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.

To have an effective character arc, your hero needs a problem. Otherwise, they aren’t changing, whether that means positive or negative change. This naturally raises the question of how big a problem your hero should have. Are they afraid of the dark or afraid of everything? Should they be a little grouchy or constantly in fight mode? All that and more on this week’s episode, plus an accidental Rickroll.

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: So, character arcs are where a character overcomes some kind of personal problem they’re having and grows, which is satisfying. Therefore, bigger problem means a more satisfying problem. Bigger problem is better, right?

Chris: Oh, yes, of course. 

Oren: So, I’m not gonna give my character an arc about overcoming their lack of confidence or learning how to talk to their crush. No, that’s small potatoes. I’m gonna give my character the arc of overcoming their need to punch every baby! It’s the biggest problem. And it’ll be so satisfying once they’ve overcome it and they no longer want to punch every baby.

Chris: Yeah! I mean, if your character isn’t running around screaming, punching everyone, are they really flawed enough? Are they a complex character? 

Oren: Did they not have enough flaws? Probably not. You should add more flaws. One of the most bizarre parts of reading Save the Cat for novels was your character−you should have a laundry list of flaws.

Chris: I think this is an area where people very frequently start waxing poetic and start getting away from what is actually, practically how you build a story and more into what feels romantic or deep or poetic.

Again, a character arc, we’d always describe it in pretty simple, non-romantic terms. It starts with some kind of internal problem. The character has an emotional issue that makes the character unhappy or poor judgment that is affecting them or others. Something that can only be solved within them. It’s not something that they could easily and should solve by changing their external circumstances. It’s just like any other plot arc. It starts with a problem. 

And you can call this their “inherent misbelief” or their “lie” or their “want-versus-their-need” or any other label that you want that sounds deep to you, but it doesn’t really make a difference. It always boils down to that same thing. They have a problem, and the way that we know that they have a problem is that it’s something that the audience believes change is desirable, right? So again, some we can see the outward effects of it are bad or they’re unhappy, or we know that we want change. Therefore, it’s a problem, and it has to be solved in their mind or heart.

Oren: Caveat! Do remember the possibility of a downward character arc, but that’s also much harder. So we’ll cover that later if we have time. 

Chris: Well, that also has to be solved in their mind or heart. The difference is not−

Oren: Yeah. They fail to solve it. 

Chris: They fail to solve it. 

Oren: You can’t fix them. You can make them worse!

Chris: Yes, you don’t have to fix them. It could be fixed in their mind or heart, but it could also then end up not being fixed. So that’s basically what we’re talking about. But in practice, this is a place that often becomes really thorny, where authors are tasked with establishing what the character’s character arc is, in which case they do need to show that a problem exists, but then what ends up happening is that readers can be really sensitive sometimes to character arcs and then hate the character. 

And I find that this−again, getting into the romantic side of this−I think this is something that a lot of writers are not prepared to deal with because of all of the rhetoric coming out about this. All of the−and again, it’s not just the literary crowd that’s doing this, but that culture is probably the primary culprit here−where we spend so much time like, oh, the flaws are what makes a character. Then people are shocked when they get beta reader feedback and the beta readers are like, I hate this person because of their flaw. 

Oren: You made them too flawed. I don’t like them anymore. It’s tricky because there are people who just love characters who are the absolute worst. It’s like, yeah, I would love to read about this jerk-ass coward who snivels in a corner all day. I don’t think that particular reader is very common, but they exist. And if that’s who you’re writing for, sure. Just be aware that that’s not a huge audience. 

Chris: Every reader is gonna be different but different, right? Different people are sensitive to different types of flaws. And some people might find a character with flaws really relatable because they’ve had those flaws, dealt with them before, for instance. Or they sympathize with characters for other reasons, and they just aren’t that sensitive to flaws. I will say that I know me as a person that I have trouble tolerating assholery. A lot of other people can let asshole behavior roll off of them easier than I can. And so I’m probably in some cases harsher on characters who behave like assholes than some other readers might be. Right? We’re all different. 

Oren: There are definitely different standards characters are held to which are not good and I don’t recommend writing your book to try to coast off those, but you should be aware of them. This is why you talked about this recently in one of your lessons posts, which was that one of the male romance interests in this story is controlling and arrogant and gets another character really badly hurt because of his controlling arrogant nature. But, he’s also written as the big, tough manly man, and this bar for that kind of character is so low that he seems fine because he doesn’t spend the whole book verbally abusing the protagonist.

Chris: There’s definitely different standards here where, again, a lot of times what we’ll see is those white male heroes are just allowed to be misbehaved more than other characters are, unfortunately.

Oren: And it depends a lot on audience identification. If the audience identifies with a character, they will tolerate a lot more from them.

Chris: But there’s also, I think, some readers, and I feel like literary readers might be this way, where they just get novelty out of character flaws. I think for some of them it’s almost like they get the joy of gossiping when they see a character that has weird flaws. They get some kind of engagement out of that, that other people don’t get.

Oren: I’ve certainly read a number of stories that are… feel like they’re inviting me to dish about how messed up this character is. And, uh, sometimes I’m not immune to that. Sometimes it starts to feel weird and voyeuristic. But I can’t say it’s not effective. 

Chris: I mean, it was interesting when we watched Succession to see what was the deal there, and the first episode was funny. So because it was funny just being like, “Oh wow, these characters are horrible people,” seems to be a tolerable pastime. But then as it went on, it was less funny and actually spent time building sympathy for one of the jerk characters. It became clear that actually as this continues, you are actually supposed to grow attached to him and like him on some level. And I’m like, well, I don’t really want that. 

Oren: Right. I suspect that was not a super long-lived storyline because when I talked to other Succession fans about it, they were like, ‘Huh? Whatcha talking about?” My guess is that that happened long enough ago they’d just kind of forgotten about it. 

Chris: Yeah, at this point, the story has taken another turn.

Oren: The novel We’ve Always Lived in the Castle, it felt like that to me. It felt like it was very “Oh man, look how messed up this protagonist is. Look at all the weird stuff she’s doing. She’s real weird and messed up!” And I don’t know exactly how most readers took it, but I do know that I found a couple of reviews praising this story for just knowing how insane teenage girls were and−

Chris: Uuuugh.

Oren: −and that’s the reviewer’s words, not mine. This is from, I think the sixties is when this book was published. 

Chris: That’s uncomfortable.

Oren: I was like, so at least for some people, part of its popularity was that this was supposed to be a realistic portrayal of an average teenage girl. I don’t know. That seems weird to me. 

Chris: Yep. Nope, nope, nope. 

So anyway, this kind of balance−we want their flaw to be present, but we also don’t want to annoy readers−can be delicate. So, it’s worth talking about what some strategies are for dealing with this because we want to have our character arcs, right? They’re really satisfying. Again, if you’re somebody who’s like, “Oh, I just really like flawed characters and this is what I want to do, and I’m writing for an audience that likes that,” yeah, go. Go you. That’s fine. In general, we aim to give advice for more common use cases. Sometimes we’ll go into niche stuff, but at this point, for most writers in most situations, we’re trying to balance this so that the character is pleasant to read about. 

So knowing which problems are likable versus unlikable can be helpful because some of them are more sensitive than others. So the ones that are worst are either ones that just by their nature work directly against likability or ones that are liable to create frustration. So, for the working against likability, we have selfishness. Which you can do, but you have to do a lot of damage control to make selfishness−I have an article on that. 

Oren: This one’s pretty common because it’s fairly easy to come up with, “Yeah, this character’s selfish, but never in a way that really makes you want to hurt them.” Like, yeah, this is a selfish character. They’re always trying to get money, but we’re not going to steal from the kid who’s collecting cancer donations. 

Chris: Yeah. 

Oren: They’re going to rob a bank or something. Or, if they did steal from the kid with cancer donations, it’ll be like a one-off joke, which we will quickly move past and never talk about again.

Chris: Right. Also, selfish is very broad, so if that’s what you’re thinking, narrow it down. How, in what way are they selfish? Let’s narrow down that. Arrogance is one of those things that’s very interesting because some audiences actually do like arrogant characters because they feel empowering. This is the Rick and Morty effect. Again, I would not choose to cater to an audience that wants to identify with an empowered jerk. But, at the very least, an arrogant character is gonna be quite divisive. 

Oren: Well, because what you’re going to get is you’re going to get half the fandom saying no, you’re not supposed to identify with Rick, and then the other half saying, I identify with Rick. He’s very cool. Regardless of whether you’re supposed to or not, clearly a lot of people do, right? 

Chris: An arrogant character is going to be grating for a lot of people. It’s not that there are no audience members who are drawn to that, but at the very least it’s going to be really divisive. So, if you know that that’s what your audience wants and you’re leaning into that, well, you do you. But that one is often real hard to manage. 

Oren: It’s also really demographic specific. I was amazed actually that Eda from the Owl House basically fulfills the Rick role−the Rickroll role, LOL−fulfills the role of Rick from Rick and Morty. It’s very similar, and it kind of worked, but I think that was because Owl House was popular with a specific demographic for whom they identified with Eda, whereas you might not count on that for most of your stories.

Chris: Also, Eda was nerfed. 

Oren: They did nerf Eda in season two. 

Chris: They decided that she was too much and toned her down. 

Oren: Which I have a huge respect for them for being willing to do that. And who knows, maybe that was always the plan, but that isn’t normally what happens with a character like that. 

Chris: It doesn’t look like it. It looks like they− this definitely looks like a classic case of a storyteller absolutely loving their favorite character and then giving that character all the candy, having that character be obnoxious and then realizing, okay…

I mean, it might not have been from feedback. It might have been like, “I’m having trouble plotting because Eda can solve all of the problems.” Right? Or it might have been feedback, I don’t know. But making the adjustment there was great and probably was hard. 

Then there’s characters that are really boring, just really boring as hell. That’s something that people… sometimes they can be relatable. Basically what you want to watch out for is a character… sometimes people want a character that has no motivation or feelings or opinions because then they come into their identity later. And that just makes them kind of a non-entity. So I would avoid that and just give them like, they’re fearful and they become courageous instead, or something. As opposed to oh, they’re just a non-person who becomes a person. I think that that’s just a little too blank, a little too boring. That’s working against likability. 

And then in the creating frustration, this is about managing how much does the problem hinder or sabotage the character? And a lot of times you do want something. So it feels real. If it never affects them in any way, then it doesn’t feel real anymore. It doesn’t affect the story. But at the same time, if you do have the character making obvious decisions that are clearly a really bad idea, and your reader is invested in a successful outcome, they could get really frustrated then think that the flaws is real bad. 

Oren: Usually, I have found that the most reliable way for this to happen is for it to be earlier in the story and for the problems that it causes to be for the protagonist specifically. It’s way harder if the problem is going to affect a lot of other people. I’ve got a whole blog post about that, about how in my novel I wanted my main character to make a mistake at a pivotal scene, and readers hated that. They got so mad at her. It was a big thing. It was something that affected the lives of lots of other people, and so having her stumble, they were just like, no, we don’t want her to do that. We are upset that you’re making this happen. 

Chris: Honestly, if they sabotage themself in more internal arcs, like they sabotage their relationships or themselves emotionally, I think that’s easier. The thing about high stakes is it generally creates more investment in achieving a specific outcome, which is why people can even have too high of stakes. If it’s a comedy and characters are goofing off and not taking the problem seriously and you have high stakes, that can actually be an issue because audiences will get frustrated, but you actually want characters to goof off because it’s a comedy, right? So, having them sabotage themselves in either much smaller ways. It could be an external problem, but it’s not a very big setback. Or, it could be like, well they cared about somebody and they just pissed off that person, so they’ve now strained their personal relationships.

It’s not impossible that you could have some readers like, I’m really invested in this relationship. But usually that would just be drama that’s creating a little bump in the road. Knowing what type of story you’re telling and making it appropriate to that. So again, little things that hold them back are better and that seem like they are only delaying them a little bit, for instance, versus having them fall on their face. Or you could have them make a bad choice and then some other character helps them, but then there’s a cost to that. But they still move forward.

Oren: Right, like disapproval. 

Chris: They get disapproval. 

Oren: Shake their head. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. 

Chris: You do wanna think about, okay, with frustration issues, there is the reader’s experience all the way through the process, right? So, if you have a character who is obviously making a bad choice, and then you make it so, okay, actually that didn’t turn out so bad afterwards, you can still get a lot of frustration ahead of time, right? Because the reader doesn’t know that you’re going to then come and soften the blow by bringing in another character. So, unfortunately that’s something to think about, but it’s definitely better than nothing. So even if it’s really frustrating leading up to the choice, if another character makes it better, that will help. Ideally, it doesn’t look quite so cringe-worthy ahead of time. 

So if a character… For instance, I think impulsiveness is the one I think of here because impulsiveness is not by itself a really unlikable flaw, but it does mean your character is going to do something they shouldn’t do probably to show that they’re impulsive.

So, okay, how do we do this? Well, something that is, I think, emotionally satisfying for the audience can help. We really want the protagonist at some level to punch that antagonist. It’s probably a bad idea, but it would be really satisfying if they would. Really fun for a moment. That could help. Those are some of the basic things that are going to be more sensitive. 

Also with frustration, besides impulsiveness or proactively doing something bad, a character that is too meek and does nothing when they should act or just goes along with more nefarious characters when they should oppose them. That can also create frustration. 

Oren: That one’s rough because I understand a lot of people want to tell stories about a character who is initially pulled along into circumstances that they shouldn’t be and learns better. I get that that’s a thing people wanna do, and Chris has a number of articles that can help. One of them is the lessons from the writing of Revenger where we talk about this. You can still do that. But you probably don’t want it to be just because the character is completely passive and has no desires of their own. You would usually want it to show how important it’s for them to get the approval of this bad influence in their life. Something like that, which would just be a lot more sympathetic. 

Chris: And that’s one of those things where some people are more sensitive to characters than others because they want to have an empowered character in their story because that’s what creates a good experience for them. Whereas for me, I’m almost getting really tired of over-spunky protagonists that just thumb their nose at literally everyone around them. I feel like I’ve seen all of them before, and now they’re kind of dull to me. The disadvantage of that character, of course, too, is they can make it so that none of the antagonists are taken seriously because they don’t take them seriously.

Oren: Just call up the main bad guy, do a little Who’s on First routine with them, refuse to take anything seriously. 

Chris: I honestly still don’t know of any character that is universally liked. Unfortunately, that is the reality of the situation. People just have different character preferences, but you can have a character that’s mostly liked. That’s liked by 90, 95% of people. That’s possible. 

Oren: Or you could go the other direction and make them so disliked that it circles back around. I assume that’s what was going on with Neelix, but I don’t know for sure.

Chris: Another thing we can do to help with any kind of flaw or problem that your character has that might bother readers is try to get them on the same page with your character as much as possible. So you want whatever they do to be understandable, building empathy and sympathy. So, for instance, if your character has trouble trusting people and that’s going to hold them back a lot, well, you want to go into the background of why they don’t trust easily. Have they been betrayed a dozen times? Make that feel real for the reader so they can empathize with like, oh yeah, it seems reasonable to me that this character doesn’t want to trust this person. 

Oren: Trust arcs in particular are interesting because you do have to create a situation where it seems like they should trust somebody because if you show how this is a dark world where people will constantly lie to you and it’s like, but you should trust this one. Should I though? This is the dark world where people will lie to me. Maybe I shouldn’t trust them. And then it’s like, no, that one was a good one. You should have known to be able to trust them. How would I have known that, author? How?

Chris: Which I think gets into the point of how do we make sure the problem is clear. Because it’s a balance here. We want to show that the character has a problem and that there is a character arc, but we don’t want to piss readers off. One thing is to make sure you are using internalization. You’ve got to be narrating what’s going on inside that character’s head. And if you’re not doing that at all, it’s hard for readers to tell whether or not something is supposed to be a problem or not. Once you have their head, you can either have characters be self-aware of their problems, maybe they know they’re too impulsive but they just can’t help themselves in the moment. They can exhibit what is clearly warped thinking. 

And for that, you probably want some external context. You want to show a situation so readers can objectively see what happened. Then you show what the character takes away from the situation and see that their perspective is skewed. That’s another thing that you can do. If you need to, of course, the mentor character that’s like, “You need to be more patient” or “You need to believe in yourself, hero” can also be useful for establishing what the problem is. 

Oren: Just get a wise mentor. They can just say it sometimes. It makes this a lot easier. 

Chris: It does. But I still think you want to have that internalization in there if you could get it to clarify that there is a problem here and the character is not supposed to be right. With a trust issue, for instance. A thing that I would do is have it− so, okay, we have another character that’s clearly supposed to be a positive side character and then have warped thinking in the way that the protagonist is coming up with elaborate theories for how normal behaviors could be calculated in order to deceive them. And maybe they even can be self-aware. They can know that this is probably unlikely to be real, but still have it emotionally affect them. That will show that they have a problem. 

Oren: Although on the other hand, it’s occurred to me, you can go too far in the other direction and be trying so hard to not make your character frustrating or annoying that when you’re like, okay, it’s time for them to overcome their issue, the audience is like, what issue? What are you talking about? They seemed fine?

Chris: It’s hard to tell. For instance, what happened in Project Hail Mary, right? I think with that one, it wasn’t that Andy Weir was trying to make the problem mild. I think what happened there is that his character was supposed to be a coward, but he needed this character to be brave for the plot to work.

Oren: Yeah, that’s… that character’s not a coward, Andy. He’s just not. In zero ways. 

Chris: That is another thing to think about. Because I do think that ideally there is, if you want the character arc to be relevant to the story, you do want a problem that will sabotage the character as they try to go about solving problems. At the same time, if you need them to instantly get over their problem, their personal, emotional issue in order to solve a bigger problem, that’s not going to work out very well. 

I think that’s one of the problems with cowardice, right, is cowardice is a flaw where it’s not impossible to have a setup where your character is a coward so they solve problems in less than ideal ways because they’re not willing to go out in the open. So, they always have to be hidey and sneaky about it because they’re too much of a coward to be in the open and that hinders them. But they still barely manage to solve their problems. You could create a situation like that, and eventually they can no longer sneak around and they have to be out in the open and face their fears.

But in Project Hail Mary, which is just one guy in a spaceship, that wasn’t really… you’d have to have, logistically, the ability to come up with that kind of halfway solution.

Oren: All right, well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

Chris: If you thought the problem with this podcast was too subtle to notice, obviously that means we’re great and you should become our patron. Whereas if the problems were too big that they were obnoxious, obviously that means that we need more money to fix them. So you should become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

We want heroes to be smart, but we authors may not be smart. This is a problem. Also, other characters in the story might be smart, so why haven’t they done whatever smart thing was required before now? These are the problems we encounter when our characters craft clever solutions. This week, we’re talking about how to surmount those problems and how to make it look like you knew what you were doing the whole time.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] 

Oren:  Hey, Oren from the future here. In this episode, I refer to typhoid when I should have been saying cholera, so just keep that in mind. 

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: I know I’m supposed to give listeners clever tips, but that’s hard. So how about I just talk about how they should “shift the polarity” of every scene and then “reconfigure the narrative matrix?”

Oren: That sounds pretty clever. But I think we should go the opposite direction and say something that sounds kind of silly, that people assume we must mean something clever. Like I was to call my writing advice on pacing, “Bishop in the pantry.” What does that mean? That means nothing.

Chris: Hey, it’s snazzy and memorable. It’s got that buzz to it. 

Oren: It’s just meaningless.

Chris: [Chuckles] So when people do technobabble, I actually call that a “clever ex machina.” Because it’s basically a dressed up deus ex machina. If the audience can’t follow the logic, it’s like you made random stuff up. 

Oren: You just said words. You could just replace them with “womp womp” sounds, and it would be dramatically the same thing.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And this is mostly a sci-fi problem, but you get it in fantasy too. 

Chris: No, it definitely happens in lots of fantasy where the magic system hasn’t actually been communicated or figured out, but the characters still solve problems with magic. So it’s like, “Okay, well I’ll just solve this with magic again.” And sometimes it sounds very technical.

Oren: If you say so, I guess I gotta take your word for it. 

Chris: So talking about creating clever solutions, which can be tricky. ‘Cause that’s why they’re clever. Obviously they won’t feel clever unless they meet a certain benchmark. 

Oren: And I’m not clever, so that’s a problem. I gotta figure out a way to make this character smarter than me. How do I do it? Well, the trick is that I have infinite time to come up with ideas. 

Chris: I don’t know Oren, I think your podcast listeners would say something other than “you’re not clever,” I think. 

Oren: Have you met our podcast listeners? They get harsh. [Laughs]

Chris: Wait, what are you, what does that mean? [Laughs] You certainly sound clever on the podcast is what I’m saying. I don’t know what you were saying. [Chuckles]

Oren: You’re confusing sarcasm with cleverness. [Chuckles] The thing to think about here, is it’s interesting that it is easier to come up with split-second clever ideas, than it is to come up with clever ideas to problems that take longer to solve.

And the reason for that is that you, as the author, have plenty of time. And so if it’s a problem where being clever is limited to a few seconds, you can spend several minutes thinking about it. But if it’s something that people have spent their lifetimes trying to figure out, it’s like, well, how much time do you got?

Chris: There are tricks though. We will talk about those tricks. So when do you need clever solutions? Because just about everybody does at some point. For one thing, you gotta have your turning points. And you want them to be satisfying. And you should not just use the same type of turning point all the time. That’s gonna get really old. 

So sooner or later you’re gonna wanna have some clever turning points in there, where your character does a clever thing in order to solve a problem. And it can just be a small problem, in which case they only need to be a little clever. But you’re gonna wanna have that in the mix. Otherwise things are gonna get repetitive. 

And the other reason is because you want to make characters who are supposed to be clever, actually feel clever. Which brings me to my complaints about Fourth Wing. 

Oren: [Laughs] Just that?

Chris: Our listeners might have noticed I am more favorable to Fourth Wing than Oren is.

Oren: Yeah, well.

Chris: Well, we have slightly divergent opinions on Fourth Wing. And, by no means a perfect book, but I think it’s still doing a lot right. But one thing that did continually bother me is that Violet is supposed to be smart and clever, but it’s all hand-waved so it doesn’t feel real.

Like preexisting knowledge, for instance. It does not really feel the same as a character coming up with clever ideas to solve problems. So for instance, Violet, the idea here is that she’s been forced to go to “Ruthless Dragon College” that kills its students for no reason. And she’s not prepared for the life-or-death fights that she has to do against other students.

So because she’s clever, she just already knows how to make poison. And we don’t really have to see her do anything clever to make the poison. She just already knows. So that’s basically hand-waved. But then there is one thing that would’ve been clever, which is figuring out a pattern so she knows who she’s gonna fight next.

Because these things are supposed to look random, but they’ve actually been prearranged. And she could notice, by observing. And this is how a lot of clever characters act, half of it is about their observation. Just like Sherlock with the idea that we get these little clues. A lot of times that’s what it boils down to. She could notice patterns and realize, “Oh, this is not random. This has been prearranged, and here’s how I calculate who’s gonna fight.” And that would make her feel clever. But instead, she just gets this diary that belonged to her brother that just tells her. 

So the one part–and I think it was–for Yarros, I think it was a way that she wanted to bring the brother into the story and she was looking for a way to do that. But this was a place where Violet really could have used that. So that she actually felt clever, like she was supposed to be. 

If you just have a character use their book smarts all the time, that’s preexisting knowledge and we don’t actually have to see them be clever on the fly. It’s that whole making things understandable that we talked about with the technobabble. The problem with the technobabble is the audience can’t follow that, so you’re just making random stuff up. 

Oren: Generally speaking, just having prior knowledge does not make a character seem clever. It’s usually, what makes them clever is how they can apply their knowledge. If you need to fix a car, and they just know how to do it because they read that in a book once, that’s fine. It seems capable, but it’s not gonna make them seem clever. 

Chris: If we saw Violet making a poison and she had to do something clever, let’s say she was missing one ingredient. And then she had to do some clever problem solving to find a new replacement for that ingredient. That could qualify. But when she’s already made it and we don’t see the process, it’s basically the same thing as technobabble because all the parts of it that required her to actually be clever have happened offscreen, basically. 

Oren: There’s another interesting scenario that comes up a lot for me, which is having characters figure things out from clues. And I have two funny examples from the same book that I read recently. Ninth House by I think, Leigh Bardugo. It might be Lee Bardugo. I’m not positive about that. So we’ve got two back-to-back examples of characters figuring things out from clues. The same character, actually. Figuring things out from clues.

In one case, making the most wild leap in logic. And in the other, taking forever to figure out something that was very obvious. So in the first one, we’ve got our character, his name is Darlington. He’s talking to another character about this time when she had been found at a scene where a bunch of people had died, and she mentions that her friend was there and had also died, and that her friend was left-handed.

And Darlington knows that she can see ghosts and somehow he’s like, “Oh, hey, but I heard the killer was left-handed. Therefore, you must have been possessed by the ghost and gotten superpowers and used that to kill all the guys!” And it’s like, what are you talking about? None of that has been introduced. He somehow made that connection from hearing that the friend was left-handed. The most wild supposition I’ve ever seen. 

And at first I thought it was because we had already found out that this was something that had happened and the author was just rushing us through the characters catching up. But no, this is the first time. This is how we learn not only that this is what happened, but that she has the ability to absorb ghosts and get superpowers. It was such a wild way to find that out. 

And then later–I actually made a mistake. It’s not the same character. This is now Alex we’re talking about. Alex is trying to figure out why a ghost killed his wife. Or if he killed his wife or someone else did it. And she gets hit by a magical backlash where she sees visions of the ghost, when he was alive, being possessed by another spirit and shooting his wife. And she’s like, “Huh, I wonder what that could mean?”

And then she spends several pages working up to, “I bet the ghost who possessed him made him do it”. I guess. Sure. I’m glad you got there eventually. 

Chris: It’s so hard to judge. It is really tedious when you see something obvious from clues. And it takes forever for our character to figure it out. But to be fair, readers do tend to figure things out at very different rates. 

Oren: That’s true. 

Chris: So sometimes that is hard to account for, but it does feel like we could have gone a little faster. That’s why I’m usually in support of giving a last important clue before the character figures it out. You give one clue at a time. They do what thinking and processing they can. And then we deliver the very last clue right before they figure it out. So there’s no long delay where you’re waiting for the character to catch up to where the readers are.

Oren: That’s usually the way to go. And that’s I think, what was supposed to happen in the first example. Hearing that the dead friend was left-handed, is supposed to put all the pieces together, but there weren’t any other pieces. It was just finding–and I legitimately don’t know if Darlington knew that absorbing ghosts could give you super strength, if he knew that was a power that existed. Or if he also invented the possibility of that for this reveal. The book’s very unclear about that. 

Chris: Hmm. That’s a question like, “Was this discovery writing?” We are always guessing whether authors were discovering writing something and making it up as they go, which is actually surprisingly hard to tell. Because a lot of authors who planned, if they did something that’s funny. It could be they didn’t notice that part. They didn’t notice it was funny. The mistakes can look very much like ad-libbing. 

Oren: And I think what’s going on here is that the reason why this is so weird is that it’s part of a meta-mystery. ‘Cause Alex is actually our POV character, not Darlington. And so Alex has been hiding all this information from us. And I think that we were supposed to be shocked when Darlington figured this out about Alex. And if there had been more information, we probably would’ve figured it out earlier.

Chris: Oh okay, yep.

Oren: Because it’s not really that shocking because Alex is established to be a stone-cold killer by then. So the idea that she killed a bunch of people we know she hated, is not super surprising. The only reason it’s a surprise is that the book had not given us any hint that this was even possible.

So I think that’s the problem there, is that there’s supposed to be a surprise, but the only way it can be a surprise is if we get no clues at all. Because otherwise we’d be like, “Yeah, I guess she killed them. ‘Cause she seems like she would do that.” 

Chris: Sometimes those reveals just aren’t worth it, folks. So let’s say you need a turning point for a smaller conflict. It’s an argument, it’s a fight and it could be important or exciting, but it’s not one of the most pivotal scenes in the book. One of the most exciting ones. Usually for those, if you want a clever solution, all you really need is a single observation and then a strategy tailored towards it that happens during the conflict. 

Like, “Oh, my opponent is favoring one side, so I’ll strike there.” Or, “This person is arrogant, so let’s fan their ego and make them overconfident.” Or, “Hey, this person doesn’t seem to wanna hurt me. Let’s negotiate instead.” 

And that one, they come off as clever enough. They’re not gonna blow the audience away, but they’re satisfying enough for your average conflict that you just need a quick solution to. So if you do something like that, one observation, the character… And it doesn’t have to be something they made in the moment. It could be something they made earlier, but then they think about it again during the conflict and be like, “Hey, I was told this about this person, so that means I should do this.” And that’s really all it takes. “This person hates me. Let’s try reverse psychology.” Something like that.

So those types of clever solutions aren’t generally too difficult and an average turning point there is usually quite doable. The most difficult ones are society-wide solutions. 

Oren: Or some kind of bigger scale problem. In Deep Space Nine, how do we get the Romulins to help us fight the war? ‘Cause clearly lots of people have been thinking about that. So if it was easy to do, then someone would have done it by now. And it’s hard to come up with, “Okay, what can our main characters do that other people would not have thought of?” And usually the most reliable way to make this happen is, you create a combination of special circumstances and new expertise. Sometimes you only need one or the other, but often both. 

So in this instance, in Deep Space Nine, we have special circumstances which are that things start to go really badly in the war. And this makes Sisko decide that he’s actually willing to engage in some shady tactics that he wasn’t before. He is willing to trust Garak who is a spy master. And let Garak do some stuff. And also, Sisko’s the only one who has access to Garak, ’cause Garak is undercover on his space station. So nobody else had this option to begin with. 

And this helps explain–Garak helps come up with this clever plan, which of course has a secret double extra plan inside of it ’cause that’s what Garak’s like. But you’re not left asking, “Well why didn’t someone else at Star Fleet do this?” Well, they didn’t have the option to, and Sisko wasn’t willing to do it until just now. 

Chris: You have to remember that everybody’s clever. And so the more people who would want this solution and have time to make the solution, the more unrealistic it is for the protagonist to be the only one who’s thought of it. And I would also say then, a lot of these situations, cultural stigma only goes so far. So if there’s a lot of money on the line, if there’s lives on the line, enough people are gonna overlook some kind of cultural taboo to doing something. Because everybody’s gonna really want a solution to this. 

Oren: And if they’re not, you are probably gonna want a stronger explanation for that. If you have a setting where there is some kind of vested interest in not solving the problem. That’s totally doable. You just need to show that more than like, “Oh, well in our society, we look down on people who solve this particular problem.” That’s probably not strong enough. 

Chris: You need like, “These people are profiting by this problem not being solved. And so therefore they’re using their power and money to take steps to prevent anyone from solving it.” 

Oren: And you could combine that with social stigma. That’s also possible.

Chris: Social stigma can help a little bit. It’s just not enough by itself. And I’ve seen a lot of stories that try to, “Oh, well nobody does this ’cause it’s not tradition.” Okay, but that only goes so far. 

Oren: And to use a real-life example, we have the story of John Snow, not from Game of Thrones. Real guy John Snow from the 1800s, and he did a lot of pioneering work figuring out the way typhoid spreads. I’m pretty sure it’s typhoid. I will add in the show notes if I’m wrong about that. I believe it’s typhoid. And he figured out that it was spreading through contaminated water sources. And he was on the ground figuring this stuff out.

The sort of high-tension, tangible medical drama you could tell a story about. And so the question you’d have to ask is, “Why did nobody else ever think of this? What made John Snow the first person?” And well, first of all, he probably wasn’t the first person, but he’s had a unique situation where he both has the knowledge, because medical technology and knowledge is advancing very fast in this time period. 

So he has access to knowledge most people don’t have, and he is also kind of an outsider. He’s not part of the same group of doctors who have been looking into this problem before. And then finally, once you have those things together, it makes sense that he’s able to figure something out that previously people had not figured out.

Chris: So if you come up with a way that things have changed recently that has created a new opportunity, that really helps. So we’re not on an infinite timeline where for hundreds of years people could have figured this out. No. It’s only the last five years. And so then your protagonist could just be the first person. That’s really useful. 

Any special abilities or skills or knowledge that are very specific to your protagonist. It was helpful that John Snow wasn’t a doctor, and you’d wanna specify why. And if your character has a special magic power, again, the magic power by itself is not clever. But your character can use their magic powers in clever ways that other people can’t. ‘Cause they don’t have that power. 

Oren: It would be a really unsatisfying story if John Snow just came outta medical school and was like, “Oh yeah, typhoid is spread through water supply. I learned that in medical school. We should fix this problem.” It wasn’t that simple. He did learn about waterborne illnesses in medical school, I believe. There was still a lot of mystery around exactly how typhoid spread. There were competing theories and the people who believed in the miasma theory, they had some reason to think of that. There are diseases that spread through the air, just not this one. 

Chris: So an example in Way of Kings. I recently went through Kaladin’s viewpoint. And Kaladin comes up with all of these solutions. Again, in this story, what’s going on is he is part of a bridge crew and they’re basically battle fodder. And their role is to carry these transportable bridges because this is a setting that has all of these chasms that the army has to cross.

And so they carry the bridge and put it down over a chasm so that then the soldiers can cross and then they pick it up and carry it to the next one. And the idea is that they’re completely disposable and they die really quickly. And some of the things that Sanderson comes up with for Kaladin to solve these problems, with Kaladin trying to keep his bridge crew alive are, pushing it.

For instance, he taunts the enemy by desecrating the bodies of their fellows. ‘Cause we’re like, “Oh, these people, they cannot stand it when anybody moves the dead bodies of their fellows. And they get so angry, that they attack whoever does it and that provides a distraction that then makes it so they stop attacking the bridge crew.”

But if this was the case, then their enemies would’ve used that against them long before. Because they’ve been fighting for years at this point. Their enemies would have a really high incentive to find novel ways of messing with them. So this is not a thing. They would have to get over it. [Chuckles]

Oren: Especially, and we see the same thing happen in a few other places. The Parshendi are the non-humans they’re fighting. And they have this problem where they always shoot at the bridge crew people instead of at the soldiers. And this tactic is established to not work, because the human lords just send in more slaves to carry the bridges and they apparently have an infinite number of those. 

And so the Parshendi are wasting their arrows instead of shooting at the soldiers that would actually do some good. And I can believe that this would work for the first few times. But after years? No, they would’ve figured out that shooting at the bridges is pointless. 

Chris: And beyond the fact that they can always replace the bridge crews. I think the bigger issue is they always make sure to bring enough bridges and bridge crews, that they still never hold the army back. Because they’re prepared to lose a whole bunch of them. And supposedly the bridge crews are distracting the Parshendi. And after a while the Parshendi would notice that shooting at these bridge crews never really results in tactical gains.

They never actually stop the army from crossing, which is the purpose of the bridge crews. So why keep attacking the bridge crews if that never actually hinders their enemy in any way? They would learn. People would learn and adjust. But Kaladin does have some special powers that can be leveraged in this situation that kind of keep him safe. And one thing I would’ve really loved to have seen more, that would’ve been a great way to sort of unlock new, clever solutions and make it realistic that only Kaladin had done these things is, we’ve kind of established that these bridge crews have a very short lifespan because they’re battle fodder. And so usually everyone’s dead in two weeks or something like that. 

And just the difference it makes to have one person who can carry knowledge and experience forward is huge. If you have any organization that has a turnover rate of two weeks, everybody’s permanently inexperienced. And can’t learn and adjust. So even having one person who survives, that unlocks all sorts of solutions that come with having more than two weeks of experience. So that isn’t actually used as much. Kaladin comes up with a bunch of solutions, but it’s always attributed to the fact that he has “battle experience” and he’s clever, for the most part. When just the fact that he’s around and is surviving would be a really big deal. 

Oren: Well, Kaladin has all the skills. He’s very good at many things. 

Chris: Yes, he’s a very candied character. 

Oren: So scaling it back down a little bit, one thing that I have encountered a number of times is the “clever solution.” Or at least a solution that is portrayed as clever, but there are no real limits on what the character can do, so it doesn’t seem clever. 

One really blatant example was from The Book of Doors, which I read recently. Where by the end, the main characters essentially have unlimited time travel. And it’s technically closed-loop time travel, so they can’t change anything that’s happened in the past. Although they don’t actually know that that’s the case, they just sort of assume it is. They never try anything. But that’s a different argument. So they can’t change anything, but they can set up infinity traps, basically. It’s like someone was playing Scooby-Doo, but seriously. They know where the bad guy’s gonna be and they know when, so they can set up as many contingencies as they want because they have– 

Chris: Okay, unlike in Scooby-Doo when they somehow have foreknowledge of exactly where the antagonist is gonna step, so they can have a trap fall in that specific location. 

Oren: Yeah exactly. It’s like that and it’s just nothing. I guess you had infinite time to come up with something. But also your solution doesn’t even have to be that good because you can create as many of them as you want since you have unlimited time travel.

Chris: Sounds like we need some urgency. 

Oren: They do need some. They can even do the causality fake-out thing that I described, where they can actually change things as long as they can make it look like the original thing happened, and that works too. It’s like, all right. Sure. I bet you that’s very smart. You must feel very good about yourselves. 

Chris: Having a story where you have a group of people who can go back in time to wherever they want repeatedly, it’s just not very viable. It’s not a good idea. 

Oren: I would recommend you not do that. 

Chris: Don’t do it. Instead, you can have it so they can’t control where they go, so they’re never prepared for where they end up. That works fine. Or they can go back just once and kind of learn how it works as they go, that works.

Oren: If they have one trip back that could work. They could set something clever up. But when it’s like, “Oh, we have as many trips back as we need.” It’s like, well, there you go I guess.

Chris: That’s not really clever anymore because the whole thing has been made too easy. 

Oren: Or sometimes you have a situation where the creators, the storyteller, has introduced something into the story that’s too world-breaking, and so they have to figure out a way for characters to counter it. But, that sounds hard. So instead of coming up with cool ways to counter metalbending in Korra, we’ll just make everything out of platinum. And now metalbending doesn’t work anymore. [Laughs]

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: I don’t know guys, why did you make metalbending a widespread technique? I sort of assumed only a few people could learn it. But no, I guess not. I guess anyone can learn it. So now we have to nerf it badly ’cause it suffers from the Law of Inverse Ninjas again. 

Chris: Maybe they wanted to show that time had passed and things had progressed. Or maybe they thought it would go with… ‘Cause it’s kind of a steampunky feel to it. Or dieselpunk maybe. Maybe they thought it would go… Except for it’s the opposite now because now it’s hard to use metal for anything. 

Oren: Now metalbending is actually bad. It’s actually worse than normal earthbending in the Korra universe because the metalbenders that they show never do normal earthbending. They’re fighting big robots made of platinum and they don’t open holes underneath the robots, which is what I would expect you to do. ‘Cause I guess they don’t know how to do that. And so instead they’re ineffectually throwing bits of metal at the giant metal robot and it’s very sad.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: It’s like, this is the best we could manage? 

Chris: Sometimes that’s what happens if you make character powers too powerful, now they have to use them very badly or else they just insta-win. Which is why it’s better to have smaller powers that your character can be clever in using, as opposed to really powerful powers that they have to be really incompetent at. 

Oren: And of course there is the classic urban fantasy, clever trope of just using a gun.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: But see, it was a cultural taboo to use guns, and so nobody thought of breaking this cultural taboo against guns. 

Oren: Friends don’t let friends randomly introduce a gun into their urban fantasy setting. Well, now you’ve opened that Pandora’s box. 

Chris: It’s not clever to use something that we really needed the audience to forget about.

Oren: If you have a big conceit about not using it–it’s the same thing with every Star Trek writer thinks they’re clever by having the characters do something universe-breaking with the transporter. Every new version of Star Trek, we have to go through this, “Well, what if we just beamed a bomb to the other ship?”

Don’t do that. That would be really bad for the story if we could do that. That’s not clever. Everyone has already thought of that. Well, with that, I think we have reached the point where we will cleverly decide to end the podcast before we run out of things to say. 

Chris: So if we said something clever that you found useful, obviously that is a positive turning point for us. So it would be very satisfying if you supported us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

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

It’s important to listen to this podcast right away. Don’t wait, hit that play button! Why? Urgency, presumably. In fiction, this is the quality that determines which conflicts must be resolved right away and which can wait until later. If a conflict is to be tense, then it must have urgency. Otherwise, readers will know your hero has all the time in the world to figure out a solution.

Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren:  Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Quick! We gotta get through this topic before our half hour time limit runs out. It’s a challenge, but hour-long episodes make some topics kind of untenable anyway, so we really have no choice.

Chris: Yeah, we actually had somebody recently request that we do hour-long podcasts like we used to. I think the assumption there is that if our podcast keeps going and doesn’t have a time limit, that we will continue to say insightful things. The reality is that we’ll probably just start talking about the weather after the half hour mark.

Oren: There are just a lot of topics that there’s not enough to say on them to fill an hour.

Chris: We had such a limited pool of topics when we were talking for an hour, and then when we moved to half an hour, it opened up so many that we could talk to for, you know, a shorter period of time. So not eager…

Oren: We do sometimes get topics that are too big for half an hour, but we split them up then. We focus on a smaller part of them, which I guess actually decreases urgency and that’s bad because we’re talking about urgency in fiction today.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, how are our podcast episodes gonna be exciting if we have all the time in the world?

Oren: Yeah, we could just talk forever, which would be boring. You wouldn’t want that, trust me. 

Chris: Well, don’t tell our listeners that. I’m pretty sure some of them do think they want that. 

Oren: They think that then they would get it and they would realize the curse, the monkey’s paw that they have called upon themselves. So what is urgency in fiction, Chris?

Chris: I would say it’s a feeling of time pressure. I’ve heard it referred to by others many times as a ticking clock. So, and this is specifically for creating tension in the story. I suppose urgency might have some other uses for things besides tension occasionally, but almost always we’re talking about tension, so we’ve got a problem with stakes and the protagonist has a limited amount of time to solve the problem or else all is lost.

Oren: There are sort of the three basic elements for creating tension in most circumstances. Stakes: something needs to matter. Difficulty: it needs to be hard to solve the problem. And then urgency: it needs to be done in an amount of time. ‘Cause if you can just take forever, then you’ll figure it out eventually.

Chris: I mean, I’ve often grouped together urgency and uncertainty, which is basically our difficulty factor, where it has to feel like the problem might not actually be solved. Because it’s difficult to solve, etc. And what happens is if we have a hundred years to figure out this problem, even if it seems impossible to solve, it just feels like, “eh, we’ve got a century. We’ll think of something if there’s no time limit.” But at the end of the day, if you never have the uncertainty requirement met without urgency, it’s for all intents and purposes its own requirement.

Oren: I think of it as a difference between what are your chances on the die roll you’re about to make versus how many die rolls you can make, is the way I think of it, because I’m a weird nerd.

Chris: That’s a good way of looking at it because that does happen in stories where you realize that the character might try to solve a problem and then fail, and then they just can keep trying again and again, and that is a big problem. It means there is no urgency if we can just trial and error our way out of this problem. I also think, again, for uncertainty purposes, it’s nice if you have a character fail to solve the problem. If the time is really precious, having it just be like, “okay, well not only did we fail to solve the problem, but we wasted all this time.” Usually you also want some additional reason why, okay, now it’s gonna be harder ’cause I failed to solve the problem and broke my equipment, or something like that. But urgency by itself can potentially, you know, like every time loop episode has some way of figuring this out.

Oren: [sarcastic] So that means that more urgency, more better. Right? We just always have the highest urgency. Every problem should need to be solved in the next like two seconds.

Chris: Sure. That’s why every story takes only two seconds. Stories are so short these days ’cause it’s just better that way.

Oren: We solved it. There we go.

Chris: No, I mean, I do think it’s worth asking, how tight should the timeline be? And the answer, of course, is: it depends. Although it depends on something very specific, right? It depends on what you are trying to do in that time. And a goal – again with anything about uncertainty with solving problems – is always to make it feel like it’s a bit of an uphill battle without making it impossible. So if you have to, you know, evacuate the planet, one year could be a very, very tight timeline for that and feel very urgent, even though you have an entire year. Whereas giving somebody a year to clean their bedroom is not a tight timeline.

Oren: Yeah. The question is gonna be one of scale. You’re gonna need more time to deal with a problem of moving a bunch of people. That’s not something that you can do shortly. So if you say, well, we have to move 500 people in the next five minutes, it’s like, well that is impossible. So tension is effectively zero now because the chances of success are also zero. Whereas if a guy’s coming to kill you and you give them a year, well, that’s not very tense. Even though those are very high stakes, it’s not a high scale problem. It’s very personal. A year is probably way too much time.

Chris: It’s also worth thinking about you as a storyteller. There’s a problem. Do you have a way for the protagonist to solve it in the deadline you set? Which can be really tricky sometimes because again, for it to be tense, we want the reader to perceive that this is gonna be an uphill battle, shall we say, to solve the problem in this time. But then you as a storyteller also need enough time for excitement and stuff to happen. And sometimes what happens is you get weird time dilation problems. And this particularly happens in action scenes. So for instance, you’ve got your protagonists out in the woods, say, and you’ve got an enemy that is closing in. Now you get to choose, where does that enemy appear? Do they appear right in the tree above? Do you see them over the next hill? And wherever you place the enemy, there’s gonna be a certain amount of suggested time until they reach your protagonist. And then your protagonist might need to do something like get up and run. They might need to help somebody else escape. Maybe they need to solve a puzzle, I don’t know. There could be all sorts of things that you have here. Get their weapon, which is stuck in their sheath in that timeline. What I see sometimes in various situations is you got to make this exciting. Because we want this sequence to be exciting, we make the enemy really close. Or we could have a situation that’s similar to cleaning the bedroom. “Oh no! Parents are about to come home, they’re gonna ground me. I have to clean my bedroom in just five minutes.” But it’s really hard to actually depict the protagonist doing what they need to do in that time. And then somehow, you know, our enemy that was supposed to be right up in the treetops just takes a really long time to fall. While the protagonist does half a dozen things, the enemy jumps from the tree and the protagonist sets up an entire trap in that time somehow. I thought of this ’cause we’ve been watching Scooby Doo.

Oren: Yeah, they do that a lot.

Chris: They make a joke out of the incredibly implausible traps. The more recent Scooby Doo show.

Oren: Yeah. Although even the outline that I’m working on, you noted that I had a sequence where my protagonist is running away from a monster and it really seems like the monster probably should have just caught her already and uh, it hasn’t. “What’s going on with that, Oren? Did you say that the monster was really close to create urgency but then not want to deal with that because you didn’t want your protagonist to get eaten?” No comment.

Chris: But also sometimes you wanna create a conflict and the conflict shouldn’t be over immediately. So you need time for the protagonist to dodge around things and make moves. But for that to happen, the enemy has to be farther away to allow more time.

Oren: Yeah. Thinking about it in terms of moves helps a lot because again, different conflicts are gonna happen at different speeds. Cleaning your room, if the room is dirty enough for that to be an issue, you’re probably not gonna be able to take care of it in two minutes. That’s just unlikely. It just doesn’t make sense. Moves in terms of cleaning your room take 10 minutes each at least, ’cause you’ve gotta sweep or put things away or whatever. And if it’s serious, that’s gonna take a little bit. Whereas in a fight, fights move very quickly. In that situation, you can very easily have it be a few minutes, unless you need them to do something really elaborate, like set up a trap, which… that’s just not gonna work. You’re gonna need to plan the story differently if you want that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have your protagonist make a move that gives them a little more time. We’re gonna distract the parents somehow. Or let’s say we’re being chased down. We’re gonna try to throw something that creates a sound somewhere else and delays the attacker for a couple moments or something like that. You could do that, but at some point in time you kind of have to look at what’s realistic in addition to what is tense.

Oren: Right, and usually if you were gonna make cleaning the room into a fictional conflict, you would probably have the turning point be something other than the physical cleaning of the room, just because that’s not for most characters going to be a particularly skill difficult endeavor. Most characters are gonna be capable of doing that, but at the same time, it’s very unlikely most characters could rush it to be done in a couple minutes. So you would usually have the turning point be something like, can I convince my parents to stay out for another hour? Or can I have the willpower to actually clean my room and not watch TV all day? Something like that is usually what I think you would go for in that situation.

Chris: I think the characters should just stuff a bunch of garbage up their shirt and then have to stay still without moving so that the parent doesn’t see.

Oren: Yeah. You can get into more creative solutions. If it’s a magic story, your character could cast a quick illusion to make it look like the room is clean and then struggle to maintain it without any telltale shimmer as the parent inspects to see if the room’s actually clean.

Chris: So, yeah, there’s lots of things you can do there, but in any case, how far away the timeline is, again, the whole idea is that you need time pressure and it’s just proportional. If it’s something that’s a year away, of course you want your protagonist to be able to sleep and have meals, but if it’s something that’s an hour away, they’re not gonna take a meal break. They’re not gonna take a nap. And having your character also act as though it’s urgent, because again, remember that people follow the lead of your protagonist by default, unless you do something to suggest otherwise. They assume the protagonist was right, and that’s just because 99% of the time in stories, that is in fact true and so therefore that is naturally what they are used to. Generally, your protagonist also has to act like it’s urgent, which leads me to talking about urgency fading, which is a big issue.

When we’re talking about urgency as a requirement for tension, it’s worth thinking, “okay, when do I actually have to do something to make the situation more urgent? And when will it inherently feel urgent?” And in a lot of cases what we see is that problems initially have a feeling of urgency, but it quickly dies as story time passes. How this works is because nothing bad happens. So if you were driving your car and you realize your gas tank has been leaking and then you realize this leak has been happening for the last week and you’ve been driving your car around, that must be a very slow leak because it’s been going on for quite a while and you haven’t noticed any bad effects. And so that also suggests to you that, oh, well, you can finish your errand and drive it to the mechanic without worrying about running empty on your gas tank. It’s just like that with all sorts of problems in stories. A character going missing is a huge one. Anytime a character has maybe been kidnapped or has just simply disappeared, it feels urgent initially, very urgent, because there’s a big risk that they are in mortal danger. They might be in a really dangerous situation. What if they fell down the well or something like that? They might be injured, or if they were kidnapped, maybe the kidnapper will kill them in the first few hours.

Oren: I mean, I was watching a show the other day and the first three episodes at least, are about trying to find this missing kid. And it’s like, well, after the second episode, I’m just starting to think he’s either fine or dead. If he was in immediate danger, then that has already had time to pass. And if he wasn’t, then it doesn’t feel particularly urgent. I’m sure we’ll get to it eventually. And you can counteract that. An interesting example is Will Byers in Stranger Things season 1, by which I mean the only season. [sarcastic] They never made any more, thankfully. But he goes missing in the first episode and it’s like, “oh wow, what happened? That’s scary!” But you know, as time passes, you would normally start to think, well, either he’s dead or he’s fine, but they keep that alive by having him be able to communicate and drop hints that something’s still happening. Not only that he is alive, but he’s still in danger, and that keeps the tension up and reestablishes urgency because you get some actual info about what’s happening. This is a thing that I’ve seen some authors struggle with. It is true that keeping a threat mysterious often increases tension, but it can’t be 100% mysterious. You need to give something, otherwise readers have no reason to worry at all.

Chris: If you have a mysterious threat, you still need some sign that it could cause harm after a while. In stories, one we’ve talked about before is the beginning of The Name of the Wind. We have these spider demons that are threatening the town in the beginning prologue part, and that seems like a really bad problem. But then Kvothe just hangs out cleaning bottles at his inn for a while. And it starts to feel like, okay, maybe this isn’t a big deal, because nothing bad has happened yet. That’s why if you have a lot happening and a lot of activity, especially if you have an unfolding conflict, it already feels immediate. So if you’re showing your hero and villain dueling with blades, you don’t have to do anything special to create urgency because we can see things change and every time the villain lunges for the hero, we know that they’re in immediate danger. But if you have any long-running problem especially, a lot of times you do have to do something special in order to make sure that there is tension in that situation.

Oren: It’s interesting because we’re talking about how to establish urgency. The obvious solution is to use an actual clock. You have an actual timer that is counting down, and that might be a kitchen timer or a calendar or whatever, but often you’re not gonna have something that precise. So you have to give a rough idea, and that is where the danger of “well too much time has elapsed, now it feels boring” [comes in]. If you say the castle’s gonna be attacked soon, what does soon mean? Does it mean within a scene, within a chapter? If it goes more than that, I don’t really believe you that it’s gonna be attacked soon anymore.

Chris: Yeah. We get back into that same issue of urgency dying the more time passes. So you could have a thing where it’s like, “oh, at any time, the enemy will attack.” And that will work. But again, the more time passes, the more that starts to fade. Unless you do something to have, again, your mysterious enemy start making some moves and start harming people. If you have a serial killer out there, for instance, who is in the regular habit of killing people. You can make that work because you know another person, the longer you wait, the more people are gonna die. Or similarly, you can show a trend heading in a bad direction. Like the fire is consuming more and more of the city. And so we need to stop it before it gets more. The main thing with when you’re observing repeated bad things happening or a problem getting worse, is to just make milestones and the difference feel concrete. ‘Cause if you emotionally distance yourself, let’s say like you’ve got a plague in the city. And every day you wait, more people are technically dying, but they’re dying somewhere else. Right? And all the main characters are fine. After a while, it just may feel like it doesn’t matter because you’re not putting the story behind making it matter. You kind of have to have the plague come closer to where the characters that readers like are. Have somebody the readers actually know come down with the plague. You know, maybe it’s spreading to more people they care about more and have concrete milestones so that they still feel like, okay, it matters. These aren’t just nameless people in the background. You want it to matter. 

And that also is important if you have any ongoing problems. A character being imprisoned, for instance, is another one where like that will feel less urgent as the character hangs out in prison. Even if they’re miserable, we need to make it emotionally impactful that they’re miserable.

Oren: Right. We’ve talked in other places about how tension is usually the result of the status quo going to change for the negative. Once a new negative status quo takes over and it seems to be going like it’s just gonna continue… even if it sucks, that’s not gonna be super tense ’cause it’s just the same.

Chris: In those cases, again, it’s really helpful to just add some stakes with a deadline. They’re easy to add together, which is nice. So like we have our prisoner and, “okay, if I don’t escape from this prison before such and such date, they’re all gonna brand us with a branding iron, and then everybody will know that I’m a slave and I’ll never get free again” or something. We have a specific situation that is like a point of no return that adds a new deadline to this situation. Adding new stakes and a new timeline can be really helpful in the situations where after a while, okay, this feels like the new status quo. Or we have nameless people dying and it’s not emotionally hitting home anymore. That kind of thing.

Oren: Using different levels of urgency is also how you build plots that are either immediate and need to be dealt with right now versus plots that are building and will become a bigger deal later. This is how you create a story where we have to escape Tatooine right now because there’s stormtroopers and they’re closing in, they’re gonna get us, but we know that the Death Star is out there and we’re gonna have to deal with it eventually. You want the urgency to be balanced correctly. You don’t want it to be like, well, we gotta escape Tatooine, but the Death Star’s attacking us right now. So that kind of makes escaping Tatooine kind of a moot point.

Chris: This is just a great thing for anytime you have like your first story in a series, for instance, but it also applies to a child arc in a bigger story, your child arc versus your throughline, book one versus your series arc. You attach the biggest stakes to the longer overarching story, and then the immediate problem that you’re dealing with right now can have lower stakes, but higher urgency, and that will make it more exciting right now while still making that bigger story really important. So yeah, the Death Star is like the higher stakes problem because it can destroy whole planets. But like right now, we urgently need to escape from Tatooine.

Oren: I mean, of course you could need to escape because the Death Star is gonna blow up Tatooine, but I was imagining the death star is gonna destroy the rebel base or something. That’s an urgent problem, but it’s not something we’re dealing with right now

Chris: Right. We wanna make it less urgent and then whatever the current arc is more urgent. And then the nice thing is that when it’s time to tackle the big series throughline, book throughline, whatever, you can usually increase the urgency and can add a new deadline that wasn’t there before in order to bring that plotline to the forefront.

Oren: Yeah. One thing that I found interesting is that some authors just take for granted that nothing is gonna change in a long period of time, and I don’t know, I just don’t believe them. I was so confused by the book Three Body Problem, where at the end of it, aliens are on their way, and I thought they were gonna be here in 40 years, because it said they’re traveling at 1/10th, the speed of light from four light years away. And I was like, that’s actually pretty tense, right? In 40 years we’re supposed to deal with an alien invasion. That sounds rough. But then they said no, 400 years, because apparently they’re only going at 1/10th of c for a very short part of the trip, which is like, “okay, well I’m reasonably confident that in 400 years we’ll have a solution.” Like, I don’t know. Apparently the author thought I wasn’t supposed to think that.

Chris: Yeah, let’s just pass some funding bills on space defense, I guess.

Oren: Or who knows? Maybe they’ll get here and we’ll all be dead, right? That’s another possibility. Barring any other explanation, technology tends to improve pretty quickly. Now, again, I’m not guaranteeing that would continue, but I have no reason to think it wouldn’t in this particular case. And the book certainly hasn’t done any work to make it look like 400 years isn’t gonna be a long enough time.

Chris: Yeah, no.

Oren: So yeah, it was just very strange.

Chris: That’s pretty impractically long. I guess if you have a really long-lived or immortal protagonist, it’s not impossible to do something on a 400 year timeline.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that’s a different issue, right? It’s like, okay, well in 400 years all the characters are gonna be dead anyway, so it’s basically gonna be a different story. That doesn’t really matter that much to me in Three Body Problem, because I couldn’t have cared less about any of the characters, which is a different third problem that I had with that book. But in this case, it was just simply, the book ends with like, “you gotta be scared ’cause of the aliens” and I don’t know. I think we’ll manage. Which of course is not what happens because it’s not my book. I didn’t write it, the author did. And so he writes the aliens showing up and completely dominating, ’cause he can just decide to do that. It’s his book. But I don’t believe him.

Chris: I mean, there are very few things that can’t be solved in 400 years.

Oren: You could say whatever you want in the story. The question is, will your reader believe you?

Chris: Even if something is supposed to be technically impossible, I just think in 400 years you’ll be like, “eh, we’ll figure it out.” Or like, “it’s not my problem right now, ’cause it’s too far away.”

Oren: Right, it’s so far into the future, it just doesn’t feel like a real problem. I’m not a, oh gosh, what do they, what do they call themselves? The Sam Bankman-Fried people. I’m not an effective altruist, okay? I care about people who are alive today.

Chris: Uh, yeah, I’m pretty sure effective altruism is just an excuse to do whatever they want. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure out there, there is some effective altruist who really means well. Is doing some good work, but I think for most of them… Let’s talk about too much urgency, because that happens.

Oren: [sarcastic] Well, we can’t, ’cause the episode’s gonna end pretty soon here.

Chris: Oh no! It’s almost like we don’t have time to have a conversation to sit down and talk about things for a while.

Oren: I mean, if you give me the inverse of the 400 year problems, if you tell me like, “well, you have to build a car and you have an hour, and you have to build it from scratch.” It’s like, well, that’s just not possible. I’m sorry.

Chris: We talked about it being unrealistic, but there’s also the issue of are the protagonists using their time effectively, and are we getting frustrated with them? Like A Study in Drowning. We talked about the scene in A Study in Drowning in which there’s a big storm that’s about to hit and the lovebirds of the story have been hanging out in this creepy mansion that’s falling apart, and there’s a good chance the storm will completely demolish the mansion, and they have their research materials in there. So they really need to just grab the research materials and get out. Instead… bow chicka wow wow.

Oren: Yeah. They gotta, you know, gotta go have sexy time instead!

Chris: Sexy time! It’s like, no, this situation is too urgent for you to have a slow scene where you have sex and then fall asleep together. That’s frustrating. And this, again, happens where you want your characters to have a little downtime, you want them to have some relationship time, but you’ve created a problem that is too urgent. And so realistically, they should not be doing that. Generally in this case, you just wanna create some kind of waiting step for them where like, sorry, we can’t do anything until such and such calls us back. Or the storm in this case can already have hit and now they’re stuck in the house, just the two of them and it’s the perfect time for them to… you know.

Oren: You gotta create the flow of time in such a way that it doesn’t feel like they should be doing something other than what you want them to do right now.

Chris: Or another thing that can happen that is an interesting challenge is when you have a story that takes place over a long time period. And we had, I think, a recent podcast episode on this. For that one you need to do like, we set a deadline that’s really far away, and now we’re going to summarize all the time passing really fast. So now that event that was far away is suddenly really close and now it’s urgent, and then the event is over. You do your falling action scenes and then fast forward again.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t like when stories just summarize huge swaths of time like that. I find it disorienting, it takes me out of the story, it makes me less likely to care about it. I’m constantly wondering, “okay, a year has passed. Are these characters the same? Did they change in that year?” I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. Other people don’t seem to have a problem with it.

Chris: Got a grumpy magic school hater here.

Oren: Yeah, it’s weird. I mean, at least a magic school usually only fast-forwards a couple months at a time. It’d be weird to fast forward through an entire school year, although Babel did that.

Chris: Yeah, Babel is not really an example that people should follow.

Oren: Babel has so many other problems that it’s really hard to disentangle the passage of time issue.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, our urgency has run out and now we will have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: Since our time is running low, listeners, you have only minutes to support us on Patreon before this podcast self-destructs.

Oren: Kaboom!

Chris: Do you feel motivated now, eh? Feeling the tension? Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants before it’s too late.

Oren: [dramatic music tone] dun dun dun! 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. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

When reading a book or watching a movie, there aren’t many choices for the audience to make. We can decide how fast to read and whether to keep going, but the actual story is set. But what if it wasn’t? Not all storytelling mediums are the same, and this week we’re talking about the ones where players get to make choices. Do those choices matter? That’s an entirely different question.

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Joining me for a third time is my brother Ari.

Ari: Hello once again, everyone.

Oren: So you know what’s fun: writing one story. So what would be twice as fun is if you had to write two stories, based on a choice someone made early at the beginning.

Ari: Well, that’s just many times the story. So that’s just a better story at that point. That’s more story for your story.

Oren: Yeah. And then you could do it a couple more times until you’re writing infinity stories pretty quickly.

Ari: Mm-hmm. I don’t see any problems with this.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just fine. So this is what happens when you introduce audience choice into storytelling, and I’m using that terminology specifically because this can cover a range of different mediums. The most obvious examples would be either TTRPGs or video games where the players can make choices directly. But in theory, you can also have something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are some movies that work this way.

Ari: You mean the storytelling masterpiece of the Clue movie with multiple endings.

Oren: Yeah, although that one is less about audience choice, that one’s more like what theater you happen to be in.

Ari: It’s true, but I just wanted to reference one of my favorite movies.

Oren: It’s a good movie. Netflix has a movie. I’ve forgotten the name of it and I should have looked this up before the show, but whatever, I’ll put it in the show notes, that has an interactive element where, as you’re watching it, you decide what happens next and it’s quasi-interactive. So when you’re dealing with a written medium, this of course introduces a whole host of problems. With an RPG, you’re not really writing an RPG.

Ari: Hopefully not, anyway.

Oren: Presumably you’re reacting in real time, but with a video game you still gotta write whatever happens because of the characters doing things. So that’s hard. So here’s a important question. Is more choice more good?

Ari: No.

Oren: No? Okay.

Ari: No, not at, not at all. It can be good, but like a lot of things, there’s moderation.

Oren: All right. Well, that’s the end of the podcast.

Ari: Yeah, we did it. I solved it. You’re welcome. Everyone come back next time.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I love making choices in video games and feeling like it matters, but that second part is important. And I recognize that most game studios don’t have infinite writing time.

Ari: Exactly. The quality of the story matters a lot more to me than the number of choices. I would love more choices in my RPGs, but not if it comes with the cost of a game being worse or the story being worse.

Oren: There’s a concept in game design called Diamond Dialogue, which is where you make a choice and it goes off in two directions, and then those both come back to the same place.

Ari: I’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3, and there’s a ton of that in there. And some of it is more obvious than others.

Oren: You can make it work, but sometimes it starts to feel pretty obvious that you’re not really making any different choices and the results are kind of… jarring. In Rogue Trader, which is a Warhammer 40k game, you can become almost fully chaos-infected and everyone will just hang out until the end of, I think act four.

Ari: Yeah. Then – Team Good is a generous term, uh, Team Not-Chaos – will leave your group at that point. You hit the threshold for when the choice will matter because, like you said, there’s limited time and also the game might not function super properly if most of your party disappeared early.

Oren: There are a lot of very chaos choices you can make that I figure would’ve driven them away long before then.

Ari: Oh, yeah. 100%.

Oren: Heinrix is an Inquisitor and he is there watching me make a deal with the chaos governor of one of my planets. Like, I don’t think he’s sticking around for that.

Ari: This is actually interesting. The video games I see take two approaches and we kind of see them at different spots in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Rogue Trader.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Ari: Whereas in Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s really easy to lose your party members super early based on those decisions you make. But once you hit a certain point late in act two, or especially in act three, it feels like no matter what you do, they are with you till the end. You have your lady who, her whole thing is “I hate mind flayers,” and you’re like, let’s all be mind players. And she’ll be like, okay, that sounds like a great idea. I was like, wait a minute, this seems like one of the one things you would not be okay with. And then you have, like you mentioned in Rogue Trader, where it feels like at the beginning it’s almost impossible to lose them with a couple of notable exceptions. And then at the end is when it’s like, oh, oh, you made those choices – okay, time for consequences. And so then you lose a bunch of party members if you have gone to the wrong type of evil.

Oren: Yeah. It is funny how easy it is to not get certain party members at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3. Almost like the game has a few traps built into it.

Ari: Like, you could just slap Gale’s hand and he’s just gone. Bye, Gale. Or if you’re the dark urge, it’s even worse. if you don’t understand the dialogue that the dark urge gives you, where it’s like imagine you’re doing an evil thing, means you are doing the evil thing – then Gale’s just dead in that one. It’s so easy, and then at the late game, it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you say to these people.

Oren: I was really confused how quickly Lae’zel agreed to lie to the other Githyanki for me, and that’s not really a choice thing. She’ll do that regardless of what choices you make, but that was definitely an example of them sacrificing character realism for the sake of keeping the party together.

Ari: Yeah, and I don’t mind, I understand the limitations of game development, although sometimes it feels like Baldur’s Gate certainly had the resources to do some of these things better than they did. But what I don’t like is when it feels like the game is trying to trick me into thinking that, oh yeah, your choices definitely matter. Don’t worry about it…wait. No, they don’t. Like that Diamond Dialogue design, when that is so heavily used to the point where I know what I say doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’ve gone so far as to reload just to see, and it is like, there’s eight options here and they’re all meaningless. There’s no difference and nothing changes based on what you say, and what you say could be radically different! Like: what are you doing? I wanna take over the world and eat the dead and rip and tear and skulls for the skull throne and whatnot. Or you could be like, I wanna just help everybody. And then the thing goes, well, you’ll figure that out tomorrow. And then that’s the end of the dialogue. Why did you have me respond to this? This doesn’t matter.

Oren: The funniest one is when Raphael, the demon or devil, I forget which one –

Ari: He is a devil.

Oren: Yeah. And he offers you a bargain for your soul and you can’t accept. Yeah, you can say yes.

Ari: He is like, you’re not supposed to say that yet. That’s not till act three. Go away. We’re not ready for that. 

Oren: Why did you give me this choice if I’m not allowed to take it?

Ari: Baldur’s Gate, I think, has this worse than Rogue Trader, but it’s like the game assumes, well, no one’s going to click this. Why’d you put it in there? Someone’s gonna click it.

Oren: That is replicating the accurate D&D experience though, because sometimes GMs will give you a choice and they just don’t expect you to make one of the choices. But you can, and sometimes it feels like it makes some more sense to.

Ari: At least in A TTRPG, you can react to it as the GM. The game is just kinda left floundering. You’re like, oh, what a lovely lampshade you have here. It’s beautiful. It really ties the room together.

Oren: There are some times where I feel like the choice actively makes the game worse is when you are given a choice that has a really negative repercussion that there’s just no way you could have predicted. I just feel like, why are you punishing me for this? The worst one, the worst of any I’ve ever seen was this game called Heart of the Woods, which is a visual novel that does not appear to have any branching choices. It appears a hundred percent linear until you get to the end, where there are two bad endings and a good one, and which one you get depends on a random dialogue choice you made eight hours ago.

Ari: Excellent.

Oren: Did you say ‘I promise to make it up to you’, or did you say ‘you’re right?’ Because you should have said ‘you’re right’ if you wanted the good ending.

Ari: I don’t want you to say you’ll make it up to me. I wanna be right. 

Oren: It’s the weirdest thing. And it was so surprising that when our friend who’d recommended it to me was talking to me about the game, he didn’t understand what I meant because he just didn’t realize there were multiple endings. Because it does not seem like a game with multiple endings.

Ari: I’ve seen some people defend this when a character says something in a video game and then it just turns out they’re lying to you. Like in Baldur’s Gate 3 – Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good game, by the way, for anyone wondering. I do think it’s a good game, but I’m playing it right now and it is one of the biggest RPGs that’s come out in the last decade, so I’m using it as an example. Where you meet murder Harley Quinn Orin – not podcast Oren, very different. Alter ego, I assume. And she’s like, oh, I took one of your people and I’m gonna murder them if you come after me. That’s just a lie. She won’t. So it’s almost like, she lies to you, but this is a video game. I don’t…A, she could just kill them. If this was a realistic world, she could see me coming and stab them in the face. But also, it’s a video game. So I know there are limitations and I just kind of have to believe characters ’cause there’s no way to check their story. It feels like the choice of ‘do you go after them or not’ doesn’t really feel like a choice. Because I have no idea what the consequences are without looking them up. And anytime I have to look up the consequences of an action, not because I wanna make the perfect choice, but just so I understand where are we operating here as far as is this character even being truthful with me, I think is a failure of the game story. And I would rather less choice than that. 

Oren: Yeah, I kind of feel like you probably shouldn’t put in choices that you know are just leading to a deliberately bad ending, but that’s obviously a pretty controversial stance. I do think we could compromise on don’t have characters recommend things that if I do them, will be bad for non-story reasons. The most blatant example of this is in Mass Effect 2.

Ari: That’s rough buddy.

Oren: Poor Jacob. Not a great character to start with. And when you’re talking to him, and I think Miranda is the other one, Miranda’s like you could go and prepare to fight the collectors, which means do all the side quests. And Jacob’s like, no, I think you should go and fight the collectors immediately because we don’t have time to wait around. Do not do that!

Ari: Don’t do that. That’s the bad ending.

Oren: You will get the worst ending. But in character, it makes sense that Jacob would say that because we don’t have time, right? The collectors are doing stuff now. Jacob doesn’t know that the collectors will just wait for you to do all the side quests.

Ari: Also, if you do it that way, Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly short game. Mass effect 2 is like 80% companion acquisition and then loyalty missions.

Oren: Yeah, it’s bizarre to me that they even have a character suggesting that. And I’ve even seen that listed in reasons Jacob’s a terrible character and like, that’s not Jacob’s fault, man. Don’t put that on him.

Ari: And I could see why the writer put it in there. That makes sense for him to say. But also, this is a video game, and don’t tell me to do something that’s not just a bad idea story-wise, but also robbing me of a lot of content. Like back in Baldur’s Gate 3, your dream visitor – who in my game is just my character, but with a commanding mustache –

Oren: It’s a good visitor.

Ari: – Will say, don’t go to the Githyanki creche. Don’t go into the astral prism. If you don’t do that, that’s a huge amount of the story you just don’t get. You’ll learn those things eventually anyway, at least for the astral prism part. But you can just skip the Githyanki creche and if you follow that character’s advice, ’cause they’ve been right about everything else so far and they seem to have your best interests at heart, you just missed out on a pretty cool area. And the same can be said for visiting House of Hope in act three, Raphael’s House. The dream visitor, who you know now at this point and is theoretically even more your ally, says don’t do that. It’s a waste of time. It’s dangerous. There’s no reason to do it. We have a plan, but is there a real reason I shouldn’t do it? Or is there just this character telling me and they’re just wrong. And it turns out the dream visitor is just incorrect. You can just do that. Get a bunch of cool loot. It’s great.

Oren: And you can see how they’re imagining this because in a tabletop game, if I had an NPC suggest, okay, don’t go there, and the players are like, oh, that’s a good idea, I would then create the story in such a way where a different cool thing happened. Something that wouldn’t have happened if they’d gone to the House of Hope, if I had been designing the game properly. Now, there are GMs who will design a whole dungeon for you and then be like, do you want to go to the dungeon?

Ari: Yes.

Oren: And then you don’t get the out of game signal and so you say no ’cause you think there’s a different place to go. And then they’re just kind of sad. That’s its own thing.

Ari: Playing an RPG with your friends, there’s also that room for investigation to a certain point when an NPC in a video game says a thing, sometimes I’m like, no, I wanna know more about that. And then there’s just no dialogue for it, but in tabletop, your players could be like, do we believe them? Are they telling the truth? What vibe do we get from that? Yeah. And you can, as the GM, be like, well, you sense that they’re really scared or something. You know, you could give reasons as to why this person might personally say this, but not necessarily as the GM telling you that you shouldn’t do a thing. That can make a huge difference. And video games just don’t have that flexibility. It’s especially bad in Baldur’s Gate 3 because the character, the way it talks to you is omnipotent narrator-type voice that just appears in your head. So it feels, if anyone is the writer stand-in for what I should and shouldn’t do at this point, it’s this magic voice in my head that seems to know everything.

Oren: I mean, if we’re gonna keep talking about choices in Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s very funny that they have this whole temptation arc with the tadpoles, but taking the tadpoles doesn’t do anything. Nothing bad happens if you take them. They’re just cool powers.

Ari: I assume it’s a relic of an earlier system that was going to make that matter. I can see a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 where that was a huge part of it. I think either the remnants of it when they scrapped it or stuff that they had, so they just put it in there because don’t waste the work if you can use it somewhere. And then you don’t see anything about it past act one, which makes me think that that was dropped relatively early and act one was designed kind of as the standalone space where they were still figuring out what they wanted the game to be, which is why sometimes the very beginning, I think they’ve taken this out. Your character has voice lines in act one as just a random person, and I assume that’s a relic from when your character was supposed to be voiced, and they never talk again, and it’s just weird.

Oren: I really wish your character was voiced. I know why they’re not. I understand that it production-wise would’ve been a nightmare, but man, one of the few moments that I actively dislike Baldur’s Gate 3 is when an NPC gives me like a brilliant setup for some kind of impassioned reply, and my character just stands there silently.

Ari: And it’s funny ’cause I feel like they could have at least voiced some of the replies for the origin characters, because they already had the voice actors in, they have the dialogue choices. Obviously that is more time in the booth and costs more, but I personally believe Baldur’s Gate 3 had the resources for that.

Oren: The tadpole thing reminded me of a better version of that in Road Trader, where you start off the game with a shard of this chaos blade. And that’s one of the big choices they ask you to make in the beginning, is what are you gonna do with this thing? And you can start leaning into it and you will eventually get really cool powers. You will also be chaos-ed.

Ari: You get a really cool sword. That’s not the same as saying it’s a really good sword, but it is really cool.

Oren: It looks great. You will feel stylish.

Ari: Yes, 100% the sword element part of Rogue Trader works really well, A lot better than the tadpole non-dilemma that the game introduces. And you get to make friends with the giant space chicken if you want, which is pretty cool too.

Oren: Everyone likes the space chicken. Now, we’ve been talking a lot about choices early in the game, so it might be worth looking at how do choices pay out at the end of the story. And it’s really interesting to me to see how different games do it. Usually they try to collapse your choices down into roughly the same ending with a few changes because again, they don’t have time, right? They can’t make a billion different endings. But with the exception of Rogue Trader, again, because Rogue Trader’s endings are a bunch of texts on cards, so it’s a little easier.

Ari: Yeah. They can write a lot of those.

Oren: Although they do bug pretty badly.

Ari: Oh yeah. They don’t always make sense, but they do have a lot of them. Characters are both very alive and very dead at the end of my Rogue Trader games, according to the end cards.

Oren: Yeah, but most games don’t do that, and so they have to give you an ending where it at least feels like your choices line up. Baldur’s Gate is okay at that. I think Fallout: New Vegas is actually probably one of the best ones.

Ari: I’d agree with that. Fallout: New Vegas also does a combination where they have the final action climax of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, followed by the end cards. I love the end card system. I love it so much. I used it in my cursive drive game for my post game credits that I did for my group. I think that with the limited time and budget they had to do a lot with a little, and I think that was a very smart use of the resources they had.

Oren: Yeah, I think that you’re ending at the same battle regardless, but which side you’re on makes a big difference. And then what you do when you win, that makes it feel like your ending choices matter quite a bit. Baldur’s’s gate 3 ending is fine. The big choice you make at the end there is independent of the other choices you’ve made.

Ari: Yeah, you fight the big brain and then you’re kind of allowed to do almost anything regardless of what you’ve been saying you’ll do leading up to that, which isn’t my favorite method. It is nice to have some level of freedom. You’re not just completely locked in from a choice you made eight hours ago, but the other side is, why did I make all those choices if basically just comes down to the dialogue tree right at the end? 

Oren: Yeah. You’ve been rejecting mind flayer powers this entire time, but now you can become the elder brain if you want to.

Ari: Yeah, on reflection, I would love to be the elder brain. You know, they make a good point. So yeah, let’s sign me up. Let’s go.

Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize that’s where this was going.

Ari: That was so sweet. And then you have like Mass Effect 3.

Oren: Oh boy.

Ari: Oh boy. What Instagram filter do you get on your cinematic right at the end?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that one is pretty infamous. It’s interesting to see with Mass Effect 3 less the choices at the very end and more how the choices that they gave you in Mass Effect 2 create problems for 3. Because in theory, you can start Mass Effect 3 with most of your party dead. If you fail the end, especially if you take Jacob’s advice in Mass Effect 2, most of your party will not survive the final level, and so you have to be able to play the game with almost no companions from the rest of the series.

Ari: Yeah, everyone’s just gone.

Oren: Which is why they suddenly introduced several new ones.

Ari: Yeah. Hot take, Mass Effect 2, I think, does the series dirty. There’s a lot of problems that come from Mass Effect 2. I know it’s the darling for a lot of people.

Oren: Well, I mean, it’s the best one, but it is the problem child.

Ari: Although I would argue gameplay wise – it’s not what we’re talking about, but it did suffer the worst from the remake. So if you’re replaying the trilogy, don’t be surprised if Mass Effect 2 feels kind of the odd one out in the gameplay department.

Oren: Little clunky there. I was gonna move on to talking about tabletop games.

Ari: Yeah, sounds great.

Oren: I figured it would be useful to talk about choices in tabletop games because that’s the other place where they tend to come up a lot. So how do you approach that? Because you run D&D, which is very different from the freeform, go with your feelings kind of games that I tend to run.

Ari: Yeah, these touchy feely games. Not for cool math nerds like me.

Oren: Yeah. The namby-pamby hippie games. That’s right.

Ari: So for me, I have a couple of general story beats in mind, especially if it’s something I’m working on completely custom. I did a campaign called The Undiscovered Country, just completely my own creation. And I tried to create a cast of characters that would all spend the first act, I guess, of the game, meeting the party, and then seeing who does the party like, who do we vibe with here, and then their level of importance would be adjusted accordingly. That way it felt like I didn’t have to put a ton of work into all these characters and then just hope I guessed right as to who the characters would choose to interact with. And then once I knew that, then it would become a lot easier to shape the major story moments that I had thought of, for each of these characters to be central portions of the game.

Oren: Honestly, I use a pretty similar strategy. The way I see it is that there needs to be a balance between player choice and what the GM wants to do. Assuming you’re doing a kind of traditional GM tells a story to the players and then takes the players into account when making the story, right? So there are interactive concepts out there if you wanna play a GM-less game, or one where the game is governed by a flow chart or whatever. But if you’re playing a more traditional RPG, there has to be give and take on both sides. If the GM is like, hey, we’re doing a paranormal investigation game in this town that I made, players should not be making the choice to not go to the town.

Ari: We’re moving to Chicago. That was in the Dresden Files, so there’s probably some stuff over there.

Oren: Yeah, you have to be willing to buy in that amount. This is kind of Roleplaying 101 stuff, and you either do it with a session zero or you can just kind of intuit it if you know your players really well. But within that, I try to make it so that my players can make the choices that they want within reason. I have certain players, who will remain nameless, who sometimes try to find the not-viable choices to see if I’ll let them make those.

Ari: Yep. I’m familiar with those types of players.

Oren: Yeah, and you know, I love them, but that can be a little hard to deal with. [laughs]

Ari: Sometimes my strategy has been terrible panic as I realize that I’m playing a prebuilt module that didn’t actually give the players a reason to do the story, and I just have to rely on my players’ goodwill to descend into Avernus. The game doesn’t give you a reason to go to Avernus, which seems kind of important because you’re literally going to hell. I just have good players who were like, yeah, okay, we’re going to hell. I guess this otter wizard told us to, and I very quickly had an NPC who the characters had developed some attachment with saying, I have a reason to go to hell. I’m gonna go there and die if I have to. So the players are like, okay, we’ll go with that. Sometimes the game you’re running, especially if it is pre-made, doesn’t have good decision points built into it because it doesn’t provide your players with anything to work with. Be aware of that, especially if you’re running prebuilt adventures.

Oren: Yeah, definitely read the prebuilt adventure ahead of time. You don’t know what it’s gonna do. It could be weird.

Ari: I just assumed they had a reason and it wasn’t until we got to that session, where it was like, oh no.

Oren: Yeah, I’ve been on the other side of this, where the GM clearly expects me to make a choice to continue the story that doesn’t seem good to me. At the risk of a cliché, it does not seem like something my character would do, and I do my best to try to make my character the kind of character who would do what’s necessary for the plot. But players don’t like being humiliated, so if you require them to kiss a bunch of boots to continue the story, they’re probably just not gonna do it.

Ari: Yeah. Why am I asking them to go jump through these hoops of feeling very uncool to get to the fun part?

Oren: There was a Firefly module that a friend of ours tried to run in college, where you land on a planet and everyone’s really rude to you at first, and what you’re supposed to do is do unpaid jobs for them and you’ll be then paid in exposure and eventually you can build up enough reputation to get paying jobs. We came here on a spaceship. We could just go somewhere else. Especially since not knowing that this was the premise, I made a character with the rich trait, I think it’s called Moneyed Individual, but it’s the trait that means you’re rich and it’s actually very cheap – which is sort of a problem in a game where you’re supposed to be a hard scrabble trading vessel – but that’s a different question. So as a result, it was just really hard to get into the head space of we gotta do these crappy exposure jobs to build up to the paying ones, you know?

Ari: Yeah. I had that problem as a player as well, where this world that my friend made for us where every NPC was a jerk to us, regardless of what level we were and what we had done for them. Late into the campaign, we were level 14 or 15 or something, and you’re kind of a big deal at that point. These people are still just mouthing off to us the whole time, and it made me like really frustrated and I didn’t even wanna work with these people. It became really hard to, like you said, get into the head space of we’re cooperatively building this story. Like, I don’t wanna work for these jerks. They’re all being unnecessarily rude when literally all we’ve done is help them. I don’t really wanna interact with them anymore. So I just sass them and then go and do the quest because I wanna fight something, which is not where I want to be as a player in D&D.

Oren: Alright, there’s one more thing I wanted to talk about, which is how do you feel about games that have a roughly good run and a roughly evil run? And the evil run is always underdeveloped.

Ari: They have to be, if you have a run where you are guessing more than half of your player base is just never gonna see the evil content. You don’t have infinite resources, no matter how big your studio is, and when you could make a better good run at the expense of your evil run, yeah, do it. I think Rogue Trader is the most likely to have your player at least trying chaos, because chaos is a fairly popular faction in Rogue Trader, and also it’s fun. Everyone’s a jerk in Warhammer, so it feels less bad that you’re the biggest jerk, but I think it’s worth it if it gets you a better campaign that the majority of your audience is going to be engaging with. Myself included. I am totally fine that Caesar’s Legion has way less content to it because I don’t wanna play those people. They’re awful. I feel bad whenever I talk to them or have to interact with them. So get rid of it.

Oren: I feel for players who see, oh, there’s an option for an evil run, I’ll try that, and then they feel punished because the evil run is just not well made. I understand why that is really frustrating. By the same token, if we’re dealing with a limited pie, I want more of the pie and I’m only ever playing the good runs. So.

Ari: I’ve seen it discussed that, oh, just don’t have one. Don’t have an evil option. But then I also see people complain about that, and it’s the same people. Yeah, it does stink that one of these has less content. In a perfect world, they would both have the exact right amount of content to be the best stories they could be. But I think the inclusion of evil options is almost as valuable as actually building out those evil options. Knowing that you could have been a big jerk, but you chose to do good, I think is a valuable and necessary portion of a lot of games. That is what that’s doing. Because if you took it out, it would feel like you weren’t making choices at all.

Oren: Alright. Well, I think that is a good place to end the podcast on. For those of you playing the good run at home, you can make the choice to pledge to our Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

Today, we’re talking about conflicts in fandom between people who like one romantic pairing over another, along with… Oh, not that kind of ship, huh? Never mind, this episode is about actual ships and the fights they get into. Mostly spaceships, but also some mention of the air and water variety. Plus, you get to hear Oren’s attempt at pronouncing “Jeune École.”

Generously transcribed by Victoria. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song]

Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Once again with me is my brother Ari. 

Ari: Hello again, everyone. I’m back. 

Oren: Yes. Now, before we start this podcast, I need everyone to read this 500 page technical schematic for how rail guns work. This is gonna be on the test.

Ari: I definitely know that. So, I’m ready. 

Oren: So, we’re talking about ship battles today. Possibly because Ari and I recently read The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is sort of about ship battles. 

Ari: There’s a couple of ships in there. 

Oren: You know, there’s some airships in there, kind of. We get a little one at the beginning and then a big mystery plot, and then another little one at the end, or a bigger one.

Ari: They have a little tussle. I don’t know if this is where Jim Butcher’s greatest strengths lie, but it was okay.

Oren: And I know you’ve been binging the Honorverse books, again. Which are about two things: ship battles and how great monarchy is. 

Ari: Yes, we love the monarchy here. Big fan. A benevolent dictator is really just our best option as far as a form of government.

Oren: Just such an interesting take to read in 2025. 

Ari: Look, look, it’s complicated. Okay? These were made in like 19, like 89, so they had no idea. Now, there was no evidence that monarchies might not be the best form of government at that point.

Oren: How could they have known?

Ari: They just couldn’t have known. They were fresh children.

Oren: It’s so funny to me how they start off by being like, ‘And you know what bankrupts communist states? It’s welfare. They spend too much on welfare.’

Ari: Yeah. 

Oren: And you look at what actually bankrupted communist states, and it was military spending.

Ari: Look, David Weber’s political views, or at least the ones expressed in this book, ’cause they’re not always the same- I read some of Orson Scott card’s books and boy, those are different.- but the, whatever they are, they mellow out a bit. But yes, you do have to accept some love of the monarchy. Couple of monarchies, actually. 

Oren: Yeah. So, for ship battles, I think the first thing to think about is what is your inspiration? Like your historical inspiration, assuming you have one. That will sort of help you inform what you’re doing. Like in The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is an airship story, there’s clearly like an inspiration to age of sail, ships of line type combat, although they can also fly and go in any direction they feel like.

Ari: They’re also airplanes, which were definitely around at about the same time, give or take.

Oren: Yeah. You could almost miss this, but they drop that one of the big ships they’re fighting is 500 years old. 

Ari: Yeah. A little war hammer inspiration in there with like old ship, good ship. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s like the ship gets better as it ages.

Ari: Yeah. It’s like wine, you know? It just gets better with age. 

Oren: They mentioned that it has steam engines, and I got the impression those were kind of recent, so I’m like, did they refit it for steam engines?

Ari: Yeah. Being 500 years old doesn’t actually mean a lot. It’s like a Ship of Theseus issue here. They’ve just replaced every part of it at this point, but they like the name, and they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t just name a new ship that, so we just have to keep refitting this one.’

Oren: Yeah. The ship’s bell is 500 years old.

Ari: Yeah, exactly. Look, as long as one piece is still from the original, it’s legal, okay? No one can sue us over this.

Oren: Yeah. So, that’s one option. Star Wars is obviously World War II in space. The Honorverse books are kind of World War I in space, and then they get into this weird, like, missile development tech, which kind of mirrors torpedo development before World War I. And then we get into something that’s vaguely analogous to aircraft carriers, but also kind of like the Jeune Ecole mid-1800’s French naval strategy. So just some mix and matching going on there. 

Ari: I think they even use that term in the Honorverse books.

Oren: Jeune Ecole? Do they?

Ari: yeah. I think they talk about that as like a school of ship design or something. It’s something similar. That’s how I read it in my head, anyway. 

Oren: Yeah, it so it’s a French term, and if you will forgive me for being way too nerdy, it translates roughly as ‘the new school.’

Ari: Yes, that is in the Honorverse. 

Oren: Yeah, and the idea was that you could use a bunch of small, heavily armed ships to blow up bigger ships, and the idea was that it would be more cost-effective. At first, they were like, ‘We can use these new explosive shells that we’re designing.’ And then that didn’t work because of Ironclads. So they were like, ‘Alright, we’ll switch that out, and we’ll use torpedoes instead.’ And that also didn’t work. And it’s a fun example ’cause everyone’s always wondering like, ‘Well, why didn’t they see aircraft carriers coming?’ Right? Why didn’t they realize aircraft carriers would out mode battleships? And it’s like, well, people had said exactly the same thing about torpedo boats.

Ari: You know, hindsight 20-20, and all that. It’s a lot easier to look at everything after the fact and be like, ‘Well, yeah, that just makes sense, obviously.’

Oren: People are always claiming that this is gonna be the next big thing that’s going to out-mode everything. And sometimes it is, but often it’s not. 

Ari: And also, especially in like an existential wartime, you really don’t wanna be wrong about this and invest all in on a new weapons system for it just to not work. So, you know, I can see why there would be some resistance to upending naval doctrine in the middle of a world war or leading up to one, and the Honorverse does include some of that, actually. 

Oren: And that is part of the reason why the French Navy was struggling towards the late 1800’s and start of the 1900’s, is that they had gone in on this Jeune Ecole idea or, I’m sure I’m butchering that, but you know, the new school, right? And it wasn’t like they stopped building larger ships, but the larger ships really took a backseat for a while, and so then they had to play catch up right around the time everyone else was revolutionizing how their battleships worked. 

Ari: Yeah, the Wonder Weapon School of Thought, like, ‘We’ll build the magic bullet, and then we’ll be good to go.’ You see in the Honorverse, it’s important that you have the person who pushes that be tempered by the cool cool main characters who know that too much innovation all at once with unproven technology is a bad thing. So like, we need the cool main character. That’s what France needed. 

Oren: Yeah. Why didn’t France have Captain Honor here helping us out? I mean, her name is Honor. How could she not be right? 

Ari: She is very cool, and I say that jokingly, but I like her a lot as a character. But boy, the setting also likes her a lot as a character.

Oren: That’s very cool. Then there are some ship battles in fiction that don’t have an obvious parallel, like I don’t know what the Expanse is drawing on. I mean, the Expanse does have big guns and torpedoes, so I guess you could argue that that’s again, sort of World War one-ish, but they’re so different in the way they operate. 

Ari: You do see, I think some of this in the details of how the Honorverse works as well, where it’s like someone actually giving at least some amount of thought to what warfare in distances imposed by being in space would mean and how the differences between momentum and acceleration and things like that and gravities and all that noise would affect how combat works and what ships are forced to think about, or captains are forced to think about. And I think I see some of that in the Expanse where they’re exploring the differences. It’s not just World War I but with some stars in the background, or World War II with some stars in the background. There would be a lot of changes if we actually tried to shoot at each other over Interstellar or even intersystem distances.

Oren: Do they use crossing the T in the Honorverse? It’s been a while.

Ari: Yes. They cross the T. Their form of propulsion is also their form of defense. There’s super, like, gravity walls that are formed above and below the ship with weaker ones on the side, but in the front and the back they are open, so you are always trying to cross your enemy’s T and either get it down the throat or up the kilt shot as they say.

Oren: You can definitely see how that makes a little more sense on the water than in a three-dimensional space environment.

Ari: Yeah, everything’s like real big in Honorverse. Like, the size of these things are measured in like hundreds of kilometers. So, it’s like approximately being in front and also their, when their attacks are done with like missiles, the missiles are supposed to be smart enough to try and maneuver in front and behind ships before they explode. That kind of thing.

Oren: So that’s an interesting question, actually, since we’re talking. You mentioned shields. How do you feel about shields in ship battles?

Ari: When all they do is represent additional hull that comes back between episodes, like how in Star Trek they’re just like, ‘Oh, okay, like we just have to get through the shields.’ then the consoles start exploding. I like when shields are-if they’re doing something more novel than just adding additional hit points to the ship. The Honorverse ones are mostly a damaged reduction mechanic rather than a complete ‘you have to punch through these before you can hurt me’ kind of deal, and I prefer that style. 

Oren: Yeah, and I mean, with Star Trek you can really tell the writers kind of struggle with that sometimes ’cause it’s like if the shield is basically just a wall of hit points you need to get through, then what happens when we’re in kind of a rush, right? It’s like, we don’t have time to chew through the shield, so it’s just oh, suddenly the shields don’t work.

Ari: Yeah. Or, just stuff explodes anyway. Like the shields are there, but they’re like, oh, the shields are down to 50% and like three incidents have died already ’cause their consoles exploded in their faces. Like, I don’t, what is the shield doing? 

Oren: Yeah. I mean, that is one of the advantages of a book over a TV show is that at least with the budget that Star Trek was working with in the nineties, you know, they need to make the space combat feel dangerous, right? But they can’t actually have like a phaser beam rip through the bridge. They don’t have the budget for that. So they had to go with consoles exploding. That’s how you make it feel dangerous.

Ari: We put explosives in everyone’s consoles to really spice things up a little bit when we’re fighting.

Oren: Right. Whereas, In the expanse or in the Honorverse or in Windlass, things just explode because people are shooting explosives at you. 

Ari: Yeah, and the Honorverse spends a lot of time during its space battles really trying to hammer home both the physical damage to the vessel, because especially in the early books, the vessels are almost their own characters in the fights, but also the human costs as the Honorverse gets, not incredibly graphic, but graphic enough that it seems like a bad time.

Oren: Yeah. I reread the first one recently, and I thought it did a really good job of explaining what the different systems were and why they mattered. You understood like, okay, so we need these sensors because they allow us to see the missiles coming and that’s how we dodge them. And so when we lose these sensors, now we’re taking more damage, and you know, stuff like that, right? 

Ari: Yeah. We’re gonna take more damage ’cause our net of defensive systems are now falling apart. 

Oren: Yeah. And I thought that was very good. It really added a sense of desperation as these two ships are just tearing each other to pieces. It was confusing the way that it keeps switching between ship bridges like that with basically no indication of which ship we’re on. 

Ari: So I, for the most part, didn’t have that issue reading it way back when. And it’s much better as an audiobook, obviously, because the voice changes.

Oren: Yeah.

Ari: I do honestly think that one of the reasons, in later books, all of the bad guys have to start calling themselves Citizen Captain and Citizen Admiral is so you have an easier time identifying which side you’re reading about.

Oren: Yeah. 

Ari: Without having to remember the characters’ names.

Oren: In Windlass, I was sometimes a little confused what exactly they were doing. I sometimes got it. Like, okay, the netting is basically sort of like sails, except they aren’t dependent on wind direction. It’s like sails, but you always have wind going in the direction you want to go. So you can shoot that. Okay, I can see how that works, but I remember specifically in the big ending fight when the two battle cruisers are shooting at each other, I could not track why one of them was being more effective than the other one.

Ari: It’s ’cause it was real old. Yeah. I think was my takeaway is that the ancient machine spirit that dwelt within it and the powers of the Adeptus Mechanicus and holy terror really spoke through its guns. And I have no idea. I agree. 

Oren: As far as I could tell, it was because the ship that was losing was captained by a loser who we hate, and so, his ship sucks. 

Ari: Yeah, what a jerk. Yeah, the Honorverse falls to that sometimes too. This, the ship is captained by a big dumb jerk and that means their ship sucks. It’s weird ’cause Butcher has a high fantasy, the Codex Alera series where he writes large scale battles, and I think he does a really good job at some of my favorite fantasy battles that I’ve read. And so I was a little confused by some of the vagueness present in the ship battles in Windlass. That it was just like even sometimes, literally, they went into the clouds and then one ship came out and was winning. It’s like, oh, I might’ve liked to see that, but okay.

Oren: What happens in the clouds stays in the clouds.

Ari: Until it comes out, and it shoots at our main character, Captain Grim.

Oren: Oh gosh. Captain Grim. Okay. I don’t hate Captain Grim, but I definitely don’t like him as much as Butcher does. 

Ari: Butcher really likes Captain Grim, which I get it. People like honors in the Honorverse, so I do get it, but also I don’t like him as much.

Oren: The fact that he’s so persnickety about people calling him Captain Grim and not by his first name, Francis. He’s such a try hard in that scene. It’s like, no, don’t call me Francis. I’m Captain Grim. Like, okay.

Ari: Yeah, if people call you that, cool. But it loses a lot of its impact when you’re running around demanding people call you by your cool alias name, you know, like I’m not Ari, I am like Death Slicer and call me that, damnit. You can’t call me by my actual name.

Oren: Y’all gotta call me Rathe McBlade from now on.

Ari: Exactly. It’s very cool. 

Oren: Which like to be clear, if someone tells you what their name is, respect them. I’m not saying you should go check to see what their actual first name is. I’m saying, in this context, he just wants you to call him by his gamer tag. This is not like a name change situation.

Ari: Yeah, I completely agree. If someone tells you what their name is, respect that. But this seems like a guy who is very attached to his Xbox Live gamer tag and really wants you to respect how cool he is.

Oren: This is a little bit beyond ship battles, but one of the reasons I think Honor is a better character than Grim is that Honor has to start with a goddamn loser ship that’s been like half gutted to fit this like newfangled weapon that barely works. Whereas, Grim starts with a ship that’s already like the best ship of its size, and then he gets a special power crystal that makes it even betterer. 

Ari: Yeah, it’s called the Predator. It’s a very cool ship for cool people. And it has all the coolest people. Like, they’re gruff, and they pretend they don’t care, but they care. They really do care.

Oren: I was so much more attached to Honor’s, like tiny little cruiser in the first book. It was like getting blown up and I was like, no, no special ship. No. 

Ari: Yeah. And that’s why at the end when it’s like, oh no, like my ship sustained too much damage, it will never, like, it’s gotta go to the scrappers. It’s like, oh, you fought so hard. And now, now our, the poor ship is just. What did they say? She was too old and she gave too much.

Oren: That’s a pretty good line, honestly.

Ari: And it’s like, oh, now I feel bad. 

Oren: As opposed to Predator, which is very cool. 

Ari: We love predator here and we know nothing. Predator’s gonna be fine. Predator isn’t going anywhere. I don’t believe for a second the predator will suffer. Any permanent damage except for maybe like the final climax, and then we cut to having a cooler, bigger ship, also named the Predator.

Oren: Predator two Electric boogaloo. 

Ari: Exactly. That’s the only instance I can imagine that ship is going anywhere in the Windlass series. 

Oren: Moving back to the actual ship battles, one thing to think about is how do your ships get into and out of fights? Because in the real world it’s on the water, right? And they gotta move around on it. But in fantasy settings, they’re often in space or in the air, and those tend to be a little different. Especially once you get FTL involved. Like, if your ships can jump to Lightspeed, it’s very easy to end up in a situation where anytime they’re losing, they can just smash the go to Lightspeed button and escape. And you probably don’t want that. That’s gonna hurt tension in a lot of your fights.

Ari: The Honorverse dedicates a lot of pages to explaining why, in all of these fights, you can’t just do that.

Oren: Yeah.

Ari: They have like hyper limits around the stars. So like once you’re inside a certain space within, depending on the star type, you can’t hyper out. So we’d have to like break away and get outside again. The Weber goes to a lot of trouble to talk about how space is huge, and even the biggest ships are tiny moats. So this is all down to very precise math generating intercept vectors and then tricking people who might have higher acceleration than you into an angle where they just can’t get away from you. It’s just impossible with the technology in the setting. Even if they max excelled away from you, they have built up too much speed coming towards you, that kind of thing. And it’s obviously like that is an important detail for him, and I think it serves the series generally quite well in making the battles feel both different from being just on the water, but also possible and not just pretending that space is really tiny. Because that’s kinda what Star Trek does, right? Star Trek just pretends everyone’s kind of right next to each other all the time.

Oren: Yeah, they’re always flying up there. Star Trek has also kind of changed the way Warp Drive has worked over time. Like sure, the distances in Star Trek don’t make any sense, but it at least used to be that if a ship went to Warp, the other ship could just chase at Warp, right? And again, the distances are weird, but at least in like relative speed that sort of works. But more recently, star Trek has increasingly treated warp speed more like hyperspace, which I suspect is JJ Abrams fault.

Ari: JJ, why would you do this? 

Oren: Like, he started doing that in the 2009 movie, and I think it’s just sort of stuck. Even the shows are doing it now. Now, granted, we don’t know for sure, right? I think in, in Discovery, they still do like a warp speed chase where they’re shooting at each other. So, it’s not like it’s guaranteed, but the writers are treating it more that way. Which Star Wars has this as a huge problem. Like in Star Wars, every new edition of Star Wars pushes the envelope of where you can go into hyperspace and how easily.

Ari: Well, let me tell you about, uh, hyperspace branding this new idea I’ve thought of. I think it’ll really do well for this series. You know, imagine you’re going like really fast. 

Oren: Are you? Is that how hyperspace works? 

Ari: It might be, but it’ll look really cool. Like. The coolest looking scene in a movie, you might say.

Oren: yeah, is it worth what happens after? I don’t know.

Ari: But it did look really good. 

Oren: But like even beyond the hyperspace ram, like we’re at the point now where you can hyperspace from the atmosphere of one planet to the atmosphere of another planet. 

Ari: Yeah. It’s kinda like teleportation. I think this is when writers, I don’t know if lazy is the right word, but their focus is elsewhere. And so this is the button you press to get from one locale to the next and the rest of it, it’s fine. 

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s funny to me because The Aeronaut’s Windlass shouldn’t have had this problem because it doesn’t have FTL, but for some reason Butcher added like a permanent cloud layer that any ship can just dive into to escape anytime it wants to.

Ari: See. I initially assumed when I was reading, ’cause the way they talked about it was like, ‘oh, you can’t just do that.’ And so I’m like, oh, is the cloud layer like corrosive? Is there something in it that like eats you, like a big monster? And there are monsters in it, but they’re apparently not super common, and you could just run away from them or not attract their attention by being quiet.

Oren: Right.

Ari: So, you can just leave. I don’t wanna be here anymore. I’m gonna go live in the fog now. 

Oren: One of the things about Windlass that also kind of confused me was how advanced their technology is in some ways, and yet they don’t have turrets. 

Ari: Butcher really likes Broadsides.

Oren: You can still have broadsides with turrets.

Ari: No, those two things cannot exist at the same time in what I imagine of naval warfare. Once one is invented, broad sides are over.

Oren: Unless your ship only has one turret. 

Ari: Yeah. Points-Look, it just wouldn’t be the same.

Oren: Or like, I guess it could be one of those weird experimental battleships that have like all the turrets in the front.

Ari: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Oren: That’s-which, those look kind of funny, but-

Ari: They’re over the-some weighting issues that maybe-

Oren: Yeah. Most of the time, even with turrets, you still have broad sides. It’s just, historically speaking, we basically started putting turrets on ships almost as soon as ships were like structurally sound enough to have them.

Ari: Mm-hmm. And they weren’t just cannons sitting like inside the ship that could technically roll around sometimes, maybe.

Oren: Yeah. No, they were like fully rotating platforms, although they were like, it was not an easy process. 

Ari: Sure.

Oren: Like, there were several experiments that did not go well. There’s an infamous HMS captain, which was one of the experiments with early turrets that was extremely unstable and just rolled over and sank one day, and it’s like, yep.

Ari: Yeah, I can imagine that. You have all this weight in one spot, and then also once the guns start firing and if you’re trying to like, put the biggest gun you can in the turret. And all of a sudden your ship is on its side. 

Oren: And it had to do with the fact that these ships still had mast, which made it really awkward. Like, where do we put the turret if they have masts? That was a whole problem. That’s another reason why for a while, naval planners in the UK were very cautious about new technology is that there had been a lot of warnings that the ship was dangerous and the disaster waiting to happen. And they had been, at least according to the narratives that I have read, ignored because there was a fear that we were gonna miss out on this new technology. So, you know, I’m not saying that directly applies to any of our modern situations, but I’m not, not saying that either. 

Ari: Oh, it’s, don’t even worry about it. Jim Butcher just, he just kind of picks and chooses what he wanted. Like some things are obviously very advanced compared to the age of sail broadside canon blasts he wanted. So it can feel a little, I don’t know, anachronistic maybe to read that and see like, wait a minute, these technologies, one of these should be advanced a bit more if we also have this other one.

Oren: Yeah. One thing that I was a little annoyed by was the fact that apparently the ship’s webbing is outside the shields. And I guess that’s not a huge problem for big ships ’cause they have like spools of the stuff so they can just let out some more if you shoot it. But I mean, part of this was just a dramatic issue because later in the book there’s the big rival ship right captained by his ex-wife, which is built up like it’s gonna be the bad guy. And then when they actually fight it-

Ari: They just surrender. It’s fine. 

Oren: Yeah. Like, they fight it and it takes like two pages. They like fly up to it and shoot off its webbing real quick ’cause that’s outside the shield, and then it can’t do anything. And it’s like, all right, this is dramatically unsatisfying, but also feels like this is way too easy a tactic. It’s like, why would you ever shoot at anything else if you could do this? 

Ari: Yeah. The common issue where a lot of fiction will make shields and then put the most important things outside the shield.

Oren: Like the shield generator.

Ari: Yeah, especially the shield generator. It’s like, what? Like, why did you put that out there? You should tell me if there’s a reason. ’cause I would like to know,

Oren: And I’m pretty sure Butcher is getting inspiration from the fact that during the age of sail there was a lot of discourse about whether or not you should shoot at the enemy ship’s rigging or at its hull, right? And you could argue that it came down to what was your priority? Was your priority destroying the enemy or was your priority getting where you were going to like drop off troops and stuff? 

Ari: Yeah

Oren: But at the same time, it’s not really the same because in the age of sail, if you shoot at the rigging, it’s not like one broad side, and now your enemy has no more rigging left right? Which is how it seems to work in windless, at least in that particular battle. 

Ari: Yeah. I mean, I played a lot of Sid Meyers pirates, so I’m pretty much an expert on this. You use the chain shot to take down their sails so that you can board them and have a fencing mini-game.

Oren: Yeah, a little fencing, mini-game. Plus, then you get a free ship. So, why would you ever sink them? 

Ari: Yeah, exactly. That’s how you gotta trade up. You gotta like, hermit crab your way into a bigger ship every time. For Butcher’s story specifically, uh, it really does suffer from how effective blasting the webbing is. Very wildly because he had introduced two ships that were being set up as the big final boss. And then like, what do you do with that? Like, the predator can’t fight two ships that outgun and out everything except being the coolest. So you have to get rid of one real quick. And so that’s how they, they’re like homing their homing pile that they had in there, and then they just take out sales and now it’s over. But they can’t end the fight like that with another one. So it just stops working like that. Like, why wouldn’t you have spools in your smaller ship? Like, how big are they? Are they so large that you couldn’t afford to put some space to not getting completely knocked out of a fight ’cause someone got a good hit?

Oren: I mean, and especially with how vulnerable that makes you, right? It just seems like something you would prioritize. That’s partly just a plot problem that Windlass has, right? Because Windlass has this big like mystery where they’re like trying to stop the bad guys from doing something and the bad guys are really mysterious, and we never really find out what they’re trying to do. And at the end, they basically get away with it, and it’s like, all right, they got away with this magic book. What does that mean? It’s like, I don’t know, come back for book two to find out. 

Ari: Read the next one, I guess. It would’ve been nice to know something about the book.

Oren: Right? And it feels like butcher. Couldn’t figure out how to make a climax that was actually part of that mystery. So instead he was like, oh, hey, remember that big Battle cruiser from the very beginning of the book? That’s the climax. You’re gonna fight that guy instead 

Ari: From the dark age of technology. I’m sorry, to anyone listening who doesn’t recognize all these war hammer references, but that’s all I could think of whenever they talked about how old and cool the ship was.

Oren: Glory to the Omnissiah!

Ari: Exactly. Is that’s, that’s that was me reading that. Yeah. It’s like, shoot the air ship’s on the cover, and it’s all very important, and it has nothing to do with the mystery that’s happening. 

Oren: Yeah. Oh, that is another thing that’s funny is what do these airships look like?

Ari: I have no idea. I have literally no clue.

Oren: The book cover doesn’t really show one. Instead, it shows someone who I assumed to be Captain Grim, although he looks too young. 

Ari: Yeah, he looks really young. Like I imagine Grim is like a weathered, but handsome, like 40 something.

Oren: Yeah, I kind of imagine him looking a bit like Gortash from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Ari: No, a handsome young man with an easy smile.

Oren: But on the cover, I guess that’s supposed to be Captain Grim, but it doesn’t really show the ship at all. And all the art that I’ve seen of it sort of depicts them as flying tall ships, but I know that’s not what they look like. The description is of like a cylinder, but also they have an open deck somewhere. Like, where is the open deck? 

Ari: Yeah. The image in my mind is kind of like a half cylinder with like the front top part open, and then you have like the webbing put out behind it like fins almost. That was the best I got, but I think I took that from like a magic card or something. So no idea how close that is.

Oren: My question is, why does it have an open deck? 

Ari: Because people need to fall off. Obviously.

Oren: You have to seal the rest of the ship. What’s the point of making the top part open just so that your sailors can tumble off the side sometimes?

Ari: It’s very dramatic is why, I have no idea. I assume that this is just more of butcher really wanting to pull from Those age of sail ships, where they had open decks. So this one has an open deck too, so you can like basically build on that imagery. A lot of readers, I’m sure, have at least some idea of like a captain trumping around on the deck of their wooden sailing ship. He’s shouting cool orders as their ship explodes around them. Like, you know, that’s a very evocative image, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense in the setting we have.

Oren: I mean, pretty cool moment from the end of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie where it’s like walking down the stairs as they’re exploding. I mean, that battle, it makes no sense at all.

Ari: No, no.

Oren: but it’s a cool scene. 

Ari: Yeah. That ship would’ve just ruined two ships because they had all their guns available, but, you know.

Oren: Yeah. It’s like, are you guys gonna shoot? Nah, nah, don’t worry about it. 

Ari: No, they, it is very cool what they did to us. Like we have to give it to ’em. One of the things that’s an interesting alternative to that though, is in the Honorverse, what they do is they specifically call out the juxtaposition between what is happening compared to like the immediate environment the characters are in. Like, the characters are in this like quiet, small room in like the center of their ship. So like the most armored spot they could possibly be as like these waves of missiles and lasers are going out and killing thousands and thousands of people that until their shift is hit directly, they don’t hear a single thing. And even if the ship is big enough, even when the ship is hit, then they just get like, you know, their screen shakes a little bit in the old, the Star Trek manner. The camera shakes, and how that is like, you know, it feels kind of unreal until all of a sudden like, explosion breaks through into the bridge and then all of a sudden, like all the horrors of war are on upon them. And I think that’s really cool too. So you don’t have to evoke always like pirate to the Caribbean or, you know, whatever. Take your favorite age of sale. That kind of imagery, I think you can do a lot with specifically not using that imagery in your fantasy or sci-fi.

Oren: All right. Well, we are about out of time, so thank you for talking to me about ship battles.

Ari: I love ship battles. I am, I’m here for it. 

Oren: And, if those of you at home want to help us continue our battle against the Pirates of AI bots that are-Yeah, we’ll go with that. That’s a metaphor. You can support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 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. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. He’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone.

Music, in an animated movie? Pfft, that’ll never catch on. But just in case it does, today’s episode is about a recent entry in the genre that’s mostly flown under the radar, assuming your radar is located somewhere on Mars. While global hit films are a bit outside the scale we normally work at, there are still a few things normal writers can learn from this film’s success. Other than the importance of having a bird and tiger in your story. That much is obvious.

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren:  Welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast! I’m Oren. Chris is taking a few episodes off because she’s very busy, so as a guest I would like to welcome my brother Ari.

Ari: Hello everyone! 

Oren: Ari tends to make a great co-host, but feel for the transcribers because apparently no one can tell our voices apart. So, you know, say a prayer for them. 

Ari: This is Oren, just actually doing, he’s learning his voice work right now, and I’m just him, but doing a second voice. So. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s very complicated. 

Ari: That’s why we agree on so much. 

Oren: [chuckles] So today we’re talking about just a little cult darling, a small indie film, you probably haven’t heard of it. Netflix barely advertised it. They didn’t have any merch available or Halloween costumes. There’s no way it’s a mega hit, right? 

Ari: No. Whatever you’re about to say, I’m sure I’ve never heard of it or have feelings about it. 

Oren: Yeah. From some small obscure genre called… K-Pop? 

Ari: Yeah. Yeah.

Oren: I don’t know what that is. That sounds like music, I suppose? Probably not a big, very passionate fandom attached to that. 

Ari: It stands for “o-Kay Pop”, so it’s like, you know, it’s okay. It’s fine. 

Oren: Yeah, yeah. It’s okay, y’know, nothing to write home about. And then you attach some demon hunters to it. 

Ari: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: And I suppose you got yourself a little urban fantasy movie.

Ari: Yep. 

Oren: It’s so funny to me that Netflix absolutely did not believe in this movie, and it’s now [chuckles] it’s everywhere. 

Ari: I am very interested for– ’cause I’m sure we’re gonna get more behind the scenes stuff as time goes on, and I’m fascinated to know what the rollercoaster of emotions was for all the people involved in this. Particularly the six main voice talents, both the speaking and singing voices, but then also the two creators behind it, the two main creators, what was that like? What is this one in a million shot for a movie? They call it “breaking containment” when a post goes viral and, uh, boy, howdy, this one broke containment.

Oren: I’ll admit, when Ari asked me to come watch this movie when it was out, I was kind of skeptical, I watched the trailer and I was like, “all right, that looks like a movie.” I was a little worried, it felt a little bit like everyone’s faces looked kind of the same. So I was like, “is this Pixar again?” But then I watched the movie and I thought that it was much better than I was expecting. And in fact, I would go so far to say it was quite good. 

Ari: I adore this movie. I saw it pop up on some of the various online communities that I’m a part of from other animated shows that I’ve really enjoyed. It showed up around my– some spaces were talking about Amphibia or The Owl House, stuff like that, and I thought, “well, I have Netflix. It looks interesting.” I like the idea, but Netflix originals can be very hit or miss. So I thought I’d give it a shot, and it turns out it is one of my favorite movies ever. 

Oren: Yeah, so this is the part, I think, where we have to say like, well, I don’t normally watch this kind of movie, but… 

Ari: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Oren: This seems to be a common feature of K-Pop Demon Hunter discussion.

Ari: Yeah. I do watch these types. I do watch these animated musicals and things, so, that ain’t me. But I’ve seen lots of people say that, you know, “oh, this is not my normal thing, but it’s real good.” 

Oren: I am a huge sucker for musicals, so this is also pretty much my normal thing. It’s like, “Hey, I also really loved Jentry Chau, and this feels like more of that.”

Ari: Yup.

Oren: I feel like Jentry Chau’s art style is a little more interesting. 

Ari: Yes, I agree. 

Oren: But it feels in the same vein. So, maybe this will convince them that we need more Jentry Chau too. 

Ari: I hope so. That would be very cool. I really like that show. So I would love to see more of it, and I would love to see more skilled artistic projects get chances from this one. 

Oren: Yeah. As the person here who only liked the movie a lot, I will be taking the critical view. 

Ari: Yes. That’s fair. I don’t know how critical I could be, so this is a good space to be in.

Oren: Yeah. So the first thing that I think is interesting about this movie is I feel like its three characters are a very good example of the fundamentals of character design. Like, I don’t think that they’re gonna blow anybody’s mind. They’re fairly straightforward, but they work really well ‘cause you’ve got three main characters, we’ve got Rumi, Mira, and Zoe. Mira and Zoe are the supporting characters, so they need to be memorable with less focus. So we boil them down to “the hard ass” and “the cinnamon roll”, which is again, [it’s] just what you do in a movie like this. They both get their own small character arcs as a treat. 

Ari: I think that, uh, for supporting characters, this is an excellent example for folks looking to make their own stories. That you don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your characters, just make it a really good wheel. And these characters, I think, are just an excellent demonstration of just solid writing and really good voice performances just across the board and how that can really elevate characters that could in other contexts be too simple. So I think that’s something that a lot of people can learn from. It’s not always just ‘complexity equals good’. You can do something simple very well and it will resonate with people.

Oren: Yeah. That’s sort of my philosophy, right? I’m always trying to tell people to master the basics before you try to do something real fancy.

Ari: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: First of all, we should say spoilers, obviously. It’s probably a little late for that, but, spoilers. Rumi is more developed, right? She’s the main character. It’s interesting that her arc is, “I’m ashamed of the way I was born, but it turns out I didn’t need to be.” What’s that a metaphor about? Yes.

Ari: A lot of it can be a lot of things, for sure.

Oren: Right, and I think that is part of the movie’s popularity, is that if you wanna see it as a queer metaphor, you can, if you’re a, shall we say, less accepting kind of person, you don’t have to think that’s what it is. I’ll admit that is a little disappointing to me, is that to make something super popular, maybe we have to strip away anything too identifying about it. I’d like to think we can maybe do better than that, but I do think that is a factor in the movie’s popularity. 

Ari: Although I would say that I think specifically body shame is something that this movie is very focused on. You can do a lot with Rumi’s character arc and her feelings around her demon side. But I think it is very clear that she is incredibly ashamed of parts of her physical appearance. And also you can see it in how her, essentially mother, treats her, tells her to hide and cover up, things like that. That is– I think there is some specificity to that that I think adds to the movie where it’s not just completely sanded down to where this could mean literally anything you feel bad about, which it can be. It can be, I think, a very wide application, but I do think that’s something important to note for it. 

Oren: Although again, we should also keep in mind that it’s a body shaming thing on characters who are objectively still very attractive. Again, we’re not going that far with it, and I’m not gonna say that this movie needed to, when others don’t. I’m not, I don’t wanna hold K-pop Demon Hunters to an unreasonable standard, but it is, it’s noticeable, right? It’s noticeable when you see stuff like that. 

Ari: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Jinu is an interesting bad boy romance. 

Ari: Yeah. I like Jinu a lot. I don’t have as many bad boy romances to compare him to, but I’m interested to hear your take on him.

Oren: So he is at an interesting middle point between two ways that bad boy romances tend to go wrong. One is that they’re like, “he’s a bad boy, he breaks the rules” and like, “what did he do?” “Oh, like he jaywalked once.”

Ari: He’s a little rude. 

Oren: He’s edgy. 

Ari: He tipped his waiter 10% instead of 20%.

Oren: He wears a leather jacket and sunglasses and it’s like, all right, that’s not really a bad boy in any meaningful way.

Ari: Yeah. 

Oren: And then it’s like “he’s a bad boy.” “What does he do?” “Well, he treats women like crap.” Like, all right I mean, that is a bad boy, I guess. 

Ari: He executed Order 66 on that room full of children. You know, just a bit of a bad boy. 

Oren: Just a rebel, you know? A rebel against not killing younglings. 

Ari: Yeah, exactly. 

Oren: So Jinu, I think, walks that line because he did do something bad, which was that he abandoned his family. But it’s in a way that you can kind of understand, and it’s not good, but it doesn’t make you go like, “eh, I wouldn’t, I would never wanna be attracted to him. Gross.”

Ari: Yeah. And I think that they did a good job that his mother is there too, so it’s somewhat understandable why even in the flashback that they’re not condemning him in those short scenes we have. Jinu’s role as still a child, late teenager at that point, I think that helps make him feel more sympathetic ’cause he wasn’t the most senior person in that family group. 

Oren: Yeah, he’s not abandoning his own children. Although we don’t know what he was doing in the demon realm since then. 

Ari: He was hanging out, you know, he met a tiger and a bird.

Oren: Yeah, he was working on his, uh, on his vocal lessons. We’ll say that much. 

Ari: Yeah, he was really good though. So, you know, that was time well spent I think.

Oren: The tiger and the bird do confuse me. I understand that they are a real life cultural reference, but in universe I do not know what they are. 

Ari: I don’t know what the intent for them was besides maybe just having some cute mascot characters and also the role of non-speaking animal characters, the world over, of giving a character someone to talk to so the audience can hear a thing in the proud tradition of Avatar: the Last Airbender’s Momo. But I think that now that the movie has taken off, they signify the world is wider than the original, very short, ‘this is how the hunters came to be’ section would indicate, because we see Rumi does not know what they are either, so they’re obviously something. They don’t appear to be demons because they’re not doing the whole murder-people-and-eat-their-souls, so what are they? We don’t know. And so whatever their original role was, I think now that it’s a space to say the world is wider than we thought it was from the first movie, 

Oren: That’s what the sequel’s gonna be about. K-pop Demon Hunters: What The Heck Is Going On With This Bird And This Tiger? 

Ari: Rumi’s singing voice, Ejae, for Halloween took a photo where she was dressed in a big tiger onesie, so that was just a preview of what the next movie’s about. 

Oren: Yeah, they’re sending us subliminal messaging. 

Ari: Exactly. The Easter Eggs have already started. 

Oren: What do you think about the possibility of a sequel? 

Ari: Um. I want more. I want more. I just want to see more of these characters. Without getting too much into some of the issues that I had with the movie, seeing more of them is something I really wanted from this, and so I would be happy with just about anything. I would consider myself a superfan, so I’m probably not the right bar for that. I think that there are interesting spaces for them to explore, like Gwi-Ma isn’t dead or whatever, banished, defeated, whatever. Whatever happens to that guy, he’s still around, presumably. You know, Jinu may or may not be dead, that’s a rescue mission we may embark on. I mean, if certain parts of the fandoms we need to save all the Saja Boys, ’cause they’re all sweet boys that need our protecting.

Oren: Yeah. They never did anything wrong, really. 

Ari: They never did a single thing wrong and they’re all great. But then there’s also characters, like we still don’t know what happened to the other Sunlight Sister, there’s three. There could be as many as maybe even two more generations of hunters still alive if they didn’t die prematurely for whatever reason. So, you know, there’s a lot of, there’s the whole space of exploring what the hunters are. Celine was just barely in the movie, so more of her. I think unlike some movies that feel like they answered all the questions and now they need to scramble, I think that there is still threads that can be tugged on for another movie.

Oren: I mean, we beat up Gwi-Ma, I think is how you say that. 

Ari: Gwima? Or Gima? 

Oren: There’s a W in it. I’m not sure if you pronounce the W. 

Ari: Yeah, I’m not sure. 

Oren: But the king of demons, right? Who’s a big old fireplace, we beat him up real good, so I’m a little concerned about him being a villain again. You could make it work, but once you’ve defeated a villain like that, it’s just not as scary the second time.

Ari: There’s always the trope though of going to the demon realm where they are at their strongest, right? Like the whole, you know, ‘you only defeat a demon if you defeat them where they come’ from that a lot of fiction series use and then, you know, give Gwi-Ma a handsome singing avatar of some sort and you know, you got– you got something, maybe 

Oren: he does need a humanoid appearance to do singing, like somehow he needs to be able to sing, right? 

Ari: That is very important and like, I hope they don’t bring back the eyes. I thought that that was very silly looking when he grew eyes right at the end. 

Oren: I can tell you’ve seen the movie more than me because I can’t even visualize that. I’ve seen it a few times and I have no memory of this. 

Ari: It’s right at the end where he is super, super powerful before he like, Kamehameha Blasts Rumi, he gets eyes. He reminds me a little bit of the Cookie Monster at that point. I don’t know if that’s the look they were going for. I’m gonna assume it’s not, but uh, you never know.

Oren: That’s that’s funny. Okay. Yeah, I think it would be interesting to do a– you’ve mentioned before the idea of bringing back the third Sunlight Sister ’cause we don’t know what happened to her, like what even is her deal. I think she could make an interesting villain with Gwi-Ma as the dark voice on her shoulder kind of thing, play up the whole like, “I’m so devoted to destroying demons that I’m gonna ally with the demon to destroy demons.”

Ari: Or like, she doesn’t know it’s a demon, that kind of thing?

Oren: Yeah. Yeah, I think that could be interesting. 

Ari: For me, it’s like what haven’t we seen at the moment in the world? And that is hunters fighting other hunters. And from a visual design perspective, I think that could be a very fun space to explore. I am going to assume that the budget for this next movie will be larger than this first one given how Netflix held it in regard at the start and how they are now. So longer, more intricate fight scenes I think are in our future and having hunters with different weapons. We know Celine’s weapons were dual swords of some type based on the credits, and I think we might know what the other ones were, I think Rumi’s mom used a bow based on concept art. Concept art is of questionable canoninity, but whatever weapons they use, it’s different than just demons running at you and trying to get ya.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, the hordes of demons are not especially dangerous. 

Ari: Yeah, they’re just, they represent, they need to overcome their emotional struggles so they can punch all the demons.

Oren: Right. I mean, that’s the fights in general, right? This is not like a particularly gritty world where you’re like, “oh man, I really hope she can pivot on her central axis fast enough to dodge that hit.” It’s like, “eh, that’s not really what we’re doing here, you know?” 

Ari: No, we’re not. We’re not here for that. The fight reflects the feelings. 

Oren: Which of course is, I think, the whole point of a musical, right? I [think] it is funny, I occasionally see people talking about how like, “oh, well if you take the music away, this movie wouldn’t, is, you know, not that great.” [chuckles]

Ari: [chuckles] Uh, yeah, you’re right, I guess. 

Oren: Which it is true. [chuckles] Yeah? It’s a little like if you take the soundtrack away, Star Wars isn’t very good. [laughs]

Ari: True. If we took all the special effects away from the Marvel movie, [it’s] just a bunch of people in a green box! What’s even the point? That’s a wild take. Like of course! It’s a musical! Even more important than sound already is in movies, it’s incredibly important in every movie. If you don’t think that you’re wrong. It’s extra important in a musical, especially a musical about musicians, there are layers on layers of how important the music is. 

Oren: I do think that the plot is another example of having good fundamentals. Nothing too fancy, which is probably what the movie needed. Like we’ve got a pretty good tension arc we introduced at the beginning Things seem to be going pretty well, and then they start to get worse with ties into the main character’s arc, which is something that a lot of new authors could learn from, honestly. Probably my biggest thing that I have to deal with as an editor, or maybe not the biggest, but one of them is having a story where there’s a big external conflict and then a character arc that’s just kind of unrelated to it. 

Ari: That’s a tough one. 

Oren: And that happens in a lot of published stories too. That’s not just [an] unpublished author problem. So the way that we see here, the thing that starts to make everything go wrong is Rumi’s character problem, and so those are inextricably tied together.

Ari: I think simplicity was super important, not just ’cause this is a kids’ movie and some clear, good fundamental storytelling I think is very good for that genre, but also just how short the movie is. They don’t have a lot of time. They gotta keep things moving and straight and to the point. And if Rumi’s Conflict and the actual, like the main conflict for everyone else wasn’t related This movie just would’ve been very strange. I don’t think it could have functioned at all with the constraints it was under with runtime and whatnot.

Oren: It’ll be interesting with the sequel as a stress test of Do movies get worse if you give them a bunch more money? Like a thing some people talk about and like sometimes it correlates. Not always, but sometimes.

Ari: For me it’s more of, do movies get way worse when you rush out sequels? And the answer is generally yes, and I am actually made more hopeful by the fact that it’s going to still be multiple years until the next one. I am certain someone in some office wanted to rush out either an animated show or a K-pop Demon Hunters 1.5, like Beauty and the Beast, One and a Half from the early aughts or the late nineties or whenever that came out. 

Oren: How about a 20 minute short that we stick in front of other movies for no reason?

Ari: Yeah, I love that. I’ll just go to those movies just to watch K-pop Demon Hunters. 

Oren: Just give it the full Frozen treatment. 

Ari: So I am made somewhat hopeful that it seems like the creative team behind this Seems aware of some of these pitfalls and they seem to have retained control over this project. It’s not being taken over by some bigger name in hopes that that will somehow make it better. I don’t think there’s any guarantee, ’cause this movie was so good that a sequel will be as good or Better, but I’m not dooming over the sequel at the moment. 

Oren: You know, it could end up like Frozen 2. 

Ari: Ugh. Don’t say that. 

Oren: I mean, it could, right? Like– 

Ari: I don’t wanna hear that. 

Oren: There are some signs, but not all of them. Because one of the biggest problems that Frozen 2 had is that the characters resolved their arcs pretty fully. And it does feel like Rumi’s arc is mostly resolved, but it’s possible to give her a new one, or we could focus more on the other characters. 

Ari: I think that the main spaces that I can see just from this movie is that Rumi’s relationship with Celine is a huge source of conflict because I think that the way they portray Celine in this movie, she is obviously also indoctrinated into the same like she is older, but you can see that in the few scenes she’s in, at the very end of the movie, when she’s quoting their mantra that that was taught to her by someone else. And she’s obviously built into that, all of that same dogma that the hunters had. So. And she fails Rumi, she fails the other hunters. But I do believe the character when she says, “I do love you, it’s just that doesn’t always mean everything will work out.” And so it’s not that she’s just evil, how are Rumi and her gonna work that out? I don’t know. I think that could go a lot of different ways. But I also think that the space for the other two characters, at least in the interpersonal conflict, is that I don’t know if Rumi is gonna be stronger than them because she’s also a demon, in a lot of settings that would make her stronger. K-pop Demon Hunters might buck that trend, but Rumi say, single-handedly solving all of their early fight problems, establishing like these two characters feeling like they’re not necessary anymore, You know, that is I think, a space for some interpersonal drama. I don’t think either of those would be the primary conflict of a movie, but I could see either of those being good spaces for characters to have emotional moments with each other. 

Oren: I think the second movie should be about them realizing that they are actually workaholics and you know, having a little bit at the end where they’re like, “no, we rested up enough and now we can go back to work.” It’s like, “no! you didn’t! 

Ari: No.

Oren: “You didn’t rest up enough. You barely took a break!”

Ari: Look, we can just hope that all they meant was that they just wanted to say hi to these cute kids who were obviously super into their work. That’s what I’ll hope, I’ll hope they continue to have some time off from their actual jobs.

Oren: All right, so we’ve got a few minutes left, we’re not quite at the end yet, and we haven’t talked about the music that much. And I’m not a music person. I can mostly just say songs that I like and songs that I don’t. So real quick, which is the best song and why is it Take Down? 

Ari: Uh. 

Oren: [laughs]

Ari: Oof, I mean. My favorite song is How It’s Done. I think what makes it my favorite is that I love that confident declaration that ‘we’re good and we know we’re good’, especially given how well this movie did. Where they say like, “the whole world is singing our sound”, or, I can’t remember the exact lyric right now. Where they say that, that’s true, That’s just happened. “Whole world playing our sound”. That’s the lyrics. That’s my favorite. Take Down is also very good. The idea of the diss track, there’s a lot of emotion built into that song that I can see why it’s a lot of people’s favorite. 

I think that really, for me, the odd one out is Soda Pop. I know it’s supposed to be the kind of artificial intentionally and fake, cutesy, bubbly pop. It’s doing its job and I actually appreciate that it is also the one that is the closest to my range, so it’s the one that’s the easiest for me to sing. I like what Maggie Kang, one of the directors said that while she was working on this she knew that these songs needed to feel like K-pop songs. They needed to be a song another K-pop group would create, and I think that that shows through in the stand aloneness of these songs. I think there’s a range in musicals where, how well does this song stand on its own, you just listening to it without watching the movie that it’s connected to at the same time? I think most of them pass that test for me. I think there’s a couple, like the duet song, I don’t think that really works on its own. I still think it’s a good song and I like listening to it, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense without the movie. 

Oren: Yeah. If I had not seen the movie, I don’t think Free, which is the duet song, would’ve worked super well. I’ve heard some fun covers of it, but it’s, [sigh] Soda Pop is intentionally kind of annoying.

Ari: Yes. 

Oren: So it doesn’t feel fair to say Soda Pop is my least favorite. 

Ari: I mean, it does its job. If we’re not including Soda Pop, I think Free is probably my least favorite for that reason that you just stated. That’s one of the big ones. 

Oren: So the one that I see that is very popular, which I like but is not my favorite, is Your Idol. Everyone loves a villain song and seen that one held up as [a] favorite, which I also like. I don’t think there’s any on here that I actually dislike, but Your Idol is a very effective villain song for like raise intention for the climax. 

Ari: Yeah, I really like that the choreography of the characters for your idol, I think is doing a lot of work. I like your idol a lot, but whenever I’m listening to it, I am imagining the poses of the Saja Boys more than I imagine any of the accompanying animation for the other song, like when I’m listening to Golden, I’m not like playing the movie back in my head the way I do with Your Idol. 

Oren: It is interesting to me that Golden is sort of the song that they picked to be like the face of the movie at music awards and such.

Ari: I can see why it’s the one that gets sung, it gets reprised more than the others, and I think it’s often called the “I Want” song. I think Golden is the closest to that, where they’re like building this, what ends up being a false ideal for themselves. Which is interesting as why it’s the face of the movie, but I, I can see why. And I think it’s also just, it’s very impressive. I don’t know a ton about the technicalities of singing, but Golden feels like a very effective demonstration of how skilled the voice actors are. I think that’s another reason is that it gives all the voice actors, I think, a really good time to show off what they can do.

Oren: Yeah, I’ve been told by people who know more about music than me that it is a very technically complex song. I have no choice but to believe them ’cause I have no idea. I don’t know how music works, so I’ll take their word for it. 

Ari: You know, I have some natural singing talent and that one’s hard. That one’s real hard to sing. And it’s not just the range issue, there’s a lot going on in that one. I think it makes sense as the poster for it. Even though it’s not my favorite, I would be interested to see I’m sure someone has done a survey. I would like to see what the general feeling is as to [a] favorite song from that movie. 

Oren: Alright, well we are at the end of our time, so I’ll go look that up. If I find one, I’ll put it in the show notes so we can all find out together as a family. 

Ari: Excellent. 

Oren: So for those of you at home, if you enjoyed this, you can feel free to support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. 

Ari: Bye everyone.

You’ve written so many scenes of pulse-pounding tension, isn’t it about time to slow down and relax, maybe with your characters on a beach somewhere? After all, your heroes deserve some time to unwind, and readers will enjoy it too. Up to a point, anyway. The big question with R&R scenes is how long they should go on, along with how often to have them and whether you can use them for multitasking. At least, we hope those are the big questions, because they’re what we’re talking about today.

Generously transcribed by Scott. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So, we’re actually gonna spend this episode just on the beach, sipping drinks and lounging in the sun.

Chris: We’re gonna do that snore cast that we talked about a couple episodes ago.

Oren: No worries, no concerns. Maybe a little emotional growth if there’s time, or rather, we will talk about characters doing that because it’s the Pacific Northwest in October, and there’s no sun. So, that’s not even an option for us.

Chris: What? You don’t wanna do a beach episode in the Pacific Northwest?  We can go to Golden Gardens… (sarcastic)

Oren: As long as it’s not raining. I love going to beaches when it’s cold out. If it’s raining, that’s a different story.

Chris: But that’s probably ’cause you don’t actually get in the water. Can’t have a beach episode where nobody gets in the water.

Oren: That would be hard. So, here’s the opening question ’cause we’re talking about rest and relaxation scenes in fiction. So, important question for the panel.

Chris: For the panel as in me then?  

Oren: Chris is the panel. (both Chris and Oren laugh) The question is, can you do beach episodes in a novel?

Chris: When we talk about a beach episode, are we talking about having an episode structure first of all?

Oren: Yeah. Not to put you on the spot or anything.

Chris: Okay. I would say actually no, because you can do an episodic structured novel. But it’s kind of a stretch. People aren’t really used to it, they expect a novel to have a much stronger through line, and I think that they can get used to it and it can still be fun, and we do have some episodic novels like travel novels that are very episodic.

But a beach scene is like an entire episode that is usually lower intention. That would be definitely weird in a novel ’cause I still think you would have a higher expectation, that the episodes will escalate to some degree. If it feels like The Witcher book, where it’s really just an anthology, with a framing device…(Chris laughs) If it’s an anthology, sure. But I think if it’s anything beyond an anthology, where we actually have some kind of through line holding together, there’s higher expectations for escalation.

Man, when we had beach episodes, that’s when we had TV show seasons that were like 20 episodes long. Now, big streaming shows are like eight episodes, and it would be a real waste to do a beach scene. We don’t got time.

Oren: Maybe a beach scene, not a beach episode.

Chris: Yeah, a beach scene. That’s true. Slip of the tongue but, yeah, we can do a beach scene, a single scene at the beach.

Oren: I think you would have the same issue with the novel ’cause, even a really episodic one like Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is our go-to example for episodic novels, doesn’t have that many episodes.

Chris: Probably 12 or something. I think I counted them honestly, and it’s in the range of 12, maybe 14 at most.

Oren: An entire episode is gonna be a pretty big investment of time.  

Chris: And the other thing that makes this work, is that the through line has to be extremely low key If we’re gonna take a break like that, because if the through line is at all tense, urgency is at all high, the audience is gonna represent the “filler” because they expect the story to have more movement, instead of characters doddling at the beach.

Now, don’t get me wrong, some audiences absolutely love these. If you go to AO3 and look at fan fiction, (Chris laughs) there’s all types of different fanfiction, but you quickly discover one of the biggest motivations for a doing fan fiction, is that there’s so many people who actually want more low tension, personal conflict, and a lot of very popular stories that are much higher tension and much more tightly paced. And that’s of course, because these really popular stories are trying to appeal to a very wide audience, and so they wanna make sure that they have the audience’s attention. Whereas, when you have a story that’s for a more niche audience, like cozy fantasy, it’s meant for an audience that does not want a high-tension story. Then it’s a lot easier to be like “Okay, yeah, we’re gonna do some beach. (Chris laughs) Beach time.”

Oren: In general, if your through line is less urgent and less tense, then you’re gonna have less of a problem. Moving past the concept of an entire beach episode in novels, because that’s already a little strange. Let’s look at the beach scene, as it were, which is a little more manageable. First thing to think about is “why?”. Why would you include a scene like that? Would it be a scene at all or would it be summary? Would it be beach summary?

Chris: I’m not sure why you would do Beach summary. I mean, if you had an entire book that was on the beach side, and you’ve already done a beach scene, then you could summarize “Yeah, my character went back to the beach to relax for the afternoon.”

But, if the goal here is to have a scene that provides some wish fulfilment where we don’t just want characters to relax, we want the audience to enjoy the coffee shop atmosphere. For instance, if we’re talking about Legends and Lattes. Then, summary is really gonna, I think, take away a lot of that. Not that you can’t do some wish fulfillment in summary, but I think that to a certain extent that defeats the point, summary is for stuff that is not engaging but necessary,

Oren: You’d be more likely to summarize a character recovering from an injury, than relaxing for pleasure.

Chris: If your character has an afternoon to themself and we have to explain what they do for that afternoon, or we want them to spend all afternoon at the beach, but only when the sun sets…does the love interest show up? (Chris laughs) So, we just need to get them to the beach, but that part’s not supposed to be interesting, then we have summary. But, I think when we’re talking about scenes of rest and relaxation, a lot of times we’re looking for something that the audience can dig into and enjoy at some level, get some wish fulfilment in. I don’t think that summary really serves that purpose very well.

Oren: Which, I guess, brings to mind the next question. “What are you doing in a relaxation scene?” It could just be wish fulfilment, especially if you’ve got a really cool, fun setup. But, I think you are also often using them to give audiences a chance to catch their breath, and these can also be just a little bit of a relief to see that the characters get some time to recover a little bit if you have a tenser story. Because some stories can be tense, and you still wanna have little bits of relaxation between the really exciting stuff.

Chris: First, if we’re talking about pacing, letting the audience rest is particularly important. After you have a really fast paced tense scene, like you have a big fight or battle, what happens is if you have that super tense scene where the audience is expected to pay attention, to any moment and any moment could be a matter of life or death or something like that, or heated argument might do this, where the audience has to be in high alert because every moment is really crucial. That gets exhausting after a while for the audience.

That’s when they’re actually ready for a lower tension scene, and a complete change of pace, and it’s when they will actually be able to pay attention through it. So, if you have a scene that’s only kind of tense, maybe we kind of introduce a new mystery, but it’s not super tense. Then if you do like a really relaxing beach scene after that, you might lose their attention.

Oren: Right? It’s like, “oh man, we found that the diamond has been stolen. All right, let’s go meet at the bar for martinis.” (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: Right! At that point, it just feels like now we’re de-escalating instead of escalating. We were just getting revved up to get started on this arc, that’s when it’s gonna feel boring, but if you put that same “let’s go to the bar” after they’ve had a hard fight, or they had a jewellery heist and just barely escaped from authorities or something like that, now we’re really ready for that bar scene. My simplest rule about pacing is, always put your lowest tension scenes immediately after your highest tension scenes, and then ideally between that you’re going up steadily.

Low tension scene up steadily until your peak, and then you drop. I think you’ve described it sometimes as alternating tenses and non-tense scenes, and I think that also works if your tenser scenes are tense enough. If every other scene was a scene where a character was in immediate danger (Chris laughs) then, yeah, I think you could probably do every other scene having a relaxing scene if it’s tense enough. But, in a lot of stories, we’re gonna have a lot of in-between scenes where we’re booting up the problem or something like that.

Oren: When I talk about alternating tense and untense scenes, I’m usually talking about that with a client who, kind of, has no idea how to arrange their scenes and needs something really basic, and this is how I get them to break up three scenes of the characters hanging out and talking. “Okay, you can have those scenes, but they can’t all be back to back like this.”

Chris: And sometimes people ask me, “okay, how long is it acceptable to step away from the stories through line?” and just have the characters tend to their relationship or work on a subplot, and my answer is “well, usually you’re safe for a scene.” Now, that is still actually pretty generic ’cause some scenes are long and some scenes are short, but roughly a scene is fine. I don’t know, stories are very different from each other, and some stories kind of have two through lines. Like, they have an exciting external plot that happens in the beginning and then fades away, where the character works on their personal problems, and then the more exciting action fades back in again. There can be complex things going on that changes that up, but generally…a scene, is the amount that is safe, but it’s not necessarily all or nothing.

Characters can be doing something that’s meant to solve the through line problem, but they’re not in intense conflict over it yet. Like, “Hey, we need to investigate what happened to this murder, so we’re gonna go over to the mortuary”. So, we are working on that, but once we’re at the mortuary, we run into our ex and then most of the scene is actually spent on personal drama, but they’re still at the mortuary and they still come away with some sort of clue that they used on their murder mystery, for instance.

But, if you’re completely stepping away from the through line, I think a scene is about the rule of thumb I would go for.

Oren: Probably not a super long one, you wanna probably keep that scene on the shorter side and I think, to just hit upon an important point which is that, a lower tension scene is not necessarily the same as an R&R scene. If you just had a life-or-death chase, and now you’re gonna go and research what that thing was that was chasing you, that’s lower tension but I wouldn’t call it relaxing. You have to think about “what is the purpose of the scene.” If you’re trying to move the story forward by having your characters do some non-physical conflict, they’re trying to solve a riddle or figure out a puzzle or something, that can also be good, but it’s not really relaxing. When you think about relaxing, it’s really more about the feeling you’re creating and the reader.

Chris: But at the same time, you can have problems and conflicts during relaxing if you want to. Usually, you would just be aiming for them to be a little lower key, but oftentimes relaxation scenes are when you work on the more internal arcs of the story. Oftentimes, especially if, let’s say your character just made a bad choice in their character arc and then faced consequences, you have a relaxation scene afterwards. That’s a really important time for your character to then process what happened and then be like, “Hey, maybe I made the wrong choice there…naaah.” (Chris laughs) Or whatever you want to happen.

Have them talk it through with another character, have those relationship arcs, have those characters spend time with each other. I mean, I do think one of the really important things about those lower key scenes, whether they’re technically relaxing or not, is that usually during your really tense, fast-paced moments, you don’t really have as much time to focus on internal arcs. It’s just harder to then talk about their feelings, than it is if they’re having a tea party, for instance.

Oren: Here’s something to think about. Timing. When you’re planning these scenes, and this is more delicate the higher urgency your story is, and urgency is usually something – first of all, it’s gonna be more present in higher tension stories – and it’s usually going to increase towards the end.

Chris: I bet you’re thinking about A Study in Drowning.

Oren: You know, I wasn’t, but I should be. (Oren laughs) Now that you say that. I should have been. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: It’s such a great example of a relaxing scene. It’s a culmination of a romance so, the characters finally decide they’re gonna go to bed together, but it’s just at the wrong time, and it would only take actually a fairly small change…to make it okay…but it’s a situation where the urgency is actually really high ’cause there’s a big storm, and they’ve been staying at this creepy mansion where they’re trying to uncover some evidence, and the storm was probably gonna bring the mansion down.

Oren: They don’t have a lot of time. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: And that’s when they decide “bow chicka wow wow” (Chris laughs) and we really needed to reduce the urgency of the situation a little bit.

Oren: Usually the way that you would have a scene like that, regardless of whether the characters are gonna get it on or not, the result of some successful conflict or maybe a failed conflict – the resolution of a conflict on the character’s part – which now puts them in a situation where they just kind of have to wait for a little bit. If your high tense plot is that your character “needs to get these plans to the rebel base as soon as possible, and you’re running outta time” you would have a sequence where your character fights their way through the spaceport, and just manages to get their ship off the ground, and now they’re in hyperspace for a little bit and they got nothing to do.

So, they can talk about their feelings or go to town, whatever they want, and because that’s the result of a resolution, it is less likely to feel like “maybe you should be doing something else right now” you know? In character you can make it make sense too. Those are both important.

Chris: And having just a required waiting period. If there’s no movement on the through line for too long, it doesn’t really fix that problem because the audience knows that you created this. It’s like “Nope, sorry, but we can do nothing but stay in this cabin for three months” and then narrating three months’ worth of content. It’s still gonna make them impatient, but what it does is it takes care of that specific urgency problem where it distracts the audience with “how could they be having dinner right now? Somebody’s dying!”

It takes care of that problem so that they’re no longer distracted, by feeling like the characters need to be doing something else right now. Just any, any reason that they’re hold up or they have to wait. They’re waiting to hear back from somebody, for instance, and there’s just not a whole lot that they can do right now.

Oren: It occurred to me that a book series that does a lot of scenes like this is actually Lord of the Rings – which I find interesting – and it does more earlier in the story, they become fewer and farther between as you go. But, after the initial Shire sequence, we have the characters do a little bit of traveling and it gets a little dangerous, and then they just stop at various places. They stop at Tom Bombadill’s house, they stop at Rivendell. Or first they stop at The Prancing Pony. Then they stop at Rivendell. The order of operations continues, and in the second book, I think that one point they stop and hang out with, uh, oh gosh. What’s Boromir’s brother’s name? The less-good Boromir brother. Faromir, that’s his name. (Chris laughs)

Chris: Technically, according to the book, he is the superior brother.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. And then of course, as the story ramps up, they have fewer and fewer of those (scenes). By the end, they’re just exhausted ’cause they can’t ever stop. There’s nowhere to rest. Both narratively and literally.

Chris: If I remember correctly, the pacing for some of those scenes at the end still, is not necessarily high. There’s a difference between the tone and the pace. So, that long trip where they’re trying to dodge Orcs as they get closer to Mount Doom, I remember that being kind of a slog. The Hobbit also has this long sequence where they’re going through this…Oh, gosh, what is it called? This gloomy forest full of spiders.

Oren: Murkwood?

Chris: Murkwood, yeah, that’s it.

Oren: The hobbit’s not real, okay? We don’t know what’s going on in The Hobbit. Tolkien was having some kind of fever dream when he wrote The Hobbit, nothing in The Hobbit makes any sense. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: But, we can have long periods where there’s just tons of narration about how miserable the characters are, that doesn’t make it exciting. It just makes it kind of depressing, and so that’s how I feel like a lot of the Lord of the Rings ends up being. Whereas, when something is exciting, that means there’s an active problem for the character to solve that is providing an immediate threat, and that’s what actually makes it exciting. And you can have that excitement without making all of the characters super miserable all the time.

Oren: The Red Wall series also does this in a way that I find very interesting, which is food porn. It’s like, “hang on, everybody, pause the story. We gotta describe this deeper never turnip and tater’ beet root pie in exquisite detail”. And sometimes it is a little much, in some of the books you’re kind of sitting there wondering, “do we have time for this? Isn’t there a bad guy? I thought we had a bad guy to deal with?”
“Hang on a minute, there’s still soup. We haven’t done the soup course yet.” (Chris laughs)

Chris: A lot of cozy fantasy is pretty much well known for having slow wish fulfillment scenes, whether we’re going into details on the coffee shops, baked goods, but not the coffee…

Oren: Not the coffee though, just the baked goods.

Chris: We’re never gonna stop teasing Legends and Lattes for having really lackluster coffee description, but the baked goods are, you know, described-

Oren: Baldree, do you just not like coffee very much? (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: “Maybe it should have been a tea shop. If you don’t like coffee, I don’t know.” Maybe he just didn’t really know very much about coffee. It’s like, “I don’t know how to describe coffee.” I feel like you could research that pretty easy.

Oren: That was the part that confused me. I’m not a big coffee drinker either, but I was immediately able to come up with various things that they could do with the coffee, because I have the internet available to me.

Chris: Or the obvious. So, you have chocolate and you have coffee. Mocha, how about that? The obvious implications of the ingredients you are already established to have.

Oren: I kept expecting them to do that and they never did and I’ll never get over it. It’s broken my trust. (Oren and Chris chuckle)

Chris: Or Teller of Small Fortunes. That one is interesting ’cause they travel around, and they have their little wagons and they invent fortune cookies, which is hilarious. You always gotta invent something that exists, but we go into details about how they make these fortune cookies for the first time, and sell ’em to customers…

Oren: Red Wall is a weird book because sort of cozy, but also not. It has sequences that you would recognize from a lot of cozies, and yet, it is also occasionally very dark and brutal. (Chris laughs)

Chris: I guess the question is, “is it just inconsistent?” As I said, I feel like cozy fantasy comes from lighter, classic fantasy stories that had a cozy element, but were all so exciting, but still were sort of lighter in tone. Like the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or some Terry Pratchet, where those all have definitely neat wish fulfillment elements. Like talking to Dragons, the first in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Technically, it has tenser action than you wouldn’t normally have in a cozy ’cause the wizards are all evil, but you can just defeat them by pouring soapy water on them and they just melt. So, it’s never graphic. (Chris laughs)

So, we technically have a big villain that we wouldn’t usually have in a cozy fantasy, but at the same time, the story is still very light in tone and a bunch of time is spent on problems that are very cozy. Like, “oh, I was just sorting the dragons hoard and organizing everything very neatly, and then I accidentally opened the bottle, and a genie came out. Now we need to figure out how to get it back in there.”

“God, these knights keep showing up, wanting to slay the dragon. I don’t really want them to slay my dragon, so how do I convince them to leave” and other things like that. But it sounds like Red Wall gets…darker than that. (Chris chuckles)

Oren: A lot darker. Red Wall, actually, is kind of infamous for having a major character die every book.

Chris: Wow.

Oren: Yeah, sometimes a character survives through multiple books and I’m like, “okay, they’re gonna die eventually” and then eventually they do. “oh, that character’s been around for a while.” (Oren chuckles)

Chris: That just sounds like a total disconnect. It reminds me of- In Wings of Fire, the first book has violence between these dragons, in a story that is supposed to be anti-violence but is clearly not, but it’s surprisingly graphic. We get surprisingly graphic about all these horrible injuries that all of these dragon characters are getting, and it’s like “this is a middle grade story” and it’s true. The author does actually lighten up on the graphic violence.

Oren: Yeah, someone talked to her between books.

Chris: Somebody talked to her (Chris laughs)
That was just a thing, she didn’t know that she was going too far. She didn’t know where the right level of graphicness or non-graphicness was at, and she corrected it after a couple books. It’s like, “okay, that’s understandable.” It sounds like with Red Wall, they are not the right stories to have a major character die.

Oren: That always struck me as weird when it happened. “Huh? I wasn’t expecting that. All right. I guess that character’s dead now.”
A final form of relaxation scenes that I find interesting are scenes that you find in books like Animorphs. Which are less about the characters catching their breath, and are more about – to a certain extent – almost like what the Save the Cat people would call “the fun and games”. Where in the case of Animorphs, it’s like “what if we turned into an animal and hung out as that animal for a while and had a fun animal time?” You could see it’s superhero stories, It’s like a sequence where the character just kind of enjoys having powers for a while. Unlike the Save the Cat people, I don’t think that that scene needs to happen at a specific point in the story in every story, ’cause that’s ridiculous. But, you do recognize that kind of scene when it happens.

Chris: When I originally read Save the Cat, what interpreted is that you have advertised this story as having a specific novel premise, and this is where you fulfill that promise. So, if you advertise “oh, look at the funny hijinks that will be in the story.” That’s when you have the funny hijinks. For Animorphs it’s like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could turn into an animal? Child, wouldn’t you wanna read this?” And that’s where you’re like, “Hey! Here’s the part where I give you that novelty I promised, and that wish fulfillment I promised, about turning into an animal”.

Oren: You can’t be fighting aliens all the time as an animal, sometimes you just gotta have a moment to be an animal. Classic case of Save the Cat, noticing something that does happen and then universalizing it because that makes it easier to sell storytelling advice. (Oren chuckles)

Chris: But I would say that dark stories can also have rest and relaxation scenes, the tone might just be a little different. For a cozy fantasy, we’re really looking for a heavy wish fulfillment experience, whereas in a darker story, it’s more about – obviously giving the audience a chance to rest – but also making it realistic that the character can keep going. (Chris laughs)
You can only put a character through so much then it’s like “aren’t they just gonna collapse from their injuries at some point?”

Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it, they’ll just keep chugging energy drinks. Those let you go forever.

Chris: You do want some variation in tone too, in the story. Even if you have like a dark and edgy story, your edgy twists are not gonna…feel that shocking anymore if you do that every single scene. (Chris laughs)
So, some contrast is still there, but it still shouldn’t feel like a cozy scene and then have lots of graphic violence featuring protagonists. That would still be weird.

Oren: I think now that we have had a long and difficult high-tension episode, we are gonna go and have our relaxation at the cold, damp, dark Pacific Northwest Beach. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: And if you found this episode relaxing, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

We love a good sword fight or space battle; it is known. But what if it’s feelings you’re more interested in? How are you supposed to build an entire conflict out of those? For that matter, what if you want to combine the two? This week, we’re looking at how to build emotional conflicts. That means giving the stakes, urgency, a likelihood of failure, and everything else a conflict needs, but with more feeling!

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris. 

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: So today I went into Barnes & Noble and I saw the novel Babel by R. F. Kuang on the front display, and on one hand, I knew that sabotaging a bookstore’s display is wrong, but on the other hand, I’m really angry at Babel. And this just caused an inward emotional conflict. Thankfully, Oren was there to tell me not to spoil Babel for shoppers by leaving a warning on the book.

Oren: We could have put a little decorative doily on it with a little embroidered thing about what happens that annoyed us.

Chris: Do not read this book unless you wanna rip your hair out! 

Oren: Or you could just be like me and not form emotional attachments to what happens in the books, and then you’ll be better off. 

Chris: I just don’t honestly know why you would read Babel otherwise, because there’s very little plot, there’s very little tension, or anything happening for most of the book. So, if you don’t form any attachment, then why? 

Oren: It’s easy. You know, you read it so you know what everyone else is talking about.

Chris: But if you do form any attachment, you will be BETRAYED.

Oren: Hurtful! 

Chris: This is your warning. It is hurtful. It was very hurtful to me. Okay, so this time we’re talking about — not Babel, I mean, you know, except for when I talk about Babel.

Oren: Yeah. That’ll probably be coming up in the next few weeks of podcasts.

Chris: But emotional conflicts. So, first, what is that? Basically it’s when you set up an internal struggle over what to do, where a character has a dilemma, but the focus is not, I mean, it can have moral implications, but with a moral dilemma, it’s supposed to be hard to tell what the right thing to do is, whereas this is about two different impulses or two different priorities that the character has that makes a decision really hard for them to make personally. 

Oren: Yeah. It’s to make you angst. 

Chris: And again, the goal is not to let the character just think their way out of this dilemma. That’s not bad storytelling necessarily, and sometimes if the character has conflicted priorities and they think of some sort of clever solution so they don’t have to make any hard decisions, that can be a way of just procrastinating on something that they really have to work out or putting it off until later. But when we want the emotional conflict, the goal is to force them into that tough situation and just make things hard for them emotionally. 

Oren: Yeah, if the character is portrayed as having an emotional struggle, having them solve it with an intellectual plan probably isn’t going to be super satisfying. If they have two friends who are fighting and they’re caught in the middle trying to figure out what to do and who to support or not, having them concoct an elaborate plan by which to trick both of their friends into thinking that they’re the one the protagonist has sided with is probably not a satisfying way to end that story.

Chris: Right. I mean, it can’t be an ending. You would expect in any story you saw that what you would expect is for that to backfire on the character. Because they had tried to take the easy way out instead of actually solving their problem in a more genuine way. You know, if they’re trying to choose between two different job opportunities and they clone themselves, the expectation would be that it would go very wrong and then they would regret doing that.

Oren: Right, you could have, depending on how it’s pitched, you could have a similar scenario that would feel like an intellectual solution is fine. Like if the idea was more that this person needs to have two jobs to pay the rent, a solution that lets them do both — as long as it is earned and feels like a good reward for them being clever — that could work fine. But if it’s specifically about how I want both of these jobs. They’re both so cool, which one will I pick? Being able to do both is just going be a cop-out.

Chris: Again, just to make this more emotionally loaded, if one job is the job that their parents approve of and they want to please their parents, and the other job is the job that is fulfilling their personal dreams and goals. So that we see there’s emotional weight and each job represents some sort of priority for them. And usually in that situation, we’d expect that the answer is not just to live your life to please your parents, right? But it’s tough for them to make that choice. 

An example that I really like is episode two of Teen Wolf.  It’s in the first season, where Scott is a new werewolf without very good control of his power. So, he could, if he gets too excited or angry or something happens, he could just lose control and start turning into a werewolf. And he’s been working really, really hard to get onto the lacrosse team and thanks to his new powers, he has finally done it so he’s finally going to actually play in a lacrosse game and the game’s coming up and then he’s warned that he shouldn’t play the game because he could lose control and expose himself as a werewolf.

Oren: And also hurt somebody. 

Chris: Right, and hurt somebody. At the same time, if he doesn’t play the game, he’ll be letting other people down. He could possibly lose his position on the team, because it’s expected that when he tried out for the team, that he would actually be playing games. So that is the kind of thing we’re trying to do, whether he should prioritize that dream he has been thinking about for so long versus that risk of losing control or hurting somebody. Something like that. That would be an example. 

Oren: The one that I really like, but I have a hard time creating this is, I like it when friends fight.  I like it when you have characters who are close or have some kind of existing relationship and then they end up on opposite sides of a conflict. I find that really cool and really compelling, but it’s hard to set that up. Partly because you need to actually demonstrate the friendship. And I don’t know how well it would work — and my guess is usually not very well — to have them be friends in the backstory. Maybe not never, but I just feel that’s going to not feel very real for a lot of readers.

Chris: Yeah, I do think it’s about how important it is, because definitely the first step in any kind of emotional conflict is that we need to design the two impulses or emotions that are at conflict but we also really need to make them compelling to our audience. And that’s what you’re talking about. If the character has to balance their friendship against what they think is right, for instance, in order to make this a compelling conflict, we need to make sure that the audience can care about both of those things because you want them to be in the shoes of your character who’s having this conflict and empathizing with this conflict as much as possible and feeling the dilemma with that character. So, you want to make both sides really compelling so that the audience feels like, “Oh, I don’t know. What are you going to do?” instead of just feeling like, “Ugh, why are you angsting over this. Just do that.”  You don’t want that to happen. 

So, if one side is a relationship with another character, you do need to make that relationship compelling and showing the relationship is kind of an important part of that. I would say that if that friendship is a really central part of the whole plot, then it is worth usually just a few scenes in the beginning to show them together. But you can also do a lot with exposition, right? It’s just, exposition is much faster and you want to show those details like when did the friend help them out? What has the friend done for them in the past? And to make the case for why this friendship is so valuable. But, if it’s really central to the story, then yeah, usually it’s probably worth some initial, at least one initial, scene in the beginning of the story, of course, is so crowded and usually has so many priorities, but if this is load bearing, then it’s often worth an extra scene in the beginning where they’re still friends with each other, for instance.

Oren: You can also have them be friends for a good portion of the story and have them split up towards the end and become on opposite sides that way. They have to cooperate at first to save the city from a giant meteor or whatever, but then at the end of the story, the big climax, is actually the different factions in the city are fighting over who gets to control the meteor and that’s a problem, and then they split over that. That sort of thing could happen. 

Chris: Yeah, you could definitely have how they’re facing a problem together, but at the end — and usually you would show fractures in their friendship earlier — they managed to keep things together despite the fact that they have a difference in opinion, and circumstances would conspire to make that worse.

Oren: This can also work well in sequels. I’m actually a big sucker for sequels where friends who used to be part of the same adventuring team have to fight. I’m not a huge fan of sequels where they’re all sad and depressed. 

Chris: Really? Are you saying you didn’t like Picard? Geez! Picky, picky. 

Oren: No, I wasn’t a huge fan. But sequels where before, especially if it was a fairly simplistic idea, like we’re on an adventuring team and we’ll be friends forever. I like sequels where things become more complicated and they maybe have to come into conflict with each other. Now I do want them to make up and be friends again. So, I have requirements, but that’s my favorite part of the Avatar comics, is when Team Avatar come to blows over something. There’s some problem that they can’t agree how to address do they end up in competition with each other. I find those scenes really compelling because I have this extremely big attachment built up to their friendship from the original series. 

Chris: Another thing to consider is if you need to add backstory. For instance, if your character is afraid of something. Again, you want to put people in their shoes and overcoming fear can be their conflicting impulses. They have a goal, but they’re afraid or they have a goal, but they’re angry and they have to work with somebody who hurt them in the past, for instance, they have to learn how to tamper down on some jealousy. Fighting impulses definitely works to make an emotional conflict, but you’re trying to justify their emotions as much as possible. So creating some backstory events and again, this can be worth just some exposition to flush them out can be quite effective if it’s not the whole story. Maybe they need to get over their jealousy, but the whole story isn’t about their jealousy. That would be unusual. And of course, you can use multitasking too, so if you have a scene about something else, maybe you can do double duty. But basically make up this is what they feel. How can I get readers to understand what they feel or the logic of it?

Sometimes writers really do need to explain why their characters feel the way they feel. Like if they’re grieving somebody and they’re not sure they’re ready to date again, is it that they feel like they’re betraying their dead partner? Or what is the reason why they’re feeling these emotions? And kind of spell that out a bit. 

Oren: Yeah, with the dating one, this comes up in some romance stories and also in some client work that I’ve done where there’s been a problem where the author wants to use emotional problems to keep the characters apart but isn’t willing to show those emotions. And so either we have to sort of guess why does this person not want to date? And it’s because they’re still  upset from the bad breakup they had last time but I didn’t even know that from the story. Or sometimes they’ll say it, but it doesn’t really feel like the character feels it, and that also seems contrived. At that point I’m just like, “Get together already guys. None of this matters.”

Chris: Definitely. And if it’s not a viewpoint character that obviously can get harder. Sometimes you may need to use dialogue or plan a stimulus that they can react to so you can see them react. Seeing the character react can also help to communicate what’s going on with them, but that can be a little bit trickier, which is generally why with a viewpoint character you can have more emotional depth. If you’re planning a romance in particular, this is definitely something that goes into the decision of whether your romance has one viewpoint or two. If you have a lot of really complex emotional obstacles for your love interest, that’s often a reason to add another viewpoint, whereas otherwise, that can actually make the romance less compelling. 

So, justify each emotion as best you can. Make sure that it’s compelling, that your audience sympathizes with it, and then the next step is to exert external pressure on them. Make it really hard, right? You’re trying to make things as hard as possible for them to make their choice, so really load the pressure. And again, this just goes to the fact that the emotions the characters are experiencing are really important, but we can’t only do internal stuff in the story. We need to have external things happening. It’s boring to have a page of just your character thinking and feeling things. We don’t want you to narrate them meditating, although actually some stories do have where they actually act out what’s happening in the character’s head. They have a dream sequence that represents their emotional turmoil or whatever. 

Oren: Those are really useful, those dreams sequences. 

Chris: We have a mindscape where one character goes into another character’s mind and then we play it all out like it’s an external scene. Some stories do that, but for the most part, you need to then make it so that external events hang on this choice and that there’s a lot of pressure externally. For instance, my example from Teen Wolf, Scott has pressure from on one side his werewolf mentor, Derek, who is really funny. 

Oren: Yeah, Derek’s great. We love Derek in this house.

Chris: Oh man, because he’s like the weirdest, least charismatic person ever who is trying to be scary and creepy but is mostly funny. Who just comes and is like, “No, you can’t play in the game. Don’t even think about it!” 

Oren: “Don’t do it!” And then he just aways like, “All right, I’ve given my command, I’m out.” 

Chris: And then he just disappears. It’s like . . . what? Okay, weirdo. And then Scott’s team coach is on the other side so when Scott then tries to tell his coach that maybe he can’t make it, his coach is like, “No, no, no, no,” and will not take ‘no’ for an answer. Making it as hard as possible.  We have a scene where his mother says that she’s proud of him and that she’s coming to see the game. 

Oren: They really twist the knife on that one. 

Chris: Yeah, exactly, it is about twisting the knife as much as possible so that we get good tension and power from the conflict. That’s why I like this episode so much, it does such a good job of setting this up as a really difficult dilemma for Scott. Obviously, the show runner wants Scott to play the game so we can have an exciting sequence of him playing lacrosse and trying to keep himself from transforming too much. And we do have to justify that, which normally if it’s something like this, it would be, oh well, this is dangerous and you could endanger other people, that would normally be a difficult thing to justify. Scott might look bad, but once we like really pile on the pressure enough, we can sympathize with that decision and understand why he plays the game even if it’s a bad idea. 

Oren: And in case it’s not obvious by this point, I’d say it is important if you have a big external conflict with high stakes: try to tie the emotional conflict into that. If you have a really high stakes problem of evil invaders are coming and they’re going get you, having your character be caught in a heartfelt emotional conflict about something like whether or not he can adopt this pet is not going to make sense, right? Even if in isolation that emotional conflict would be great, if there’s a big high stakes external conflict that is unrelated to it, those two things are going to clash. They’re going to compete for space.   

Chris: Yeah, and in the same vein, usually an emotional conflict would be part of a character arc. Otherwise, you’re usually stretching yourself too thin if you’re trying to do some other character arc and also have an unrelated emotional conflict. A character arc is all about making it so that your character’s emotions have a purpose to them. I mean, not every emotion, of course, at all times, it has to be directly linked to the character arc. But in general, it lets you add emotional depth to the story while making it feel cohesive and giving it a united purpose. So your emotional conflict should have some relationship and be part of that character arc in some way. Now of course, when I’m talking about this Teen Wolf emotional conflict, that’s part of a TV show, which is very episodic, although Teen Wolf actually is a great mix of having episode arcs with a strong season arc usually. So, this is kind of part of a growth arc for Scott where he comes into his powers and deals with having these powers in his life and adjusts. That’s how it connects to what he’s going through during the season. 

And then another thing to think about when we’re talking about external stuff is a character is likely to be inconsistent or go back and forth when they’re struggling over this and trying to decide, but we can’t just have them spontaneously change their mind.

Oren: Yeah, I was wondering how you have them do that without it seeming like you’re retreading old ground. 

Chris: Okay, so without retreading old ground, let’s say we have this as one step in a larger character arc. There are basically two things that we can do. We can have them sort of make a baby step, where maybe a character is adjusting to a change. For Scott, we had a situation where he was in denial. He was adjusting to being a werewolf and we could have one little arc where he’s in denial that he’s a werewolf at all and then can’t deny it anymore, for instance. In this particular emotional conflict, it might be about admitting that his life is going to have to change. That doesn’t mean he’s adjusted to all the changes. 

So, it’s about finding a baby step. And then the other thing that can happen is they can actually go in the wrong direction and cause problems for themself. This is what we’re talking about with if they find a clever solution to avoid making a decision that they have to make. Usually that’s going to come back to bite them, right? So that’s another way of doing it. They put it off, but they’ve actually dug themselves in deeper so we can see that that’s going to come back to bite them. That would be another way to divide up that larger character arc into a smaller conflict. 

Oren: [sarcastically] Or they could just get away with it with their clever idea that makes it so they never have to face the emotional consequences. I don’t see a problem. Like what could go wrong?

Chris: Talking about wavering, the other thing about that is that we need to see why they waver, which also generally is going to rely on some kind of external change or trigger. So instead of writing a page of them thinking through the entire situation in their head and finally making a decision you would have some outside stimulus. It doesn’t mean that they can’t do any thinking in their head or figuring out in their head, but usually we want that to be in small pieces because it does feel like the story’s not moving forward. 

Oren: Yeah. Probably if they’re dealing with like the fear of, Should I try to diffuse this bomb? Or should I try to escape? That’s emotionally difficult because it’s scary. You probably don’t want them to just be sitting there thinking about how scared they are. If you want their fear to be higher, you would prompt them with something like the bomb makes a weird noise and now they might have less time.

Chris: Right, we want to place things wherever the climax of this emotional conflict takes place. You want to place things in their environment that can have an effect on them or have things happen. And often it’s a character, just like I talked about with Scott, with his mother saying she’ll come to the game. It can be other people pushing in the various directions, but also it can be if they’re scared, again, with the bomb making a noise makes them even more scared.

Or something else, if they have a deep, dark backstory, there can be something that suddenly reminds them of the backstory, seems reminiscent of it. Anything that is a stimulus that they would reasonably have an emotional response to can then change their mind and cause them  to waver more in the other direction as long as the audience can see what that stimulus is and how that would reasonably have an effect on them. As opposed to just spontaneous mind changing, which comes off as really inconsistent.

Oren: One way that I like to use emotional conflicts, but again, is challenging for me, is sympathetic villains. Because they can, in theory, do the same thing where the villain is doing something and the hero has got to stop them, but you’ve built a relationship with them or you’ve made the hero think that maybe they have a point or something and that does create emotional complications. The problem is that I find myself always being like, “Nope, that villain’s gone too far. I don’t like them anymore. Now I don’t care about your emotional conflict!”

Chris: Yeah, that’s why they have to be usually the lesser antagonist or villain working under a Big Bad, because then you can have other minions and they don’t have to be responsible for everything bad that happens. And you can be like, “Oh maybe they killed somebody off screen, but maybe not. Who knows? I mean, we didn’t see it directly, so —”

Oren: Who’s to say?

Chris: Who’s to say? Might depend on how much time you have to devote to this character. I think one of the biggest issues of having those really complex emotional things happen is usually these are characters that we just don’t have as much time. Might not have a viewpoint, and that always makes things harder, so oftentimes we do need it to be a little simpler and less complicated. We can give them a sympathetic reason, for engaging in villainy, a revenge arc or   the big bad has an influence over them or something, and then we can see that they’re clearly guilty. And that usually makes for a fairly simple emotional conflict that is easy to observe from the outside instead of a complex conflict over their feelings of self-worth versus whether or not they deserve to be in a relationship, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. What do we think about the emotional conflict, in The Tainted Cup, which —spoilers for that book although it’s been out for a little while at this point — culminates at the end with the protagonist revealing to his boss that he got this position via sort of cheating a little bit, and that he has real trouble reading? Because he’s been thinking that he is unworthy of this job the whole time. What do we think about that? 

Chris: I feel like that was kind of underdeveloped. I mean, unfortunately one of the weakness of that series right now is that Din never solves any of his own problems. Ana always solves his problems for him, which I’m hoping will change in the future book. But gosh, I just think that conflict is just really underdeveloped. We don’t have a lot of instances where it actually comes into play in the story. Okay, there’s the cheating, but actually, if we make it about him being willing to admit about his, I want to call it dyslexia, but in this particular context it’s a magical feature that probably stems from dyslexia but has got other features.

So, he has photographic memory, but he can’t remember words whereas he would’ve been expected to. I will say that having Ana know, that’s the thing, is that Ana already knows, and we can tell that she already knows and that does take a lot of the pressure off of him. He still does have to come up with the courage to tell her, but at the same time, on the reader’s end, and I don’t know, maybe there was some reader who couldn’t tell that she already knows and was nervous about this, but I thought it was pretty clear. 

Oren: Yeah, Ana seems to know basically everything, so it would’ve been very weird to me if she hadn’t also known that.

Chris: Again, it’s a little arc for him, but calling it an emotional conflict, I feel like that’s giving it more power than it really had because we can’t really be in his shoes and it comes up not that often in the story and it’s solved pretty easily. That’s my two cents on that one.

Oren: Because I’ve just been trying to think of good examples from books, and again, it’s weird that all of my good examples are from TV shows. Surely there must be a book that does good emotional conflicts. 

Chris: I mean, TV shows have a neat plot every episode and with so many episodes, think of a Star Trek that has 20 episodes per season and seven seasons. 

Oren: Yeah. That’s true. 

Chris: I think one of the reasons why, is a TV show is like lots of little stories, so many that you just have tons of examples to work with. 

Oren: Yeah, well that is a good point. Speaking of episodes, I think we are about ready to call this one to a close.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Sometimes, fantasy is actually history, and I’m not talking about the claim that Middle-earth is actually ancient Europe. The historical fantasy genre has a lot of potential, especially for weird nerds who won’t shut up about fun historical factoids, but it does have some challenges. You usually want something that’s recognizably historical, but you also want to account for the differences caused by magic. Or do you? Listen and find out!

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So I’m working on a story where, back in the ancient past, 5,000 years ago, a meteor came down. It gave everyone the ability to bend reality at will. The story is set in the present and everything is the same, except that, instead of debating gun control, we are debating reality-bending control.

Chris: We don’t have reality-bending dinosaurs from the meteor that hit?

Oren: No, not from 5,000 years ago.

Chris: Good point. Very recent dinosaurs!

Oren: They’ve been hiding those dinos. 5,000 years ago is recent enough that we might have some reality-bending mammoths up on one of those Arctic islands in the north of Russia.

Chris: I love the idea that you have a masquerade in your setting where magic is secret, but also dinosaurs.

Oren: Also dinosaurs!

Chris: Is that really a bigger deal than hiding magic? I think it would probably be just as hard to hide magic as to hide dinosaurs.

Oren: Depends on the size of the dinosaur, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, it might be easier to hide dinosaurs if they’re like the little chicken-sized dinosaurs also known as chickens.

Oren: Babby non avian dinosaurs. So obviously, I recently wrote a post about how history might or might not change in historical fantasy, and that might be out by the time this podcast comes out. Who knows when our posts come out? Not me. If it is, you’ve already seen that, and if not, you have that to look forward to. But I wanted to talk about it in a casual discussion format, because I still have thoughts, and if those don’t, you know, get out somewhere for content consumption, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.

Chris: Start talking in your sleep because you need to rant about this?

Oren: It’s called a snorecast, I’ll have you know.

Chris: I think it is interesting, when we’re talking about historical fantasy and what is the effect of magic, how similar it starts to feel to alternate history, which is its own subgenre of speculative fiction, because it’s almost like alternate history Plus.

Oren: I would say historical fantasy is almost by definition a kind of alternate history where one of the things that changed is that there’s magic now that’s generally not part of the historical timeline. There are some exceptions, right? Like, you can make a historical fantasy where you make everything self-contained, maybe it’s a masquerade, maybe the fantasy just happens in a very small area so it doesn’t really affect anything else, that’s all possible.

Chris: That’s the difference, right? Historical fantasy doesn’t have to get into all of that historical details if that’s not the goal, whereas alternate history, I think that there’s an expectation of higher realism. Because the point is that you have history diverging, there would naturally be more of a focus on that. Not that you can’t have that in historical fantasy too. I just think in alternate history that’s the point. And of course we don’t have magic to do the diverging, whereas in historical fantasy, you would definitely have magic be the reason why history is different.

Oren: No, historical fantasy where the south won the Civil War and unrelated, there are wizards.

Chris: Yeah, right? It just feels really random when you do that. Or you could just have dragons in the setting besides magic, something like that.

Oren: You can do the thing that we’ve seen several times, which is historical fantasy where magic is everywhere, it’s super well known and everyone uses it, but also everything is the same and nothing changed. I wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t like that. It’s not something I’m a fan of. It just kind of makes me wish you were just doing normal historical fiction at that point, because at least I wouldn’t feel lied to. “Alright, here’s all this magic and everyone uses it everywhere.” It’s like, “Okay, wow, what’s the implications of that?” “None. Don’t ask about the implications. There aren’t any. We’re not doing that.”

Chris: I think people just want to have the aesthetics of the historical time period. They don’t want to have to do the whole figure out cause and effect. If you want castles and dragons, right? because we can have a whole conversation about how those fantasy elements actually change the setting, the problem is having castles and dragons is inherently a bit illogical. I mean, depending on the dragons, of course. But a lot of times we show dragons and they can just destroy castle walls as they fly by or something. And at that point, there’s no point in castles.

Oren: Your dragons don’t have to be Temeraire levels of dragon, where not only are dragons really big, but they work closely with humans and are in many cases basically human servants. Which does raise questions about: Why does anyone have big fixed fortifications? Because, as we see in the novels, dragons can just drop large rocks on them from way too high up to be shot at. And don’t worry about it, everything’s fine now.

Chris: It’s probably fairly likely, right? I don’t know if it would be everybody that you would get in a situation where you want the aesthetic coming from a certain time of history, but then you’re adding magic that would naturally outmode that aesthetic. It’s like the issue with people wanting characters to use swords in a setting where there’s modern guns; there’s not a lot of reason to use swords, but we just want swords, and so sometimes that could be an issue if you think about all of the effects that magic would realistically have.

Oren: I’m willing to grant some grace on this one. I’ll be magnanimous. Like, I get it. You know, the whole point of historical fantasy is that you want to be in a historical period. Being like, “Oh, well, you can’t, because your magic has been around and would have changed everything,” I get that that’s not a super workable approach, so I’m willing to meet authors halfway. And if they want to follow the Temeraire route, which is that everything is the same up until the story starts, and at that point, things can change because of how dragons work, I’ll accept that. I will be wondering, like, it’s a little weird that dragons being everywhere didn’t have any impact on the French Revolution or the life of this kind of obscure Corsican aristocrat who ends up becoming military dictator of France. A little weird that that all happened in the same way, but now that the story’s started, we have dragon airlifts and different colonized territories breaking away and battles that turned out in different ways. Yeah, cool. There we go. That’s what I want. See? That’s all I ask. It’s not unreasonable.

Chris: In the Temeraire series, is it just dragons? Is there anything else? Any other fantasy creatures? Any other kind of magic?

Oren: Just dragons.

Chris: Question two: At any point, does somebody scoff at the idea that there might be, like, a unicorn? Does somebody be, like, “What, you think that just because dragons are real, that other creatures are real? Shh. This is not a fiction. This is real life.”

Oren: I don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read the nine books. There might be something in there where someone does that, but if so, it did not stick in my memory. There are some creatures that are like kind of pushing the limit of what a dragon is. There’s a giant sea serpent that hangs out near Japan, and it’s huge and it’s scaly and reptilian, but it doesn’t really have functional wings. So, like, is that a dragon? But, like, yeah, pretty much everything is draconic. There aren’t any griffins or manticores as far as I could find.

Chris: That is the key: If you only want one kind of magical creature, don’t mention anything else.

Oren: Yeah, it’s going to feel kind of pretentious if you’re like, “You thought there were unicorns? Silly!”

Chris: Or just like kind of mean. Fantasy writers like other stuff. It just kind of feels like a weird personal dig if you’re like, “Ha ha ha, you wanted unicorns!” And it’s like, “Well, of course I wanted unicorns. I’m a fantasy reader reading this fantasy book.” Sometimes what happens is the writer writes a setting that only has one thing in it, and then they get questioned by their readers and people they talk to, and they feel like they have to put an answer in their story, and that’s how they end up in that situation. It might not be because they’re scoffing.

Oren: Sometimes it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s not a joke I find very funny. But, you know, it’s like, “Ha! You thought vampires in this setting could turn into bats? Why would you think that? Are you stupid?” Turning into bats isn’t any more random than a lot of the other abilities vampires have. Why is that one unscientific?

Chris: Yeah, be careful. At some point in time you are going to have an ability that is just as unrealistic as a vampire turning into a bat. We don’t see a lot of alternate history urban fantasy. Usually the reason for using modern-day Earth setting is because you specifically want it to be familiar, and that would also motivate you to not have history diverge.

Oren: Imagine having to explain, like, “Here’s a modern-day-looking city and it’s got werewolves and mages.” And I got to explain all that. And then also I got to explain how this city is not part of the United States. It’s actually part of the breakaway micronation of New England. Because the Civil War went real weird. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a whole other thing I have to explain now.”

Chris: Feels like a theming problem where the story is not cohesive and the world is not cohesive anymore. Similar to, like, Carthage won, and also there are wizards, and those are completely separate reasons that history diverged in two different ways.

Oren: Wizards don’t even like Carthage. Why would they have anything to do with that? There are plenty of historical fantasy stories that have urban fantasy feelings. They use certain urban fantasy tropes, they have an urban fantasy aesthetic, but they aren’t actually set in the modern day. They’re set in a historical city, and sometimes the fantasy elements are used to help recreate some modern things that wouldn’t be there. Sometimes we don’t pay too much attention to that part of it, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do it, but doing real-world fantasy stories with a big alternate history plot set in the present is already really weird. Urban fantasy or not, that’s just kind of unusual. You can go the other way, right? Because I’ve been complaining about stories that just have magic that’s been around forever and it didn’t change anything, but if you go the other direction and it’s like, “Oh, look, magic’s been around forever, everything’s different,” then you have to explain a whole lot, and it takes a while and it’s confusing, because you have this weird mix of real-world proper nouns and fantasy terms, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on. I read this book called Cold Magic, and I first thought it was just a second-world fantasy setting, because it didn’t really seem to have anything in common with the real world. And it seemed like it was set in roughly 1700s-ish. But then they started using terms like Phoenician. That’s a real word. Hang on. And then I eventually found out it has this extremely complicated backstory of Carthage kind of winning the Punic War, and also huge magical natural disasters that made a bunch of people move around, and then also Carthage is destroyed later by a different magical thing. It was so complicated!

Chris: That reminds me of our conversation on post-apocalyptic fantasy, where there’s a bunch of books that just seem like other-world fantasy settings, and then you get this weird reveal that, no, actually it’s the future. Queen of the Tearling just seems like a typical other-world medieval -inspired fantasy setting, and then we suddenly learn that the main character has real-world books. Maybe that was people-fled Earth.

Oren: Yeah, it was scifi or something.

Chris: Sometimes it turns out it’s like planetary evacuation and colonization is supposed to be the backstory. Why? Why are we doing this?

Oren: With Cold Magic I definitely felt like this would have been easier if it was just a second-world fantasy story with some inspiration from various points in history. The weirdest one that I’ve read is The Devils. Everything’s different because of magic, but also, everything’s the same. Everything has a different name, but the dynamics are exactly the same. So it’s set in, like, late medieval period, you know, around crusading times. And there’s no Byzantine Empire because Rome was destroyed in the war with Carthage. This is another setting where Carthage won the Punic wars, interestingly. But there is instead the Empire of Troy, which fills exactly the same role. And then there’s like a different holy city with a Catholic-ish religion in Italy and it has a schism with the patriarch in Troy. And I’m just sitting here being like, “Am I losing my mind? What is going on?”

Chris: I wonder if some authors are just really intimidated by the idea of making changes. It reminds me of Kuang’s Babel. There is technically silver magic in the setting, but the setting is almost exactly the same as if magic didn’t exist. My theory was that maybe she just didn’t feel at liberty to change history, I don’t know, maybe because she wanted to make a point about colonialism, and if we changed history, then the point might be less relevant. Or maybe… She has this author’s note in the beginning of the book that’s really defensive about accuracy in her depiction of historical Oxford. Feels like really embattled with all these people saying, “My depiction is inaccurate. And yes, I, you know, took as little artistic license as I could to serve the story.” That sounds like she doesn’t feel like she has permission to change more of the setting because it won’t feel accurate anymore.

Oren: It’s weird for me to imagine the author who wrote Babel caring what anyone else thinks.

Chris: If she didn’t care, I don’t think she would have put that author’s note in the beginning.

Oren: That was weird, because on the one hand, I liked the author’s note because it had cool historical context, and I like that stuff. I like to hear what kind of research authors did and what changes they made. On the other hand, its bizarrely defensive nature, to me it felt less like someone who was embattled and more like someone who just likes to argue and wanted to preemptively argue with her critics. Which I get, I love to argue too, so fair enough. Maybe I misread the book. It’s just the book is so edgy. It’s so edgy and it’s so in your face about how edgy it is. It’s hard for me to imagine the author being like, “Oh, well, I can’t change anything because then people will be upset.”

Chris: Sometimes edginess offers a certain level of prestige. Like, I wish it didn’t, but I’ve definitely talked to many people who think that’s what makes a story good or profound, is just edginess and to shock people. Whereas being believed that your history is inaccurate… I mean, that could feel embarrassing.

Oren: That’s not going to get you on NPR or The New York Times or anything. It was so weird reading this where it’s like, okay, so in this setting, there’s this kind of silver-based translation magic that is powering the British Empire. And it’s like, how does that work? Well, pretty much the same way that the regular British Empire worked. It hasn’t done anything different. It’s just that we did like a Find and Replace, and instead of “coal,” we put “silver.”

Chris: Yeah, the Silver Industrial Revolution. We could even say the Silver Revolution. We had to also specify that it’s industrial. That was very odd because some of the things that we described, it feels like the silver would have the opposite effect as what we’re talking about.

Oren: We’re told that silver is putting people out of work in factories because it’s automation. But we’re also told that people are moving to the city to get jobs, like they did in the actual Industrial Revolution.

Chris: People are moving to the city to get jobs because there were factories that were offering jobs. So if silver is automating that and taking away from the jobs, why are people moving to the cities?

Oren: There was a reference to, like, “Oh, the Thames is actually clean in this timeline.” Okay, that’s different. That’s cool. But then they’re like, “Don’t swim in the Thames.” Like, okay, I mean, I get that you had to say that because it’s set in Britain, you have to say that. But also, that was, like, the one difference.

Chris: If anybody swims in the Thames, then somebody’s gonna DM Kuang and tell her that she’s got inaccurate Thames.

Oren: Oh, it does make one big difference towards the very end. Spoilers. The silver magic gives the British Empire a giant glowing weak spot, which, if you punch them there, they explode. Like, it’s nice that imperialism is so easy to defeat in this scenario. It does take them a painfully long time to think of this plan. They’re like, “We could capture the tower where all the silver magic is, and then we could demand that the empire be less evil.” How do you think that’s gonna work? And obviously it won’t. And then eventually they’re like, “Oh, I guess we could just blow it up. That’ll do it.”

Chris: No, as soon as we introduced these regional towers that power magic for huge swaths of England, I was like, “Okay, well, obviously we need to go and disrupt those towers.” And then, nope, the characters take forever to think of that.

Oren: That’s why it’s so funny that this book is so obsessed with the idea of how violence is necessary, and, like, that’s how you defeat imperialism, is through violence. Okay, sure. But like, you kind of gave yourself a cheat code here.

Chris: Not actually demonstrating that violence is the right answer.

Oren: It’s like if I wanted to make my story about how important democracy is and I invented a democracy crystal. It’s a magic democracy emitter.

Chris: That makes democracy work.

Oren: I guess, sure.

Chris: That doesn’t sound like democracy actually works, then.

Oren: That sounds like maybe I’m not confident in my argument when I do that. One way to do this that doesn’t get used that often as far as I can tell, but I really like it, is you just have magic be kind of recent, within a few decades.

Chris: Let’s say we applied this to Temeraire. That sounds like it would just be logistically difficult in that situation. I’m not saying this is a good idea. I think recent magic does have lots of advantages. Fantasy writers don’t usually want to use it.

Oren: The biggest problem that it has is that if magic is recent, then you can’t have a bunch of ancient magic traditions.

Chris: I’d be afraid that if we had recent dragons, they’d be like, the dragons are aliens that landed on Earth. And I’d be like, “No!”

Oren: Recently arrived dragons would be very hard to do what happens in Temeraire, right? You need a completely different explanation. That’s not the only way to include magic in a historical setting. You can also use books like A Master of Djinn. Magic returned, started in Egypt, so Egypt was the first to capitalize on it, and they used it to make a bunch of cool steampunk tech, which is why, a few decades later, Egypt is a rising power just before World War I. But, like, the world is still recognizable, right? You haven’t had this change ripple out through centuries.

Chris: I think the “magic returns” tactic is a really good tactic for this because then you could just be like, “When was magic last year?” “Oh, just a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.” Even Game of Thrones, when it brings back dragons, it’s like, “Okay, well, we have dragon eggs from the last time, so the dragons don’t have to spawn out of the ether. We have some remnants somewhere.” If it’s so long ago that it’s like prehistory, it does make it a little hard to say, “Oh, well, we have rituals that go that far back.” But again, it’s nothing that speculative fiction writers don’t do all the time. What was it? Dune Prophecy, where we’re like 10 million years ago?

Oren: Some absurdly long amount of time.

Chris: Speculative fiction writers always want to expand timelines into ridiculous extents. Like, no, you don’t understand. Human civilization changes so much faster than that.

Oren: Like in the Star Wars Andor show, where they brought out this statue. Like, this statue is 25,000 years old. That’s so old, man. You don’t know how old that is. In Master of Djinn, they have some ancient traditions by being like, “Yeah, there was magic around during, like, at some point when we had the ancient Egyptian gods. Maybe there was some magic then, so we can bring back worship of those gods as an old tradition.” Or you could have the idea that magic has been around, but it’s been hidden behind a masquerade. So you can have some masquerade magic traditions.

Chris: We had a masquerade for most of history, but then the masquerade has been lifted recently. And so now magic is everywhere. That’s a good combo. And then you can have your old rituals and what have you. What if you just want historical fantasy that is relatively low realism, you are not trying to sweat over every historical detail, the masquerade, of course, is a good way to do that. We have a previous episode on the Masquerade, which is this idea that magic is secret and most people don’t know about it, and it is just a technique for keeping the world the same. The key is that it’s usually unbelievable if you pay too much attention to it. You usually just don’t want to call attention to it and advise against making conflicts over the Masquerade, like where the hero really wants to tell their loved one they have magic, but they just can’t do it, it starts to provoke questions about the Masquerade. You don’t want to do that because you can’t answer them. And then the other thing we talked about, which is the scope of the story. If this is like a cozy, where we’re just like one coffee shop, one in, and we don’t really see a lot of the world, you’re raising less questions. Whereas if you talk about the current monarch or current politics or what wars are happening, or put in big historical events during the course of the story, that certainly cause a lot more attention to the state of the world.

Oren: A strange thing that is very common in a lot of historical fantasy that I’ve read, that doesn’t need to be, but it just seems to happen a lot, which is that when you’re creating a conflict in historical fantasy, there’s a tendency to only give one side magic. I’m not gonna say that never works, but it usually doesn’t.

Chris: I mean, do you want that side to steamroll everybody else?

Oren: Right, I mean, that’s the most immediate problem. If the magic is cool and fantasy-ish, chances are it’s pretty powerful. So that’s gonna create some balance issues.

Chris: Oren, what if I just give the other side guns?

Oren: I cast summon rifle level 5. Like, that was the problem in… gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the story, but it was set during a quasi-real mill strike from the 1830s, and the strikers all had magic and the bosses didn’t. Amazingly, the strikers won.

Chris: Oh, jeez, I wonder how that happened.

Oren: It was not hard. That’s one potential problem. But, like, it also creates a lot of believability issues in a lot of stories. Like, why has nobody on the other side started using magic? This was the problem in Babel, but reversed, where only the bad guys have magic. And it’s just weird. Why hasn’t anybody else tried to make this? Apparently it’s been around since at least the Roman Empire. All you need is a silver and some translators to get started. It doesn’t have a high entry cost.

Chris: Everybody else forgot.

Oren: They got lazy and they didn’t think about it. Real weird, you know, not what I would expect. Even more basic: it’s just kind of boring. Here we have the cool magic people, and then the other side is some guy.

Chris: In Babel, I originally thought that the reason we’re using silver as part of the magic system is to justify why only the wealthy could wield magic. Honestly, any material that is the only material that can be used for magic, if it’s scarce at all, it’s going to get expensive. But silver could be even more expensive. But then the book specifically says that China has a whole stockpile of silver. But they’re way outmatched by England. So at that point, silver has been eliminated as the reason why other people can’t use magic.

Oren: They could still be outmatched. British magic could be more powerful. In real life, the Chinese had guns during that time period; they just weren’t as good.

Chris: We could have magic that just wasn’t as good because they don’t have the same amount of institutions to churn out translation words that power the magic.

Oren: Instead, it’s just like only England seems to have magic and maybe the rest of Europe. That’s harder to say.

Chris: Since this is a historical setting, this is not as big of a deal. But it’s just silver with two words on it. There’s no reason another person can’t copy those words. Even if England has Oxford, which is much better at creating these translation words to power your magic, it would be fairly simple for other people to spy on them and just copy them.

Oren: Well, we are now going to copy something that I’ve seen from many other podcasts, which is that we are going to end the episode because it’s over now.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a 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 Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.