’t wanna be human.

Oren: And then it gets even weirder when they bring T’pring in where like they want T’pring to be a character, and in the original series T’pring and Spock, do not know each other when they first meet up for their arranged marriage. That’s an important part of the plot. They have no backstory and it’s a little weird. I can enjoy it. I don’t necessarily immediately rage quit the show when the continuity breaks.

Chris: Again, clearly this is classified and so they have to pretend that they don’t know each other.

Oren: Yeah, they just pretended that they didn’t have this whole relationship bonding experience.

Chris: Exactly. Exactly.

Oren: So the whole thing is weird and awkward and I think the Strange New Worlds writers are doing the best they can under those circumstances, because they’ve got Spock and they have to do something with him. And the thing Spock does is explore his human half. That’s everything we know about Spock. But it didn’t have to be a prequel there. There’s no overriding reason it has to keep being prequels. They just keep doing this to themselves. Well, not anymore because Paramount has decided we don’t get any more Star Trek. But you know, who knows what that’ll look like in the next 10 years when they finally decide to do Star Trek again.

Chris: Prequels are such a funny thing. I guess it really depends on are you trying to make this another installment in the series, and how close are you trying to link it with the rest? Right? Because I think the Kyoshi model is just a better way to go, where you’re just using your setting, mining your setting for nuggets that people are interested in and it doesn’t have the same main character that people are attached to, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. The one that’s weirding me out as we’re almost outta time here, is that there’s some Lord of the Rings midquels in the works. 

Chris: Yeah. They’re doing the barrow wights, I think that they’re called. So there are two projects.

Oren: There’s The Hunt for Gollum. Which I think is what it says, right? That’s the one that’s actually had casting 

Chris: That takes place between the Habbit and Lord of the Rings. I don’t know what they’re gonna do with that because it can’t be anything that matters.

Oren: Yeah. So that one’s weird. Then there’s this one that is much further out and it might not ever happen, which is the one that Stephen Colbert is talking about doing, and I love Stephen Colbert, but when he starts talking about how they’re gonna do a movie using the parts of Lord of the Rings that were not adapted originally. It’s like, what are you… what? Steven, what are you talking about?

Chris: [sing-song] Tom Bombadil. It’s Tom Bombadil.

Oren: Is that just the whole movie? Tom Bombadil?

Chris: Okay. The sequence that I think that they did not include is they did not include the part where they go to this other town full of hobbits, and then they leave through this creepy forest that tries to trap them, and then they almost get eaten by this angry big willow tree. And then Tom Bombadil comes and saves them and then they hang out with him for a while and meet his wife and then they, I think they, no– this must happen later. Because this is when they’re with Aragon, right? The barrow wights part, or does that happen after they leave Tom Bombadil?

Oren: No, the barrow wights are right before Tom Bombadil. Oh, okay. Aragorn is not with them at the moment. 

Chris: Okay. So then there’s also the barrow wights stuff, which is genuinely creepy. That could make for a good sequence. 

Oren: Yeah, but probably not a movie, right?

Chris: I would not think so. No, not normally. Especially not if, again, as far as I know, the Tolkien estate really cares about canon.

Oren: Okay. So here, let me read you the brief description that was given in this article. “Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Mary, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Eleanor, discovers a long buried secret that explains why the war of the ring was nearly lost before it even began.” [with feeling] What? 

Chris: Yeah, it reminds me of how when somebody’s trying to adapt a classic book that doesn’t really have a through line and just wanders all over the place. They have to do a more memoir style arrangement where you create structure by flashing back and forward through time, because you can’t get your events to follow an actual throughline. So you create a framing device to try to give it a sense of unity and cohesiveness and this, “their future selves looking back,” you know, that’s what that says to me. That it’s kind of a mess. So they’re using these kind of heavy handed framing devices to try to make it feel like a cohesive whole.

Oren: I could only imagine this future framing device, and then the thing they discover is that Tom Bombadil happened. It’s like, that’s the secret. Oh, okay. Alright. Look, Stephen Colbert’s had a rough time. If this is what brings him joy after being silenced for his political criticism, I guess, who am I to judge? You know, if Mythcreants gets shut down by the fascists in power, I will make my own completely Ill-advised Lord of the Rings project. You’re allowed one when that happens.

Chris: Alright. To help keep the fascists from shutting us down, consider supporting us on Patreon. 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 is Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.