The Mythcreant Podcast

Fantasy and romance. It’s an intuitive pairing that’s been around for quite some time, but you wouldn’t know it from the discourse. People are raging about Romantasy as if it’s the end of literature, but why is this market trend given so much weight? This week, we unpack why this popular genre mashup sparks so much controversy, and why it’s being held to a higher standard than other fantasy works (spoiler: it’s misogyny).

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Oren, did you know our podcast isn’t really a podcast? 

Oren: Oh, really? 

Chris: Because it’s bad and people don’t like it, therefore it apparently just doesn’t deserve to be listed with other podcasts. 

Oren: I mean, it being bad and people not liking it is the first trait of a podcast. Like, if it was good, it would be something else. 

Chris: I’m altering the definition of podcast to mean podcasts I like, so pray I don’t alter it further. 

Oren: Ah, yeah, I see. We’re changing the genre definition to be books that I think are good. This is the Oren core or Mythcreantspunk, or I forget whatever we called this last time.

Chris: So this time we’re talking about the backlash to romantasy. First, I just wanna be very clear, you don’t have to like romantasy. It’s okay if you hate romantasy books and don’t wanna read them. That’s perfectly fine. There are things that I find tiresome in many of them, too. However, how you respond to stories you don’t enjoy matters. It sends certain signals to other people about what is legitimate fiction and, and what’s not, and other things. And so when we notice odd patterns, it’s worth talking about, because you may not like many books, but are you arguing that all of those books you don’t like aren’t part of a specific genre, for instance?

Oren: Just trying to be normal about disliking romantasy books. There are dozens of us. Dozens. [laughter]

Chris: You don’t like something, you don’t have to write a think piece about how it’s destroying democracy or something like that.

Oren: Before you’re motivated to write a, a think piece about romantasy, I would ask, do you write think pieces about any other genre of fiction? Like, I’m not saying it’ll be good if you do, but, like, that would be my first thought. This is a thing that I see a lot where someone’s like, “Oh, man, I have to share my thoughts about this particular moral panic that’s sweeping around.” It’s like, okay, but do you have any expertise in that area other than that you’re upset about this thing that’s happening? Because if not, maybe you don’t really have much to contribute.

Chris: I think it’s helpful to notice when dislike of something starts to take a performative edge. It takes some self-awareness to realize it, but the difference is are you privately disliking this, or do you want everybody to know you dislike it? And that doesn’t mean performative dislike is always bad. I hate AI and I will also performatively hate it. I’m fine with that. I will perform my hatred of AI. 

Oren: Yeah. We’re doing a little dance over here about it.

Chris: You know, that’s punching up. It’s a little weird when a specific genre, you’re performatively hating on it. You should just ask yourself why. Why is this the thing that I’m performatively hating, and is it a good reason?

Oren: [fake-astonished] Is it misogyny? Shh. It is. It is. That’s the reason. That’s not the only reason someone might dislike a romantasy book, but that is the reason why people are so weird about romantasy. I’ve been talking to my law school classmates, and I’ve had several people, almost the identical conversation, where I’ll tell them I’m a fiction editor and they will very carefully bring up that they either read or write romantasy, like they are expecting me to attack them over it. This has happened three times now. 

Chris: It’s sad. So sad. 

Oren: It’s because they get such bizarre reactions from people, despite romantasy being hugely successful. That’s a fun little contradiction. 

Chris: And hugely popular, so lots of people feel the way they do. You know, we have people in our community, plenty of people in our community who write romantasy. We have editing clients who write romantasy. I have students who write romantasy. They are not on the fringes. They are part of our community But it does feel very much like pumpkin spice lattes in the performativeness, or like Twilight hate. These aren’t perfect books, just like Twilight isn’t a perfect book. There are many problems with Twilight. But Twilight also isn’t especially bad either. I’ve looked at lots of best-selling books. They all have problems. Twilight, among best-selling books, is not particularly flawed. It has its issues, but so do other books. Twilight has always been the book where people boldly criticize it without worrying about people getting mad at them, whereas any other popular book, people would get mad at them. And so there’s tons of Twilight hate out there. 

Oren: On the bright side, the popularity of romantasy has more or less erased people telling us that our critiques of a certain book must be wrong because it’s popular. 

Chris: I had hoped that we had made a dent, which maybe among our regular readers we have, criticizing popular books for so many years. But I will admit the argument that I would have against this that would just silence everybody was just pointing out that Fifty Shades of Grey sold 250 million books. If you think that, I don’t know, Name of the Wind with its, like, 10 million or something must be perfect, then that means Fifty Shades of Grey is 25 times better than Name of the Wind.

Oren: Beyond our comment section, when I look at other places discussing books, it’s not like I don’t see anybody make that argument anymore. I just tend to find that now the feeling has shifted in some of these places with this idea that actually, if a book is popular, that probably means it’s bad, which is equally wrong and silly, but people are gonna do that. Romantasy being visibly really popular – because romance has always been really popular, but in our section of internet and literary discourse, it wasn’t as visible because we just don’t have a huge amount of overlap with the romance writing and reading community normally. But now we’ve got romantasy, which is a fantasy subgenre and a romance subgenre, and it’s very visible, and it’s everywhere in bookstores with these big splashy covers. So you can’t ignore it anymore, which has led to this attitude that a lot of people have that books are worse now than they used to be, which, to be fair, has always existed, but I find it very common now. And when people say, “Why are books bad now?” They almost always mean romantasy.

Chris: One thing I do think is worth explaining to people, if you’re picking up romantasy and being like, “Oh, this book is just, like, terribly written. It has grammar mistakes everywhere,” or something, whatever genre is trending, what happens is that the number of writers writing it compared to the number of readers reading it works in the writer’s favor. And so publishers do get less picky about what they publish because it’s a less competitive category because so many people are reading it. And at some point in time, that wave crests. More people start writing it, demand often goes down somewhat. I think romantasy is here to stay, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay at its current level of popularity. At some point in time, that trend is always gonna peak. But, like, whatever is just most popular, we’re gonna find traditionally published works that are particularly rough because it just takes less to break in. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all rough. Some of them are good too, and very competitive with other bestsellers. When I do my lessons posts, my lessons from bad writing posts where I critique the beginning of bestsellers, they’re usually ones that are pretty rough. It was interesting because I used to do a lot of YA because that was the books that were trending and really popular, and the floodgates were open. Now it’s really easy to find romantasy. There’s just so many popular books. A book that is not written as well has a better chance of becoming a bestseller. But that doesn’t actually say anything inherently about the genre, just the current state of our trends.

Oren: It’s wild to me the people who have been reading for a while talk about this like it’s a new thing. It’s like, were you not paying attention during the YA dystopian boom or the Tolkien-like boom or the Game of Thrones-like boom? Like, this always happens. It’s normal. It’s just a thing that goes on. But there is sometimes an issue of quality mismatch because, for example, ideally, a romantasy book would be good in all aspects, but maybe the author is particularly knowledgeable about romance and not very knowledgeable about other aspects of the story. That could happen. In that case, if you aren’t big into the romance, then you are missing out on the thing the author is best at because you’re not gonna like that no matter what. In the same way that if I write a book that’s all about airships and I give it to someone who doesn’t like airships, we might be in trouble. Maybe the rest of the book’s not as good as the airships, and then the main enjoyment factor is just not landing for that reader. 

Chris: I do think with a lot of romantasy it is written by mainstream romance authors who are coming into fantasy for the first time, and I try to be a little bit more lenient because it’s like, hey, they’re new to fantasy writing. Let’s keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that they’re not a skilled writer. I also think that, you know, some of the romantasy audience, but certainly not all of them, may be mainstream romance readers that have become interested in fantasy partly because speculative fiction has been mainstreaming. It has been getting more and more popular. I still remember the old days when there was [grumpy old woman voice] only one movie in the theaters at a time that was speculative fiction, and you had to go see it because it was the only thing available. [normal] Or back when people thought consuming fantasy and science fiction was, like, really weird, and it’s not true anymore. And with the big Lord of the Rings movies and Game of Thrones and all of these things, it’s just, like, opened up the door for a lot more people to become speculative fiction fans, and I think that’s great. But sometimes there may be kind of a transition period where we have some romantasy works. They don’t use the wordcraft conventions that a typical fantasy would. They’re more likely to have anachronistic words in them and things like that. Certainly not all of them. That happens, but it’s good. It’s good for speculative fiction to get bigger and more popular. And some of those mainstream romance readers may start picking up fantasy books that aren’t primarily featuring romance because now they’re more open to fantasy in general.

Oren: One of the things I occasionally see people argue when they try to argue that romantasy isn’t fantasy is this idea that there’s no crossover between the readerships.

Chris: To me that feels very much like somebody when they think of fantasy readers is only thinking of men. And I’m not saying, like, men can read romance too, and some men do absolutely read romantasy. But at the same time, like, there has always been romantasy, we just didn’t call it romantasy before. There has always been books that were romantasy as we would call it today before the label happened. They have always been included in fantasy, and there’s always been people who liked them, more likely women than men, but again, people have all sorts of different tastes. This idea of a fantasy reader who won’t read romantasy just feels like we’re only thinking about men, and we’ve kind of edited women out of the picture.

Oren: It’s just weird for me to imagine someone being like, “Okay, so you like romantasy because you really like fantasy and you like romance in it.” Well, I mean, Wheel of Time has lots of fantasy and lots of romance. Neither of it is very good, but you know, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people. It’s hard for me to imagine that if your tastes are calibrated to like romantasy that there is a super low chance you might like The Wheel of Time. There’s a lot of interest overlap there.

Chris: And there’s been some, again, Naomi Novik has done Uprooted, for instance. It has a strange detour where the protagonist goes where the love interest isn’t, which you wouldn’t normally do in a romance, but otherwise it just feels like straight up romantasy. Novik is a fantasy writer. She’s not known for mainstream romance. She’s known for writing fantasy.

Oren: The whole it’s not fantasy claims are just so funny. I hear people say, like, it barely has any fantasy in it. What does that mean?

Chris: What books have you been reading?

Oren: Explain. Explain what that means.

Chris: The story is full of dragons. How is that not having fantasy in it? I don’t understand. Romantasy has tons of fantasy tropes everywhere, all the time. 

Oren: Sometimes if I press, I can get them to retreat back to, okay, it has fantasy elements, but, like, the world-building’s not very good. Either it doesn’t make sense or it’s too complicated or, in the case of something like Fourth Wing, it, like, feels like a modern setting with a very thin fantasy veneer over it. But again, that has happened with every genre. That’s not a romantasy-only problem. It’s really weird to act like that is a reason to say it’s not fantasy. It just logically doesn’t make sense.

Chris: I’m sure there are plenty of non-romance fantasies that also have fairly surface-level world-building. It varies. I mean, there are some romantasy books that, you know, their focus is just not on the world, and they have world-building that is just meant up to set up the fantasy conceits of the plot and the romance and just do what’s necessary. And that just keeps the cognitive load of the story from being too high and lets the writer focus where they want. And a non-romantasy fantasy could absolutely do that too, and it’s a fine trade-off. The story is still heavily dependent on fantasy tropes. Again, not every story has to be, like, max world-building. There’s room for all kinds.

Oren: To invoke a common frenemy of the pod, Ursula K. Le Guin, she had an essay like a billion years ago complaining about how a lot of fantasy books she was reading didn’t sound like fantasy. They sounded too modern. So, like, this has always been a problem. This is not a new thing. Romantasy didn’t invent it, nor is it universal across romantasy. Whatever you might think of it otherwise, if you go read The Jasad Heir, which I read recently, you can’t accuse it of not having a lot of really intricate fantasy world-building. You might not like it for other reasons, but you can’t say that it’s got the Fourth Wing problem. Are we gonna say that one counts but Fourth Wing doesn’t? Come on.

Chris: And of course, the other thing we see is a bunch of fantasy readers who don’t read romantasy being annoyed that because romantasy is popular, it’s like filling up all the listings and getting on all the shelves, and they feel like it’s in the way of the books they like to read. That’s reasonable. That’s just a problem with, like, filtering on a website or categorization, or shelving. I feel like for any other genre, we wouldn’t take that and then leap to romantasy isn’t fantasy. You know, if LitRPG gets really popular and starts filling up all of the listings and shelves, are we gonna say that LitRPG isn’t speculative fiction because, like, we’re annoyed that it’s there?

Oren: I’m gonna do that. I’m already prepared. I’m prepared to go complete 180 and be like, “I, I know I said that you can’t disqualify a genre ’cause it’s bad or whatever, but I’ve changed my mind.”

Chris: With the exception of Dungeon Crawler Carl, LitRPG is terrible. I’m not saying it’s inherently terrible, it’s just the fact that a bunch of generally young men that don’t have a lot of storytelling skills are writing it and self-publishing it, and so just because of where it’s coming from, a lot of it is really terrible. There’s nothing inherently terrible about this genre, as Dungeon Crawler Carl shows. Those books can be good, but if you look at the average popular LitRPG book, it’s pretty bad. I would not say that it doesn’t belong in speculative fiction because of how rough most of those stories are.

Oren: Well, everyone’s allowed to be hypocritical about one thing, and this is mine, actually. If you think about it, it, it just makes sense.

Chris: So yeah, I can understand the annoyance of, okay, I don’t like these books, and every time I try to look up for books I do like, these books get in the way, and it’s fine. It’s natural to feel annoyed. The natural conclusion from that isn’t, this isn’t fantasy. It’s, I wish the booksellers would help me find the books that I actually want to read.

Oren: I mean, when it comes to online storefronts, that’s, like, a sorting problem, right? Like, AO3 has fixed this. Go ask AO3 how they do their tagging system, and you’ll be fine.

Chris: And it’s not a particularly hard problem to solve online either.

Oren: I don’t- I haven’t been to every bookstore, shocking admission, but the bookstores I have been to, I have not noticed this romantasy takeover. I have noticed that there are big central displays of books that have romantasies on them, but it’s not like romantasy took those spots from more conventional fantasy stories. The conventional fantasy stories were never there to begin with, except for the occasional super popular breakout hit, which is still the case now. If I go to the fantasy and sci-fi section, it’s the same books I always see, with a couple of romantasy books in there now. It’s not that many. It’s just not a problem, at least not in the bookstores I go to. 

Chris: I feel like if you browse, you can come upon plenty of books. Also, like, romantasy does have its own cover conventions, right? You can kind of recognize them from the covers. Again, any other sub-genre of speculative fiction, generally looking at the cover often indicates whether it’s fantasy or science fiction or all of these other categories, tells you whether it’s dark, right? There’s lots of information that happens, and it’s just one of those many things when we judge books. We’re usually not looking for every single book in fantasy and sci-fi anyway. We’re looking for some signal that it’s the type of story that we personally like.

Oren: Another one that has been brought up that I feel like people have to have read our blog to see is the fact that a story that has enough romance in it for us to call it a romance often has different engagement factors than a more traditional tension plot. That’s where they wanna draw the line. Touché for using our blog posts against us. Well done. But also, no, doesn’t work because other types of plots also have different engagement factors. Mysteries, for example, depend heavily on curiosity in a way that other plots don’t, but I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest that a mystery story full of dragons and elves isn’t fantasy. Like, nobody ever says that, or at least no one I’ve ever encountered. 

Chris: We’ve always said that generally speculative fiction genres are about setting details. The traits that they are associated with are almost always traits related to the setting. You can pretty much place any plot in them and it’s still speculative fiction, and romance is a plot-dependent genre, just like a mystery is, so there’s just nothing incompatible there. They can be both.

Oren: What if I told you that romantasy was problematic?

Chris: Bause fantasy isn’t problematic. Fantasy has never been problematic.

Oren: It’s never happened, okay? It never happened. We all got together and agreed that the Sword of Truth series isn’t fantasy, so that’s actually fine then. 

Chris: Right, and you also just told me that Wheel of Time is apparently romantasy, and it’s problematic, so that makes sense.

Oren: Yeah, it does make sense, actually. Wheel of Time also not fantasy. That’s the thing, of course, like, we talk about romantasy, and not just romantasy, but that comes up a lot ’cause it’s popular, books being problematic. It’s a thing we talk about a fair amount. For other people who do, I just need you to show me that you care about problematic books in any other context. I need to know that that’s something you care about when it’s not a romantasy book. Because if you don’t, then I don’t really think you have much to say.

Chris: It’s all very silly. Again, you don’t have to like romantasy. It’s okay if you don’t wanna read it. It’s okay if you hate it.

Oren: Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You do have to like romantasy. I’m tired of this reasonable, enlightened third path we’re doing. It’s actually you do have to like romantasy. You’re actually a bad person if you don’t.

Chris: If you contact us and tell us and complain about how we’re covering romantasy and say that it doesn’t belong on our site, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s no logical defense for your position, okay? All of the arguments saying that it’s not fantasy, they just don’t hold up. They’re very silly. Also, again, we have community members that write these books, right? You want me to go to them and be like, “Sorry, you’re not a legitimate part of our community. I’m not gonna edit your book because it’s romantasy”? No. I like to read romantasy in addition to fantasy, and I’m not the only person. There is, in fact, overlap.

Oren: Wow, Chris. Why do you not care about causing the death of literacy? You’re doing that right now.

Chris: Yeah, just the degradation of literature. It’s downhill from here.

Oren: It’s so funny to me when people say that ’cause it’s like, bro, this is the only demographic that still reads. Everyone else just stopped reading. Maybe go yell at them.

Chris: It is good for people who weren’t reading fantasy to come into fantasy. We want our genre to be big. We wanna have lots of books and lots of readers buying our books. Those are all good things, and some of those romance readers may decide first they’ll start reading fantasy with a romantic subplot, and then they may decide to read some fantasy without romantic subplot even. It’ll just make our works more popular. There’s nothing bad about that. The tide will crest, and then will, there’ll be some other really popular genre, subgenre that everybody will be complaining about instead.

Oren: You just gotta stick around long enough. I mean, the romantasy tide is longer than most, but it hasn’t been going that much longer than the YA tide did, and I’ve seen some signs that it might be cresting as we speak, but I’m not gonna predict that. I don’t predict the market, except that you should totally go buy stocks in whatever company is about to produce the next literary RPG book, obviously. Go do that. That’s my prediction.

Chris: Oh, man, I hope we’re not due for a litRPG tide. I think that one is gonna be a little harder for it to mainstream because it’s so weird.

Oren: It’s extremely weird, and unlike romantasy, it doesn’t have an existing huge readership to bring over. ‘Cause as you pointed out, romantasy can bring over all these romance readers who now also read romantasy, whereas, like, who is LitRPG bringing over? Like, someone presumably. I mean, everyone’s reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, so maybe that’ll do it. I read an article on Reactor/tor.com allegedly that claimed that this was it. We were seeing LitRPG’s big breakout because of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and then The Wandering Inn is now popular enough to get a print book. And then supposedly LitRPG books do really well on audiobook rankings, but the article didn’t say which ones or how to look at those, so I don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s pretty thin evidence, man. That’s like one and a half books as your evidence. Maybe it is. I’m not saying it’s not. I just think that’s not a lot to make a big market prediction on.

Chris: Yeah, who knows? Since apparently we need more books for men, traditional publishers will start picking up LitRPG to attract the boys and get them reading.

Oren: It would be a little weird if they didn’t with how popular Dungeon Crawler Carl is. Something would have to be going on for them to not chase that success. I haven’t really seen them do it yet, but that doesn’t mean they’re not.

Chris: I mean, honestly, they probably should. It’s worth trying.

Oren: All right, and with that, in which I absolutely predicted the market. Whatever the result ends up being, I predicted it. Everyone remember that. We’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: All right. Whether you write romantasy or you hate it, you are totally welcome in our Patreon community. To join us, 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.

Sherlock and Watson are an iconic duo, so it’s no surprise many writers want to replicate their dynamic in their own stories. However, getting this pair right requires answering some tricky questions. Should you use a Watsonian point of view? How do you make sure both characters spend enough time in the spotlight? And how do we make Sherlock feel like Sherlock without sacrificing too much likability? Find out on this week’s episode!

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren…

Chris: …and I’m Chris.

Oren: So Chris, I can tell you went to UW for college. Do you wanna know how I know?

Chris: Hmm, how do you know?

Oren: Well, I’ve cleverly put together some clues. Once I saw you smile at a cute husky. Two, you live somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle. And earlier you laughed at my joke about calling the main commercial road in the U District The Way instead of The Ave. And as a result, you must have gone to UW. There is no other set of circumstances that would fit those facts.

Chris: Hmm. Well, I did go to UW, and since you only revealed all of these clues once you’d already come to the correct conclusion, your deductive process must be brilliant.

Oren: Yeah, that’s just logic.

Chris: Or is it abduction?

Oren: I don’t know.

Chris: I always use the word deductive for just coming to a logical conclusion, but technically it’s a type of logic.

Oren: Yeah, I read an article about this, because if you hadn’t guessed by now, we’re talking about how to write a Sherlock/Watson dynamic. And I read an article a while ago that insisted that what Holmes does is not actually deductive reasoning. It’s actually something else.

Chris: Like abduction…

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: …or something.

Oren: Honestly, I couldn’t remember. I should’ve looked that up before the podcast started, but I didn’t, because I’m not the world’s greatest detective. [Chris laughs] And ultimately it’s not important to the joke I was making, which is that when Sherlock does that thing of like, “Oh, well you must have been X because of Y, Z, and A,” the problem with what he’s doing there every time is that he is naming a set of facts which could fit with a character having whatever trait or backstory he suggests, but it could also suggest other things. Like it would also fit with other explanations, and he just always happens to be right.

I especially noticed it when he did this with Watson the first time they meet and he lists off a bunch of things about Watson’s military deployment, but like those things could reflect any British military deployment in a number of their colonies. So somehow he knew exactly where Watson had been, even though those facts could have applied to people from a bunch of different places. Hmm.

Chris: Yep. The trick is that you don’t show your logic in process, so people don’t have any time to scrutinize it.

Oren: Yeah. If you’re trying to do something that resembles Sherlock and Watson today, that is one of the reasons why just writing Sherlock and Watson the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did is not on our list of recommendations. Because Doyle uses Watson’s viewpoint to disguise the fact that Holmes is actually not a very good detective, and that he only really solves mysteries because he gets access to clues you don’t get. Therefore, he is, you know, able to come up with these amazing deductions. And even then, we have to just depend on Doyle to make him correct most of the time. And that would be way more obvious if you were in Sherlock’s perspective.

Chris: Yeah. It would also be easier for us to just guess the answer if the clues were actually good clues…

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: …that would lead us to an answer. So it would be harder to preserve the surprise of the mystery. Not impossible, I will say, but certainly harder than if we just don’t tell the reader any clues that the protagonist is getting.

Oren: Right. And of course, the other reason that we talk about a lot is that giving the viewpoint to someone who isn’t your main character is always going to be extremely risky at best, because you’re building attachment in the wrong place. If this person is the POV character, and the audience likes them, then you’re building attachment to someone who isn’t the main character, which can build resentment when the main character goes on and does all the main character stuff. Or alternatively, they don’t really care about this POV character, at which point you’re wasting one of the biggest advantages that prose offers over a film story.

Chris: Yeah. Again, just to recap why it’s so important for the viewpoint character to be your main character. First of all, again, we’re trying to develop attachment and emotional investment in this character. And we want emotional investment in the main character because they are the most important. You know, obvious there. One thing that builds attachment is familiarity and exposure, and the viewpoint character is just gonna have the most page space and the most words.

And besides that, generally the viewpoint character, we are deliberately placing the reader in their shoes. They experience things as that character experiences them, so we are basically doing everything in our power to encourage the reader to empathize with our viewpoint character, because that’s the perspective that they view the story from. So it’s just a huge bonus to attachment. And of course, the problem is that what the author is attached to is not necessarily the same thing as the reader.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so when you have a character, and again, we see this in other circumstances too, not just in mysteries, although it happens in mysteries a lot because of Sherlock, that sometimes writers want to present their main character as somebody who is mysterious.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And view it from the outside, usually because they wanna give that person lots of candy.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Like, see how cool they are. But that really kills the emotion. There are exceptions, but by default, we want the readers to feel some of the emotion that the main character feels. Again, it helps with that bonding, but it also just creates a more powerful experience if there’s some emotion to the story. So if they’re mysterious, they’re also very emotionally flat. Replacing emotion with mystique–and oftentimes this isn’t actually a very good trade-off when it comes to the main character. For side characters it works fine, because we already have our emotional anchor in the main character. But for our main character, they’re not gonna be as attached to that person. That person may be cool, but that’s not the same thing as being emotionally invested in them and wanting to root for them.

Oren: Hilariously, Holmes and Watson are an example of a story type that actually works better in film than it does in prose, despite it originating in prose. So I find that very funny, because in film you don’t have to deal with all this POV stuff, because there is no POV. It’s all the camera, babyyy. So it doesn’t matter that we’re not seeing inside Sherlock’s head, ’cause we wouldn’t do that anyway.

Chris: Yeah, although the BBC Sherlock still managed to have this problem.

Oren: I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are still bad Sherlock adaptations. But at least in theory it’s a lot less of an issue.

Chris: I think in the BBC Sherlock, even though we didn’t have a character viewpoint, we had some of the same dynamic where Watson was the relatable character that we understood, and Sherlock was presented as very eccentric.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And also sometimes kind of a jerk. Which again, typical for Sherlock, and a character you’re less likely to empathize with. And I got really frustrated with that show for making Watson feel too ancillary, and giving Sherlock all of these action hero moments that I felt should go to Watson instead. That balance between who your audience is actually attached to as a character, and which character is actually getting all the spotlight and all the moments of glory in the story, you want those things to align. You want your audience to be most attached to the person who’s also getting the spotlight and is saving the day, and when those things are misaligned, people start resenting the character that is getting too much spotlight. And so I quit that series because I just hated Sherlock after a few episodes.

Oren: Yeah, he’s really annoying. I get it. The show won’t stop giving him candy, and oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? He’s like Rick before Rick, where he’s mean to people, but it’s okay because he’s really smart and they deserve it.

Chris: To be fair, there are some audiences that really love candied characters.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Especially when they’re men, unfortunately.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: So there is a taste difference here, but if you can get all of your readers on board, that’s obviously better. So that’s why this sort of division where we have one character that seems to be the magnet for relatability and empathy and getting attachment, and another character that is doing the fancy cool stuff is just not really something that we should be doing. And I think most mysteries are doing it mostly because Doyle did it.

Oren: Yeah. Getting back to the idea of how might you do something like this in a written work, with a book and everything. The most obvious answer is you make Sherlock your POV main character. Or your Sherlock analog. Probably he’s not gonna be called Sherlock–although you could just call him Sherlock, public domain and everything.

But you gotta be careful with this one, because chances are that you are gonna run into the problem that every super-brilliant-detective story runs into, which is that your plot is about solving mysteries, and if you channel Sherlock as he has been portrayed in other versions, you have basically introduced a character whose power is solving mysteries. And that’s not ideal in the same way that, like, if you have a story about mountain climbing, you probably wouldn’t give a character the superpower to climb mountains. That just takes all the effort out of it. It’s not fun anymore.

Chris: Yeah. Sherlock, as he’s designed, being really good at solving mysteries is what he has going for him. Otherwise, he’s just a jerk.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: [laughing] So he kind of needs that, so you need to really remake the character, and it wouldn’t really feel like Sherlock anymore.

Oren: Yeah. So there are a few ways you can do this. You can do the just scaling him down, which some people do, and I think that can work fine. I think having a Sherlock who is a clever detective, but not playing nine-dimensional chess in his mind palace level of brilliant, is totally doable, and if he has a sidekick who is a little more relatable and gets on with people better, people will understand what you’re talking about, right? They’ll get it. And so I think that can work. If you want to really drag out how brilliant this mystery guy is, then you’re gonna need to either make your mysteries really beefy, really robust mysteries so that he has a lot to solve for the entire story, which you can do, but is challenging.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe if you reveal it slowly. But after a while, mysteries can become so elaborate that they start to feel implausible and unbelievable.

Oren: Right. Can your readers even remember what’s going on? That was my problem in Three Parts Dead, which is a book I really like, is that at the end they have to do this big explanation of the mystery because there’s so many moving parts that I was just like, “What?” By the end I was like, “What is going on?” And it more or less made sense once you put it all together, which is more than I can say for some stories like that, but it was still not fun to have to, like, pause the story for 20 minutes to get an explanation of the mystery.

The other option, and this is arguably more reliable and has less dependence on just a completely brain-melting mystery, is that you put your brilliant Sherlock character into a scenario that they have no context for, like a complete fish out of water type setting. And this is one of the reasons why Sherlock versus magic is popular as a concept, because assuming that Sherlock doesn’t know anything about magic, and suddenly you introduce magic to Sherlock, then that’s like a whole thing he’s gonna have to figure out. And that can slow down his magical mystery solving abilities long enough for the story to happen, and that is probably your most reliable way to go in this scenario.

Chris: Or Sherlock walks into some political intrigue and has to figure out who each faction is and what their deal is.

Oren: Yeah, you take him into something he’s not familiar with, as opposed to, like, your standard bank robbery type scene or something

Chris: Technically, you can have Sherlock deduct most things, but then withhold an important clue for later so he just doesn’t get anything immediately. But I think that’s always really tricky. If you give readers too much information too early, then they can guess the answer, et cetera.

Oren: Right. That could also be frustrating for movement. If it feels like he’s just not getting the clue he needs, then it doesn’t feel like the mystery is progressing. That’s why I was suggesting that if you have, like, a really robust mystery, because then he can find a clue, and then find another clue, and, you know, so and so. But that leads back to our everything’s super complicated problem. And in this scenario, your Watson just has to follow normal side character rules, which is that they have to have a reason to be there, and they have to contribute and, you know, be distinctive and all those normal things. But you don’t have the contradiction of the side character POV anymore.

Chris: Basically, Watson generally should not have a viewpoint.

Oren: Right, in this scenario.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could still get away with occasionally, if the two characters are in different places, throwing in a Watson POV scene or chapter. But you would definitely want to give Sherlock more page space and screen presence so that people know which character is supposed to be the star of the story.

Oren: Right. You’re probably gonna wanna give this POV Sherlock, assuming that they are super brilliant, some spinach, otherwise they’ll be insufferable, except with the people who really love super candied characters and identify with them. But that’s probably not the entire audience that you want. So then, of course, the alternate is to try to make Watson work as a main character.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Which is, in my mind, doable, but I don’t know if I’ve yet seen it done. The closest I can think of is The Mimicking of Known Successes, which employs kind of a hybrid approach where Watson and Sherlock are co-protagonists, and it has scaled Sherlock down, so she, in this case, is less, you know, playing nine-dimensional chess and immediately solving everything the moment she walks into a room.

Chris: Yeah, I think the base problem is if Watson is our main character, why do we want to have a detective around solving the mysteries instead of Watson? And that contradiction means that if there is a detective solving mysteries instead of Watson, it’s almost always because the author likes Sherlock better, which then creates the same problem that we were talking about.

Oren: Right. And in theory, you can do what the Tainted Cup books are doing, which is inherited from the Nero Wolfe version of Shakespeare, where the Sherlock character is kind of debilitated by something, and so they basically stay in their room and, you know, you feed them clues, and then they give you leads to follow. So at that point, the Sherlock character is kind of a weird oracle that your Watson protagonist consults sometimes. In theory, that should work. In practice, not so much, just because writers who do this tend to really like their Sherlock character, and you can tell that they failed to resist, and they’re like, “Yeah, what if I had Sherlock solve the big turning point instead of Watson? Wouldn’t that be cool?” No.

Chris: Yeah. I just feel like if you had that set up, and you really cared about Watson as a character, you would just make Sherlock an antagonist. You’d be like, Sherlock is Watson’s boss who takes all the credit [Oren laughs] every time Watson solves a mystery, and is hostile to Watson and gets in Watson’s way, because that would only give you, like, more conflict for the story and give Watson a bigger role. And if you’re not doing that, if Watson has a boss that is just super good at solving mysteries, again, that’s just, it’s not very well aligned with those goals. The only way that’s gonna happen is because the author likes Sherlock too much, right?

And that’s what we’re seeing with the Tainted Cup series, where Bennett just can’t help making Ana swoop in and solve problems that Din should be solving. Like Din doesn’t have to solve every problem, but if there’s a problem that’s uniquely personal to Din, that’s a situation where we do expect even a side character to solve their own personal problems. So Ana will swoop in and solve those, and then we absolutely need our POV character to have an important turning point at the climax. Again, none of the Tainted books do that for Din, and that’s really disappointing. That’s the kind of thing where if we like Sherlock that much, the author’s just gonna be making the wrong calls when writing the story.

Oren: In theory, I think what would work fine, would be to have the oracle Sherlock, for lack of a better term, have the big realization that sets the stage for the climax, and then your more active go-get-’em Watson character has to actually do the final turning point. That seems like what it should be. It’s almost too obvious, and I’m kind of baffled that that’s not a thing more people do, but they just don’t do it as far as I can see.

Chris: It feels to me like Ana and Din should be tension protagonist versus curiosity protagonist. Din is there to handle the actual enemies and actual threats, and Ana is there to answer the questions. That’s what it feels like it should be, and so Ana will reveal the answer to the mystery. And again, this has happened in all the books, where to make the end more dramatic, Bennett has Ana not just answer the mystery, but set a trap that feels like we’re going into the lion’s den, or we’re putting ourselves at risk in some way to spring this trap, maybe because we know who did it, but we have to prove it, for instance. And so we have to, like, be vulnerable to let the culprit reveal themself, or something like that. And so we have a moment of excitement.

And it just makes perfect sense to me that Din would have a turning point to actually stop the threat, because he’s the person who’s the fighter in the story, and have him be a little bit more of the action hero. And then have Ana, after the threat is neutralized, she can just say what the answer to the mystery is. Because after the tension is resolved for a story, you don’t need a turning point to answer the mystery anymore. It’s okay for a character to just tell people. That’s a thing that could theoretically work, but again, we would have to show restraint, whereas instead what’s happening is Ana also solves tense problems in the story when she shouldn’t be.

Oren: At first, I was hoping maybe it was just a mistake, but it’s clearly just the way Bennett likes to write those books, so I’ve stopped expecting anything different.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: I’m sure the fourth book will be the same, unless he wanted to subvert my expectations. Kapow! That would totally get me. I would be so got if that happened.

Chris: Does he do that? It doesn’t feel like he’s trying that hard to subvert expectations.

Oren: Maybe he would like to. [Chris laughs] Authors like subverting expectations. That’s a thing authors like.

Chris: These books are surprising in that they don’t have almost as many dramatic twists and other surprises as I would expect from a mystery. I mean, they do have some, as much as they need to, but it doesn’t feel like Bennett’s primary goal is to be super unpredictable.

Oren: I’m just trying to lay out some bait here, okay? [both laugh]

Chris: Oh, yeah, I mean, I would love that too.

Oren: So here’s a question. Is the difficulty of, you know, writing a Sherlock and a Watson, does that change at all if you write in omniscient?

Chris: Huh…

Oren: I just thought of that. It’s not in my show notes anywhere. I was just realizing I hadn’t considered that possibility.

Chris: Right. When it comes to, like, meta-mysteries, things that we know the protagonist knows but the audience doesn’t know, omniscient solves the problem of having it just be awkward to narrate. And I suppose it is true that I’ve found concealing information that the protagonist knows is actually not as bad when that information has less emotional weight and more just, like, intellectual curiosity about it. And I think that’s one reason why the hidden plan turning point works, where we find out that the protagonist had this clever plan all along, and then they reveal it, is because that’s not their deep, dark backstory that they’re, like, crying over every night. That’s just a clever thing that they thought of.

So I think one of the problems I see with that, and maybe this would be fine, maybe this would just be like Sherlock and Watson, is that do we know why the protagonist is doing what they’re doing? Usually we want to know that, and if we’re in Watson’s POV, and he doesn’t understand what Sherlock is doing, we at least can have him look on Sherlock in bewilderment and be like, “Why is Sherlock doing that?” Because he didn’t have the information Sherlock has. But if we only had protagonists that were in omniscient, and the omniscient narrator won’t tell us the clues that they have, at some point in time do we just not understand where they’re coming from, and why they’re doing what they’re doing?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that a third-person omniscient narrator could still sanction uncertainty the way that a Watsonian viewpoint does, but I think it’d probably be harder, at least.

Chris: Yeah, it just comes down to the purpose of a viewpoint being to place the reader in the protagonist’s shoes. And if we avoided having a viewpoint by using an omniscient narrator, you know, at some point in time the reader’s not in their shoes anymore, and we’re gonna lose a lot of that emotional intimacy that we would get at that point. For instance, in the Discworld series, Pratchett opens the scene with omniscient, but he actually dives into characters’ heads quite a lot.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: You know, I’m not gonna say it’s impossible. It would be an interesting experiment, but I do think there would be a risk that things would feel too emotionally flat or distant, or we would lose that intimacy with the characters, or there would be confusion, as we don’t know why the characters are doing what they’re doing. I think there would be a lot of risks to that strategy, but I can’t say it wouldn’t work.

Oren: Risky, but possible.

Chris: Risky, but possible. I don’t know. I’d have to see more examples. I don’t know of anybody who’s done that.

Oren: Out of curiosity, I picked up a random Nero Wolfe novel just because I was really curious to see if reading it would give me any insight into what’s happening in the Ana and Din books, and… Not really. I read it, and it’s all right. It opens with this bizarre thing where it opens with a mystery that doesn’t matter and that lasts for about an hour in the audiobook. And then twist, actually we’re in a much more compelling mystery now. All right, I would’ve simply opened with the compelling mystery, but I guess we had to do the boring mystery for an hour. And then it’s a pretty standard Sherlock story, honestly.

I actually kind of forgot at several points that Nero Wolfe doesn’t leave his office very much, because it just didn’t come up much. He doesn’t leave his office very much, but also it was never a hindrance for him, whereas in the Ana and Din books, the fact that Ana can’t leave her room is brought up fairly often, like a big part of the story. So it was kind of interesting that that element is more present in the Ana/Din books than it was at least in that one potential Nero Wolfe book that I read.

Chris: Here’s a question for you. Do you think that an important part of the Sherlock and Watson dynamic is the fact that Sherlock is a detective, and not Watson? Or could we create something similar with two people who are detectives but have different kinds of info gathering skills, for instance?

Oren: You could definitely just do a mystery story with two people who are detectives with different skill sets, right? That’s certainly true. Would that scratch the itch of everybody and their dog who wants to do a Sherlock retelling? Ehh, I don’t think so.

Chris: I guess we’d have to ask, what do people want from their Sherlock retelling and their Sherlock and Watson? Do they wanna feel like it’s the same characters?

Oren: What do people want?

Chris: Right? Is it that, “No, I’m really attached to Sherlock and Watson, and so I want my characters to feel like those characters specifically”? Or is it that, “I just love my weird, eccentric, brilliant detective character, and if they’re at the same level, they’re like co-equal detectives, then the Sherlock isn’t cool enough anymore”?

Oren: Yeah. I suspect that if you marketed it as a Sherlock and Watson adaptation, people would read it and be dissatisfied. I think that that would be setting the wrong expectation, but I could be wrong. And just quality-wise, I think that would be just fine. You’d probably have to just advertise it as a different kind of mystery story would be my guess.

Chris: Or just slowly start as a Sherlock and Watson and then just slowly grow Watson’s skills.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: [laughing] And hope nobody notices that they’re at the same level. I honestly think that would work. By the time Watson is, like, an equal detective to Sherlock, people will already be attached to your characters. It’ll be too late.

Oren: Yeah, you just really slowly boil that particular frog. [both laugh] Yeah, just play the long game on them. That’s brilliant. I love that.

All right. Well, now that we’ve actually solved the Watson/Sherlock problem forever, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you’d like to see more of our deductive process or abductive process, consider joining our 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 a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Stories spend a lot of time delivering information to readers, but what about the knowledge readers bring in from outside the story? Are genre-savvy readers likely to see your shocking reveal coming? Will spoilers for such twists ruin their experience? How much real-world logic are storytellers expected to abide by to avoid breaking immersion? Find out this week as we discuss reader meta knowledge!

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Oren, if I said something shocking right now, do you think our regular listeners would believe it?

Oren: You know, after 608 episodes, I suspect they would not.

Chris: Mm, am I not trustworthy?

Oren: I think it’s been pretty well established that you’re a lying liar who lies.

Chris: Hmm, I don’t know. I think our listeners are just cheating cheaters bringing in outside information to tell how sincere I’m being.

Oren: Yeah, they can’t be using the past 608 episodes against us, so that’s rude. They gotta judge us as completely new podcast hosts every episode.

Chris: Every episode.

Oren: It’s the only way it’s fair.

Chris: So, this time we’re talking about meta knowledge and how it affects stories. So, first of all, I have made up another term, sorry.

Oren: Yeah, well, I knew you were going to, cause I know you pretty well. I could guess that was gonna happen.

Chris: [laughs] After 600 episodes, people are probably used to me making up terms. So yeah, I’m talking about any knowledge or information that comes from outside the story, as in outside the story world, that is canonically supposed to be happening in the fiction.

Sherlock fans love to refer to this as a Doylean or Doylist perspective as opposed to a Watsonian perspective. They’re very proud of those terms. I’m just saying them right here because if I don’t, somebody in the comment section will be like, Oh, those are called Doylist and Watsonian.

And I know. It’s just those aren’t very intuitive terms, so I’m not gonna use them, sorry. But I know they exist, and they could also be used for this scenario.

Oren: We should go the Save-the-Cat route and name it something just completely absurd sounding that’s memorable but very silly. We could call it Dog Tail in the Sky.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: And then have a little anecdote about how one time I saw a cloud that looked kind of like a dog tail but actually it had an eye, and that made me think of knowing things. And there, that’s why it’s called Dog Tail in the Sky.

Chris: Maybe Snyder was trying to make his terms memorable and evocative. I don’t know, or maybe he just wanted to trademark them or something.

Oren: If you make it sound silly enough, it is memorable. I don’t think that’s a good thing, though. I don’t think that’s the right way to make someone remember your term.

Chris: Yeah. We want it to be memorable, but also easily connected with the concept because otherwise we could remember one or not the other. Want them to kind of go together. And if you think about Doylist versus Watsonian, if you stop and be like, Okay, so the author is Doyle, the character is Watson. There is a link, but I have to stop and think about it every time.

Oren: Right. I have to remember which one is which. I have to remind myself that this isn’t the perspective of Emma Watson, famous actress. It’s a whole thing.

Chris: It’s a whole thing. Anyway, but it’s definitely worth talking about outside knowledge, the knowledge we get in the real world, knowledge we get from other stories, knowledge we might have about the production, that kind of thing, and how it affects the experience, or doesn’t.

Oren: Well, there’s the most obvious one, which is spoilers. That’s a kind of meta knowledge, cause you know what’s gonna happen and the story didn’t tell you yet.

Chris: Yeah. That’s a big one, and really interesting. They don’t affect tension as much as you’d think, and this comes up a lot, especially when I’m talking about the uncertainty requirement for tension, which is basically about the likelihood that the threat will come to pass or the bad thing, the stakes will happen. So, people will ask me, Okay, what if the audience already knows what the ending is?

Most of the time they really do, because most stories end happily. So, a lot of times when we’re reading or watching something, we already know it ends happily if it does. Not all stories do, but enough of them do, [and] certainly in some genres it’s expected they will. So, in many cases we absolutely have an idea of what the ending is, but yet we still feel tension.

Oren: Right. Which is not to say that you should go around spoiling everybody and then be like, Ah, but it won’t affect your tension enjoyment that much! Cause first of all, rude. But there are other aspects that someone might not want to know the ending ahead of time. This isn’t a gotcha attempt, it’s just a description of how people engage with stories.

Chris: Yeah. There are some interesting studies. There’s a 2011 study from the University of California suggesting that spoiling a story actually improves the experience. But things like that need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, because we’d have to look at the specific stories they were testing, what engagement factors they were using.

And also, one of the interesting things about [that study:] it has a 4:1 ratio of women versus men in the study. And I’m not necessarily saying that people would have a different experience based on gender, but it’s always possible. This might just be toxic masculinity, but it’s pretty uncommon for men to say that something is too tense. Some women love tension, some women love horror. There’s never gonna be any general rules. But we don’t know without a lot more study.

But it does speak to the fact that if you spoil something, it doesn’t automatically just all fall flat just because you know what’s gonna happen.

Oren: Well, you know what they say, women do be discussing meta-knowledge. That’s the thing I always say in my observational comedy routine. The fellas know what I’m talking about.

Chris: [laughs] I think tension might be less affected than other engagement factors, just because tension is a very vicarious experience that really requires buying into the story because we’re worried whether a threat will happen to a character, right? When there’s tension in the story, the audience is never threatened, right?

Oren: Hopefully.

Chris: So, to even buy into the fact that there’s a threat, you have to buy into the story and make the story feel real. And that’s one reason why we’re not really thinking about the real world at that point. I think that’s one reason why if you have something that actually happens in the story that affects the likelihood that the hero will, for instance, survive, that has a much stronger effect than somebody telling us the hero’s gonna survive at the end.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: But I’m not sure that’s true for everything. In particular, I do wonder about threats that are mysterious because if you know what the threat is, if it’s no longer cloaked by fog or what have you, I feel like that might be more likely to change how that threat is interpreted.

Oren: Yeah, we talked about how curiosity is a lot more vulnerable to spoiling than tension is in general, and that feels like that would line up pretty well.

Because with curiosity, that’s not as vicarious. Like, you are wondering what’s happening, and so having that spoiled for you is gonna be more disappointing. So, I could believe that if there’s a mysterious threat, then there would be some crossover there.

I’ve also found that I find it pretty annoying when the story spoils itself in a way that is different than if someone tells me what happened.

Like mild spoilers, ironically, for the anime Goodbye, Lara. But one of the episodes has this weird thing where if you forgot to watch the post-credit scene of the last episode, it opens with what appears to be a flash forward of a new character showing up, a very mysterious new character. And I wanted to see that character appear in the story. I didn’t want to be told this character was gonna show up later, and I really resented that for a while. And then I figured out the reason this was happening was that I hadn’t watched the previous post-credit scene, and then I resented that for a while. And still do, cause post-credit scenes are a bane on television, and they should be banned. Hot take.

Chris: Not having adequate information was definitely the result of that. We missed an after-credit scene, and then suddenly the start of the next episode was really confusing. And instead of appreciating the experience that scene was supposed to give us, we spent it being like, What’s going on? Are we watching the correct episode? That kind of classic immersion break where we can’t really immerse ourselves in the story anymore cause we’re wondering what’s going on. And so yeah, that kind of experience was ruined.

I think in many cases, the thing is audiences also aren’t picky usually about how they get the answers to mysteries. So, I’m not sure to what extent if they get a spoiler for the answer, you know, maybe they’ll be really disappointed, or maybe it’ll be like, Oh, that’s what it is!

I’m not sure how picky they would be about getting the answer outside of the story because they’re just not picky about how they get the answers to mysteries inside the story, assuming we’re talking about just curiosity here and not tension anymore.

But the delivery of tension, of course, is important. And it doesn’t seem to be as affected as you would think by outside knowledge because we’re just focusing super hard on buying into the story and what’s happening in the story.

Oren: What about plot twists? Where does that fall on this question of knowing it’s going to happen ahead of time?

Chris: The question is what are you trying to achieve with a plot twist? If the goal is to shock the audience and they know it ahead, I do think that some of that shock is gonna be gone. But I don’t know, that’s not necessarily worse.

I sometimes wonder if storytellers like shocking their audience because it creates discussion that gives them free advertising and not because it’s a particularly good experience. I would expect some of that to wear off. But at the same time, if it’s a twist, a lot of the impact of the twist is still gonna be the same. For instance, if it’s a tense twist, I would expect that tension to still be there.

Oren: Yeah. There’s of course the inverse of all this because we’re talking about having knowledge of where the story is going because someone told you or whatever, but you can do the reverse, which is that you can guess where the story is going, not based on any in-universe knowledge, but just because you know how stories work or are perhaps genre-savvy, and so you can figure out, like, Okay, I think I know where we’re going with this because I’ve seen this before.

The most obvious example is guessing whodunit not based on any clues the characters have found, but by my method, which is to look at, okay, who’s had significant either screen presence or other narrative presences? It’s possible that it could be someone we’ve heard about, but we haven’t seen directly. That’s also possible. And then you compare that to the list of who-have-we-already-suspected, and whoever has yes for the first one but hasn’t been suspected yet is still in the suspect pool.

And you can then apply Do you know anything about the author?

More significant spoilers for Trade of Blood. I guessed it was Trecheo pretty early because he was, like, one of the last characters left who had significant screen time who we hadn’t suspected. But for a while, I wondered if it might be Dyn’s sister for edginess because Robert Jackson Bennett likes to be a little edgy sometimes, so I thought maybe that might be what we were going for. But towards about the last third, I was like, Nah, it’s definitely Trecheo. just because there’s no one else left it could be.

Chris: Yeah. Do you find that… First of all, are you intentionally doing this process of elimination, look at who the culprit is? And if so, does it improve your experience, or does it make it worse?

Oren: I mean, I mostly do it when I’m bored. And I was bored in the second half of Trade of Blood because all the stakes were gone, and it was just like, Yeah, I guess we’ll get him eventually. We have infinite time now cause he killed everyone he was trying to kill, so whatever.

Chris: I still remember when we were watching Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf has a mystery villain every season, and you guessed who it was, but there was no sign or any clues or any likelihood of this person actually being the mystery villain. It was just the only person left, and that was really unsatisfying, but it was unsatisfying because it didn’t actually make sense for this person to be the villain.

For a satisfied curiosity arc, you want it to be surprising, yet click into place. And if you just take the person who is like, Nobody suspects the dog, but there’s no clues that it was the dog. 

Oren: And then you have to spend 15 minutes explaining how the dog did all this because it’s so silly, and then it doesn’t make any sense, and so you have to try to bludgeon the audience into accepting that it happened.

Chris: To be fair, in most cases, if the readers guess who the culprit is, but it’s still something that would be surprising and plausible—and it’s not super easy to guess but they still manage to guess it—usually they’re too busy being proud of themselves for guessing to feel unsatisfied that they didn’t get a surprise when it was revealed. And I don’t know, maybe they got that sense of surprise when they guessed it. Maybe they’re like, Oh, mind blown, I know who it is! and that gave them their satisfaction already. Maybe that’s what happens.

Oren: I think it’s probably different for different people. For me, it’s a weird set of requirements where if I’m guessing purely on meta knowledge, then usually I’m doing it cause I’m bored.

But if I’m not bored, maybe it’s between episodes of a TV show or something, that doesn’t really bother me for the most part. It’s like, okay, I recognize that there are only so many ways to tell a story, and the alternative to this is for the story to be bad. If the story is bad, it’s hard to predict cause it could do anything.

Chris: Right. That’s the thing about Bennett’s Anna and Din series, is that I can usually predict the culprit before the culprit is revealed. At the same time, I prefer that rather than having a completely nonsensical culprit pop out of nowhere.

Oren: Right. But then if I’m guessing based on clues, I feel a lot more clever at that point. I don’t really feel clever for guessing who it is based on screen time and the fact that we haven’t suspected them yet. That’s not clever. That’s just the fact that I’ve edited for a while.

Chris: It doesn’t feel as satisfying. That’s not the clues we’re looking for. We’re looking for in-story clues for that click-into-place feeling that we get with a good answer to a mystery. We need to have some story groundwork for that.

Oren: And of course, the danger zone is when I have figured it out either through my meta knowledge or through clues, and it feels too obvious. It feels like the characters should also have figured it out, and that’s hard for me to intellectually define when that is.

Like in Trade of Blood, I was really frustrated—again, partly because I was bored, but even beyond being bored—it was really frustrating that they weren’t looking at the guy who had the obvious motive and also the influence to do all of this. Especially since they had earlier had a big thing about how it always came down to money, and this guy had a huge financial incentive to commit the murders. So that was frustrating.

Chris: One thing I noticed is it really felt like the protagonists were trying very hard not to discuss any suspects. Bennett didn’t want to bring up anybody as a possibility and was doing that on purpose, maybe as a way to get away from this, Oh, if we haven’t suspected them, then they must be the culprit because we haven’t discussed anyone and how suspicious they are, except for Din’s love interest.

Oren: Yeah, except for blonde boyfriend.

Chris: He’s super sus, we’ve decided. [they both laugh] Maybe he was just too obvious, and so we really had to name him. But that was just an unusual choice, and it’s like, well, if we’re gonna talk about how suspicious this guy is, why not the other people?

Oren: No, cause none of them are as hot and blonde, so we can’t really be talking about them, can we?

Another piece of story meta knowledge that ideally doesn’t matter, but I definitely notice it when things go wrong, is how much of the story is left. Because there are some instances where the protagonists will try to do something, and I’ll be like, Obviously that’s not gonna work. There’s too much of the movie/book/episode left for that to work.

And that’s not really a logical way to look at things because that happens all the time. Characters are always trying things that don’t work because if they worked, the movie would be over, right? But sometimes I have that thought, and I think the reason is that I am subconsciously noticing that this plan they have has no real chance of success, and they’re trying it anyway, which feels silly and incompetent to me, and so that’s one of the ways I am voicing my frustration.

I noticed that in the Discworld book Carpe Jugulum. About halfway through the book, they decide they’re gonna go and storm the vampire castle and kill the vampires, and my first thought was There’s half a book left. Obviously this doesn’t work. But I think I was really reacting to the fact that A) the plan didn’t make any sense, and B) the pacing was wrong. Like, it was escalating too quickly. It’s like, no, we don’t go for the big castle storm until near the end, guys. Give us some room to breathe.

Chris: Right. That’s the thought that occurs to me. It can be really tricky to attribute why we’re feeling bad about something in the story. Those explanations aren’t given to us automatically. We have to figure out, okay, I find this really unsatisfying or I’m not enjoying this, and now we have to look at a whole bunch of things to figure out why. And so, it’s easier to say, well, they’re clearly gonna go storm the castle, and I know it’s only halfway through the book, and so that’s why this feels really like—I’m impatient and unsatisfied with it.

But it could be something else. Like, yeah, the story is escalating too quickly, and if it’s over this soon, that’s anticlimactic because I expected there to be more adventures before we got to this point.

And there can be some wincing over what could happen. We know that just knowing there’s a happy ending isn’t going to ruin the tension, but giving away that there’s a bad ending might still raise tension, right? Just like if you have the narrator hinting in the story, and maybe this works because it comes from the story, but if you know something bad is coming, that’s what tension is all about. It’s about the anticipation of this negative thing that’s gonna happen. So that can still raise tension, and I think maybe if we know that a big effort is gonna fail, there may be a sense of frustration over the characters spending lots of time doing things that will amount to nothing.

Oren: Yeah, that makes sense.

Where do you think subject matter expertise falls here? You know, the classic example is it’s hard for doctors to enjoy medical dramas because so many things are wrong.

Chris: Yeah. I think it’s worth talking about believability in general when it comes to meta knowledge, because believability is informed by all sorts of things that come from different places, not just within the story, but outside the story too. I mean, when it comes down to it, I think that the audience does have to put together their conceptual model of the story world and how it works in their head, and as long as things proceed according to that conceptual model, it is believable.

But a story can’t fill in every single detail of how it works, so some of that conceptual model is always gonna come from outside stories the person has consumed, and the real world, and all of these other places.

So, if you have, for instance, a medical drama in a fantasy setting, and we have magic medical care, then at that point we’re probably not pulling too much from the real world about how this medical care is gonna work because it all clearly comes from some sort of fantasy setting.

But by default, if we don’t say that medicine in this world is super advanced or uses magic, then the audience is gonna fill in how medicine works in the real world and assume it’s the same. This just reminds me of in Lord of the Rings, the watery lava.

Oren: [laughs] Yeah.

Chris: So, this is a funny thing. Gollum, at the end of Lord of the Rings, sinks into lava. And is this in the book, do you remember? Or is it just the movies?

Oren: Heck if I know. It’s been so long.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Most people don’t know, but actual real lava is too heavy for a person to sink into. You would just stay on the surface and burn up very fast.

Oren: Yeah. Be nice and crispy!

Chris: You burn up possibly before you even reach the lava. It’s very hot. But it’s not like water. And it’s a question of, like, Okay, well, why are you picking over the watery lava and you don’t care about the giant spider? The giant spider is a convention in fantasy settings. Those giant animals are something that we are used to. We have seen them before. They are a convention that we know about, that we bring with us when we start consuming the story. Watery lava is not a thing that is supposed to be magical. It’s not a convention that we know about. The assumption there is it’s like regular lava.

Oren: Yeah. I also suspect that there might be an element of some people who do know that might tend to be people who are annoyed with how ignorant your average person is about geology and how lava works. And so, they might see everyone accepting, Oh yeah, you sink into lava cause lava’s a liquid. That makes sense, and then be like, No, it doesn’t work that way. Why do you all know so little about my precious lava? I suspect that might be something going on there.

Chris: The thing that always bothers me science-wise in stories is one person falling faster than another. And I do think stories have gotten a little better at explaining why one person can fall fast enough to catch up to another person who is falling and catch them before they hit the ground, which is what usually happens, right? There’s somebody who falls and another person has to swoop and rescue them.

Sometimes the person who falls first has some wind resistance, or more often the person who’s catching them has rockets.

Oren: Yeah, some kind of propulsion.

Chris: Some kind of propulsion to make them fall faster. So, I think stories are getting a little better about that, but there’s a whole lot of stories where the bigger person just falls faster.

Oren: The part that I have trouble with now that is hard for me to unsee is when someone’s falling and someone else catches them, but the change in velocity isn’t really any different than if they just hit the ground, right? Basically you’re just slamming into another person instead of the ground, but it’s at the same speed, so that doesn’t really help you very much. And that’s something that I realized as someone explained it on the internet somewhere, and now I can’t unsee it when I watch superhero movies. It’s like, no, you can’t just stop their fall by catching them. You have to slow them down gradually. You have to cushion, then disperse the energy so it doesn’t all go into their body.

Chris: [laughs] Uh, maybe the person catching them goes splat, but then they can magically heal themselves.

Oren: Yeah, the person catching them becomes their crumple zone. There we go. Yeah, okay. I’ll accept that.

And of course, it should be noted that even people with subject matter expertise, sometimes it’s a feeling they’re after more than strict accuracy.

Spoilers for Coyote vs. Acme. Great movie. Definitely recommend it. A friend of ours who saw it with us, who didn’t like it as much, was complaining about the legal inaccuracies. But when I looked at reviews of it written by other lawyers, they tended to like it and thought it portrayed civil litigation pretty well up to a point. And they weren’t really bothered by mistakes; we see the defense counsel give the opening statement, and it’s like, no, the lawyer for the plaintiff should do that, not the lawyer for the defendant. But that’s a technical issue that they didn’t mind so much. They enjoyed how much it felt like a small law firm being buried by all the resources of a much bigger legal entity.

That part they really liked, and they didn’t start to have a problem with it until later in the movie when the legal logic really starts to fall apart, which is incidentally the same time when the plot starts to get kind of squishy. So in that case, it was the mood that they were after as much as the specific legal technicalities.

Chris: Well, it’s certainly true that the more people enjoy a story, the more lenient they are with all of the flaws that they find, right? And those things don’t seem to be a big deal anymore because they’re looking through rose-colored lenses at that point.

That’s one thing is if you get your stories to a certain point where people are really enjoying them, you’ll probably find that your beta readers start picking over them significantly less because people just become less critical as their enjoyment goes up.

So when it comes to that meta knowledge, obviously that can ruin believability, but it can also boost believability quite a bit. And there’s a lot of conventions that we have that really are only believable because people are used to them, like the masquerade in urban fantasy where we’re assuming somehow nobody knows that magic exists even though that’s all but impossible. If you have not read any LitRPG…

Oren: Oh, boy.

Chris: It will make you appreciate this effect because when you first read LitRPG, it is so bizarre, where we have sometimes what looks like completely normal fantasy worlds, but for some reason the principles, the metaphysics of this world include messages from the ether that tell you you have leveled up. And that’s just how the world works. There’s no explanation for it.

Oren: Yeah. You’re in a normal fantasy setting and then someone opens up their inventory screen, and you’re like, What? What? Is this a video ga—No, it’s not a video game, or at least if it is, the author is waiting until book 10 to reveal it. It’s just a normal fantasy world except it has video game mechanics for some reason. Why? Who knows.

Chris: But again, those are conceits that once people consume enough stories with them and get used to them, they just stop questioning them after a while, right? And we don’t have to worry about that believability wise, so that can be a good thing.

In the reverse, though, sometimes you get situations where based on what you have, readers will predict that a common trope will happen, and it could be something they don’t like, and it’s not actually gonna happen. So, you kind of have to sometimes work around that.

They’re like, Oh no, this tiresome trope that I hate. You’re about to do that. It’s like, No, it’s fine. I’m not actually about to do that. It’s okay.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that’s the classic. We have our cool lady who does cool stuff, and then she suddenly gets captured and is helpless, and everyone’s like, Ugh, I’m so tired of that. And then they put your book down. And you’re like, No! But she was gonna…

Chris: She was gonna free herself! She’s not gonna get rescued by somebody. She’s gonna do some daring, clever trickery to get out or something like that.

Oren: Yeah, she was gonna find out it was all a plot by the evil lord misogynist guy, and it was all commentary, but nobody got to that part cause they all just thought you were doing the trope normally.

Chris: [laughs] That can be troublesome. Yeah, you need to either hint that that’s not how it’s gonna happen or sometimes just building trust. Luckily, that kind of damseling has become much, much less common. And so, these days, if I otherwise thought that the story was not sexist, I probably wouldn’t assume that just because a female character gets captured that she’s gonna be a sitting duck until some man rescues her. Just because we’ve gotten so much better about that one.

But it can be a problem.

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

Chris: If you’d like some more meta knowledge about Mythcreants, our patrons get our rambles with insider commentary on what we’re doing and why. To join, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: 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. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will talk to you next week

Hey guys, are we the baddies? Because the Lord of Shadows sure is asking us to kick a lot of puppies. This week, we discuss characters who realize they’re on the wrong side of history and where to go from there. What do such characters need to do to redeem themselves? How bad can they be before readers stop believing that they can change? What circumstances make such a radical change of heart realistic? Find out with us on this week’s episode.

Generously transcribed by Weed Eater. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Now, as the captain of the HMS Orphanage Burner, I am proud to command an elite crew of puppy devourers. Surely, we are on the side of justice. You can tell because our courthouse says, “Guilty until proven innocent.”

Chris: Hmm. Very justice.

Oren: Uh-oh. Actually, wait. Maybe we’re the bad guys in this scenario. Is that possible, do you think, our very subtly named side could be the bad guys?

Chris: But see, if you didn’t eat puppies, then there would be puppies, and clearly that’s for evil.

Oren: Yeah, that just makes sense.

Chris: Maybe all good and evil is relative, man.

Oren: Yeah, we just need a balance, a balance between good and evil.

So today we are talking about heroes realizing that they are “the baddies” — AKA that one Mitchell and Webb skit from 2006. Which is funny because that, that skit is about two SS officers realizing they might be evil because they have very evil looking uniforms with skulls on them. And don’t get me wrong, that particular uniform does make for a very good, intimidating-looking villain. But it is worth noting that the skull as a military icon is not unique to the Nazis. It was actually quite popular–and it became less popular after World War II because of the Nazi connection–probably because soldiers kill people, and so a death symbol seemed kind of obvious.

Now, I’m not suggesting that things like the Totenkopf are not evil. They absolutely are. Don’t run for Senate if you have one tattooed on you.

Chris: Oh, gosh.

Oren: But I’m pointing out that historically, one of the reasons we think of them as symbols of evil is because of who they are associated with and so it adds a little bit of irony to that skit.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Interesting. The more you know.

Oren: Yeah. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Now, I actually tried to write an article about this, about having heroes who start off on Team Evil and then realize they’re the bad guys, and I realized I couldn’t because it’s actually not really a specific thing. It’s just basic character karma.

And, so once you realize that, it’s hard to write an article about it because at that point the only thing left to talk about is the bazillions of possible permutations that it could take in the story. But what else are podcasts for, if not talking about the bazillions of different permutations it could take inside a story?

Chris: Yep, yep, that’s where the podcast conversational mush really comes in handy.

Oren: Yeah, good. Thank you for the format, podcasting. But, the problem… the reason why this is something people think about is that if they want their hero to start on Team Evil, the problem is that they are on Team Evil, and that’s Bad.

And it’s not a problem for villains because it’s assumed that villains will be defeated at the end, and then when they are, the bad stuff isn’t really a big deal. Now, you do occasionally get stories that don’t have sufficiently bad things happen to their villains and that’s frustrating, but it’s not a huge problem. For one thing, most authors just kill the villain because that’s simplest, and that’ll get the job done. So, in this case, the author’s desire to tie up loose ends matches up with the karmic requirements of the story.

But in this case, you have a hero who starts off on Team Evil and they are at least related to some evil things. So, what happens when they decide that they’re not gonna be evil anymore?

Chris: Right. So, the question is: did they do anything bad while they were on Team Evil? Reasonably, they would have. Or there’s a scenario where no, they didn’t do anything bad, but that’s completely unbelievable and an “I don’t buy it” kind of a situation.

Oren: And, if they really didn’t do anything bad, it kind of feels like “why are you having them start on Team Evil” then, right? It feels like you’re not committing to the bit at that point.

Chris: Or are they on a Team Evil, where they’re going around saving cats while all of their teammates are kicking puppies? And it’s like, okay, why were they there? Didn’t they notice the rest of the team was kicking puppies? What did they think of that?

Oren: Right. Like, why are they the one good person who joined the evil recruiting squad? And I mean, if you want to, you can always come up with a situation where they aren’t really on Team Evil. They just happen to have to be there by circumstances. Like, your character could be the equivalent of the German communists who got swept up into the Wehrmacht and didn’t have any choice, and many of whom defected as soon as they could. They’re not really on Team Evil. Like, they didn’t have any other options. The really tragic one is the guy who defected to try to warn the Soviets of the German assault, and they didn’t listen to him. Poor guy.

Anyway, moving on from that. So that’s not really what most people are talking about when they imagine this sort of thing. They are imagining someone who actually believes that they are part of the right side, but they’re actually on the evil side. Otherwise, there isn’t really a realization moment.

Chris: Right. So, we think that we’re doing good, and then we learn–wait a second–maybe we’re the bad guys after all!

Oren: Yeah. And usually what you want is a situation where your character was involved in something but not, personally, with their own two hands inflicting horrible misery. For example, if your character is part of an invading army, that invasion is bad, but if the things we see them do are fight enemy soldiers, they’re probably not unforgivable because there’s an understanding that in a war you fight soldiers even if you’re on the wrong side. That’s not gonna be something that the audience will just never forgive them for doing.

Chris: Also, the assumption is that when you’re fighting the opposing side you don’t have a lot of time to stop and have deep conversations about who they are and what they believe to verify they’re a bad guy and that you’re the good guy. So, it’s just very easy for government propaganda to be like: “No, no, no, they’re the bad ones. You’re the good ones.” And if all you do is fight each other, how would you know better?

Oren: Right. And that’s also a common mitigation tactic, which is realistic, that you were told that they were evil, and that you were propagandized to, and you were convinced. And that also happens in real life. And that can insulate your character a little bit. Readers will be more understanding. But that, then, creates a problem of: “Well then, why–if they are so effectively propagandized–would they realize they are on Team Evil?”

Most soldiers in armies that we would consider to be evil do not desert when they start doing evil things, and it’s not because they were born evil, right? They were convinced to be part of the system through a number of means. So, what makes your character different?

Chris: Or else you get Drizzt.

Oren: Yeah, you could just have Drizzt.

Chris: I read those books so long time ago, the Drizzt trilogy. I don’t even remember what the trilogy was called, but it constantly bothered me the way that Drizzt just had inexplicable different cultural values than the culture he was raised in. Some people suggested, “Oh, well, his father was good and taught him.” I suppose that’s possible it happened somewhere off-screen, but it certainly wasn’t very present in the book. He’s also, for instance, into monogamy or other things besides like, “don’t kill innocents” that are just weird in his context.

Oren: Here’s the thing about Drizzt that is funny; Drizzt is part of a marginalized group within his society because he’s a man and the drow are, you know, big, evil, man-hating matriarchs who want to crush all men. Which is hot, but also evil. And so, actually, that does provide an interesting example of why he would not want to stay on Team Drow.

Because you can do that. You can have a character–it usually wouldn’t be men if you want your world-building to make any sense–but you could have a character who is, for example, part of a marginalized ethnic group within an empire. Even Avatar did this with that one river town, where they are clearly part of some… they are not sharing in the wealth of the Fire Nation, and so it makes sense that they are not as devoted to its cause.

What makes Drizzt weird is that he goes beyond that and also seems to have no cultural upbringing that the rest of the drow have, right?

Chris: Or, you know, what we would expect is a little bit more self-blame and guilt if he’s just inherently very compassionate and he’s taught to kill innocents, right? We would see more of a “Oh, I should be killing innocents” and “What’s wrong with me?” kind of an inner dialogue as opposed to just like: “No, that’s wrong.” That kind of thing. So that we can see, okay, what’s different is that he’s just inherently a little more compassionate and has a harder time doing this than the people around him. But he’s been still taught their values, and it’s gonna take time for him to kind of deprogram himself from those values.

It certainly is easier, though, for “We Are the Baddies,” if you do have a character who is kind of young and impressionable and perhaps is not out fighting yet, right? I think that definitely makes it easier to explain why they believe what they believe, how it is that they came to believe the wrong side is good, and then they haven’t really had enough experience to accumulate too much bad karma yet.

I think this is the tactic that we’re kinda trying to use for Fourth Wing… the only thing is that we have some unbelievable stuff in there. So, Violet grows up in a society where we have these dragon riders, and just like at dragon academy, you can kinda tell they must be the baddies because they’re killing off all of their cadets in dragon rider school when they could easily save them.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I’ve only read the first Fourth Wing book and, I have to be honest, I don’t really know where the book thinks I should be drawing the moral lines here. The government is evil by any objective measure, but in the book, their biggest sin is that they are hiding the existence of an even worse enemy. Why are they doing that? I have no idea. So, at this point, anything’s possible if I was to read further into the series.

Chris: Again, usually an evil empire would want all of its citizens to know about another evil, because that’s an easy way to control them, being like, “Hey, you have to do what we want or the other evil will get you. But we can protect you. But you have to do what we want.”

Oren: It’s like imagining the Nazis pretending the Soviets didn’t exist. I’m not saying the Soviets are worse than the Nazis. I am saying that the Soviets are a genuine enemy that the Nazis had that they could use. It’d be so weird if they were propagandizing their people to be like, “There’s no such thing as communists. Don’t look for communists.” It would be so weird.

Chris, chuckling: Well, right-wingers today definitely want there to be as many communists as possible.

Oren: Right, they have to invent one, because there isn’t a real enemy for them to rally around, right? Imagine if there actually was one.

Chris: That would be quite the boon for them. Yeah, so [in Fourth Wing] this is really weird. And also, it’s just very difficult to cover up things like that. Like, in the Venin we have these mages that are super powerful. They’re not exactly subtle. And supposedly the dragon riders have been… well, maybe the idea is that they’re not fighting them, I think… and are just leaving the griffin riders to fight them and then making an enemy out of the griffin riders. It’s very strange.

Oren: At the end of Book One it could be anything, right? We just know it could be anything…. We just find out that there’s a super evil double enemy that’s been hidden this whole time, and how or why is a big set of question marks.

Chris: So, in any case, Violet is raised to believe Empire is good, the rebellion against the Empire was bad, and it’s reasonable that she believes that. And, controlling access to information of course, depending on what your bad group is. That could definitely happen, where people just have been deeply misinformed. In this case, it’s just a little strange because, again, it would be very difficult to cover up the presence of this particularly powerful enemy, and they wouldn’t even want to and that kind of ruins the effect. But otherwise, even the death that happened at the dragon academy is something that she could potentially be taught is justified in some way. And she doesn’t have to actively cause those deaths. She just has to stand by and not protest that they’re happening.

Oren:. A really interesting example is The Light Brigade by Cameron Hurley. To my mind this is like the gold standard of realizing “we are the baddies” type stories because it’s a main character. We’re not doing a dodge that a lot of stories do where the character who goes through this arc is a minor side villain, like Zuko, right? And Zuko of course is the main villain at the start, but he becomes less and less the most prominent villain as the show goes on. But he doesn’t have to be a main character for a long time, right? Whereas Dietz has to be a main character from the start and is deeply propagandized about how “the corporations are good, Martian separatists evil, do your bit for king and country–or money, dollar and country, I guess.”

And so the way that this works is that it takes an entire book to de-propagandize Dietz. And the way that Hurley manages it is by having Dietz be affected by this weird time-jumping thing that happens to her any time they use the teleporter to get into combat. This allows for Dietz to not ever do anything too bad. We never have to watch Dietz mow down a bunch of civilians, which I bet her squad mates absolutely did. Because any time that might happen, whoops, the time thing acted up again. Oh, oh, well. And it just works so well, and also the big selling point of the book is the time shifts. And it’s just a masterpiece. It is so good.

Chris: The other thing that I think is important to this story is the fact that we have our retelling-character-narrator. So we have future-Dietz telling what happened to past-Dietz. And that’s important because then when Dietz is like a fascist at the beginning of the story future-Dietz can be like, “Yeah, that, obviously I was wrong there.” I mean, it’s not said like that, but we can see the perspective is different, and so we have the narrator to assure us that no, of course what the protagonist currently thinks is bad, and the protagonist is gonna change their mind later. And then kind of some acknowledgement that this is bad. That really helps that kind of character go over better.

Oren: Now, let’s say that you, you don’t have a whole novel, right? You’re not as committed to the bit as Hurley is. A somewhat easy solution is to have your character be from some “lower value” group. So maybe they already have some reason to doubt the propaganda just because they are not sharing in the benefits of whatever Team Evil does. And then you can have Team Evil sacrifice them to achieve some goal, right? Where it’s like, “Oh, uh, our plucky squad of new recruits. Yeah, we send them to get mowed down so that we can capture this cool crystal tower or whatever.” That is a pretty effective way to have your character become disillusioned with Team Evil without them having ever done anything too bad, but still bad enough that they can feel bad about it and have a little redemption arc later, right?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a good point. So how do you think Zuko would have done… I mean, I guess we have a live action to compare it to, but it’s so abbreviated. It’s just in Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the reasons why Zuko works as a character is because it’s cartoon fire. So, for one thing, we don’t really see anybody actually get badly burned very often. Usually fire just pushes people backwards, and nobody’s really hurt. And he burns down an entire village once but we don’t actually see any person die from that or know of anybody who dies.

Oren: I would like it known that he doesn’t burn down the village. He causes a lot of property damage, but the village is mostly still standing when he’s done.

Chris: There are a lot of roofs on fire. I feel like realistically the village probably would have burned down.

Oren: I think Aang actually puts the fire out.

Chris: With water bending?

Oren: No, he hasn’t learned water bending yet. I think he tricks the Unagi into blowing water- onto the town. Something like that happens.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I remember that now.

Oren: The point is that Zuko did not burn down a village… uh, through no fault of his own. He did cause all the insurance premiums on Kyoshi Island to go up though, so he does have that to answer for.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, luckily when we’re judging these kinds of characters, intent and harm are the two biggest things. So, if a character tries to kill somebody but fails, that goes over a lot better even though they had the same motivation and they were just as bloodthirsty… as long as you can keep them from actually doing damage.

But I will say the animated format for Avatar: The Last Airbender makes it easier to hand wave. Whereas I think there’s just different scenes and Zuko does a lot of different things in the live-action version. And it’s also shorter, right? We just have less time to see Zuko do things like that.

Oren: Zuko is hard for book authors to do for a couple of reasons. One is that you generally wouldn’t want to do a whole POV just for the Zuko character. I’m not gonna say you should never do that, but Zuko spends a lot of time by himself off doing stuff, you know?

You might even say he is “Zuko Alone” [Chris chuckling] you know, if you were inclined. And I would generally not recommend that in a book, if for no other reason than people will notice that you’re copying Zuko. But that’s tough. I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do it, but it’s tough. But then, of course, also Zuko being not-the-main-character has less of a burden on him– he doesn’t have to carry as much of the moral weight of the story as the main character does.

Chris: That’s just a tough one to replicate, for sure.

Oren: It’s very hard to do that in a book. Again, not like you can’t do it, but challenging. What you usually want to avoid is something like in She-Ra, for example.

I like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, but they kind of have a Zuko-like thing going with Catra, and it just doesn’t really work because Catra is too conscious about what she’s doing. And then when she eventually leaves Team Evil she’s welcomed back to Team Good very quickly. And there’s not really much of a redemption period. It’s just like: “Yeah, Katniss is on our team now, I guess.” That’s nice.

Did I say Katniss? I meant Catra. But yeah, Katniss also goes through a pretty strong arc, just a different one.

Chris: I do think that she’s not past redeeming, Catra. But we do need to take some time to redeem her, given all that she’s done. Again, this is cartoon violence, which makes it a lot better. We don’t really see her seriously hurt people, but she’s a jerk. She’s a real jerk that hurts people emotionally. And that does need time, it needs apologies, and it’s too rushed. And so, we just don’t get that…

Oren: And unlike Zuko, she does hurt a lot of people who aren’t the main characters. Again, in a cartoon way. We can realistically say that Catra didn’t kill anybody, but she conquered a lot of towns. Whereas like, again, Zuko almost burns down one town and was thankfully stopped by our good friend Aang.Thanks, Aang.

Chris: It’s interesting because Adora also starts on Team Evil. But we at the start of the story she leaves, so we just conveniently don’t see anything that she did on Team Evil.

Oren: Well, she was in the kid barracks, so hopefully not too much. And that show also suffered from the fact that they had to keep all the names from the old cartoon.So, the bad guys call themselves The Horde and they have their base called The Fright Zone. And look, we’ve seen that sometimes bad people are extremely un-self-aware with the things they name themselves–that does happen.

Chris: Or they are self-aware and they don’t care about being evil, unfortunately. That is also a realistic possibility.

Oren: Yeah, like the bad guys are calling themselves Palantir, you know, the evil artifact that corrupts people. Like, that’s a weird thing to do. So I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but it did feel kind of out of place [in She-Ra].

Chris: Yeah. Hey, our capital’s called the Fright Zone. Do you think we could be the baddies?

Oren: I think it would’ve been better if they’d been allowed to make more changes, but you know, it’s a She-Ra show. They had to write within the… you know, it’s similar to how whenever you’re doing a superhero cartoon, you have to call most of the women “adjective”-girl, because that’s just what they’re called, and it’s usually best to just not call too much attention to it, or it starts to get weird.

Chris: Let’s see. We have for another example; I think in your notes I saw Cameron’s Avatar. We could talk about the other Avatar.

Oren: Oh, yeah. This is like the, the Dances with Wolves concept, right? So that, of course, comes with a lot of baggage. Whether it’s Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or the Avatar films, those ones–and ironically Dances with Wolves least of them–tend to come wrapped up with the white savior narrative. Because, at least in Dances with Wolves, he doesn’t become the best Native American warrior as far as I can tell.

But whereas in, in The Last Samurai he becomes a really good samurai and he’s maybe not the best, but he’s better at it than a lot of the actual samurai who’ve been doing this their whole lives. Now of course, historically none of that is accurate, but that’s the premise the movie presents us with.

And then of course in Avatar it’s even worse, where he does like the thing that no Na’vi has done for centuries, because I guess none of them ever thought to jump down on the monster, because they’re just not very smart.

Chris: Yeah, he bonds with the big dragon so that he can claim to be the big leader who will unite all the people against an enemy. It’s like, shouldn’t that leader be one of the [Na’vi] not someone from their enemy?

Oren: Don’t ask what happened to the dragon he was already bonded with. They make a big deal about how that’s like a life bond, but apparently, he just traded it in for a better model.

[Oren exasperated noises and words]

Oren, recovering: Okay, both of those movies, both The Last Samurai and Avatar, do kind of go out of their way to establish why the protagonist would be more susceptible to realizing they are the baddies than the other people on their side, right? In Last Samurai, we establish that this guy is already really disillusioned with the US military because of all the horrors he saw as part of colonialism.

And then in Avatar, the main character is not part of the mission originally. His brother died, and he was brought in, so he’s presumably less propagandized than the rest of them. And of course, because he’s the super-bestest at having an avatar body he spends more time with the Na’vi and gets to know them more…

Chris: I think having exposure to a different group of people who think differently than you do is a fine way for protagonists to learn that they’re not on the right side. I wouldn’t have it happen instantly, right? It’s a hard thing to deal with, but that is a good reason.

Oren: They do a bunch of montages in The Last Samurai’s case. Tom Cruise just hangs around in this village for a year or something, at least a winter. And he already didn’t really care for the military, and he’s also mostly fighting the Japanese military, so he doesn’t really have a lot tying him to the Team Evil side in the first place. I think they should do a historically realistic version of The Last Samurai–but still with Tom Cruise’s character–where the Ken Watanabe character is just ranting about his plan to be sent to Korea as an invasion force so that he will then get himself assassinated as casus belli for a full war. Because that’s what the guy that that character is based on wanted to do. He is a real weirdo. Because the samurai are warrior aristocrats, right? And their rebellion was about getting to keep their warrior aristocrat privileges. So yeah, they’re not actually good guys.

Now of course, the Japanese empire that they were fighting against wasn’t really a good guy either, but it’s very funny to imagine trying to do The Last Samurai with a little more historical accuracy.

Chris: Now thinking about that, it would be kind of hard to do “are we the baddies” while you’re also fighting more baddies.

Oren: It’s like, “yeah, I guess we are bad, but like, so are the other guys.”

Chris: Right. It’s almost are you the baddies anymore? And then also does it matter for the baddies if we’re fighting the even more baddies?

Oren: That’s a point where your solution is: now this is a story about trying to escape the war because actually everyone’s equally evil, and I don’t want anyone to win.

Chris: War was the baddie all along.

Oren: Yeah, the actual bad guy was the horrors of war. All right, and with that incredibly insightful comment that nobody else has ever mentioned before, because I’m special, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you don’t think we are the baddies, consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Or if you do think we are the baddies, you can enlighten us by becoming a patron. 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, a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will talk to you next week

We’ve all heard advice about creating flaws for our characters, but what does that mean in practice? This week, we’re talking about flawed protagonists! We discuss the factors that make some flawed characters compelling while others are reduced to being unpleasant. We also get into the ways flaws can be tricky to manage and why we believe adding a laundry list of them is a little excessive.

Generously transcribed by Albert Gallego. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Now, we might seem like nice people on the podcast, but maybe as soon as we stop recording, we rant about how our podcast is trash and everyone who listens to it has terrible taste. And then when we get fan mail, we write back telling that person to get a life. Also, I should say I’m secretly writing a literary genre novel. That’s my true passion, despite what I tell everyone. 

Oren: It’s funny because, normally, the trope of doing that is writers do that with books that make them tons of money, but they hate ’cause, you know, making money is bad, actually. But our podcast doesn’t make us any money. [Chris laughs]

That would be extra funny if we had a character who’s like, “Yeah, I’m writing these completely unsuccessful books that nobody buys, and they’re secretly trash… and everyone who reads them is stupid.” We should do that. Some people insist that you can’t ever have too many flaws, so I think we should do that, have a character whose flaw here is both that they’re really judgmental and also just incredibly bad at deciding what they should spend their time on.

Chris: I’m also addicted to podcasting. That’s why I do it, even though I don’t like it, and also it’s not very popular and not earning me very much money. I said that because we’re watching Pluribus right now. 

Oren: Yeah. Plur- [they both mumble]. 

Chris: Plur- whatever. It’s Pluribus. 

Oren: It’s hard to look up posts about that because pluribus is a very commonly used Latin phrase, and it’s in an important U.S. motto. And so whenever I look it up, that’s what comes up. So it’s been hard to find actual commentary on that show, despite how popular it was. 

Chris: That’s a naming mistake, for sure. Gotta have a trademark-able, extra unique name. No, that’s a bad idea. So any case, this time we’re covering flawed protagonists because sometimes writers wanna write about people who are messed up. There’s lots to say about people who are messed up, and some people find them very novel and interesting or just find them relatable or empathize with their flaws. There are lots of reasons to wanna do this, even though it is tricky and can create problems. 

Oren: My favorite is when the flaw is only kind of a flaw. It’s like a little wink to the audience. We’ve been referencing the first episode of Pluribus in which our author main character thinks everyone who reads her books is a brain-dead walnut, and has no respect for them. And yeah we could say that’s a flaw, and maybe that’s part of a character arc. I’ve only seen the first three episodes, I don’t know. Fans tell me it’s part of a character arc, so we’ll see. But regardless of whether it is or not, a lot of people also feel that way, and the show is kind of winking at them, and they’re like, “Yeah, romantasy fans are brain-dead walnuts and are total trash.” So it validates them, and then we can do a little bit of an arc later if we want, and it’s no big deal. 

Chris: Turns out the flawed protagonist was the audience all along. 

Oren: Yeah, exactly. And so it works really well that way. I don’t really love that it does, but it does. You know, it would’ve worked on me if she had been writing a literary novel that everyone loved, and then she’d been like, “Uh, actually, literary fans are all snobs and, you know, don’t actually know what a good story is and can be tricked by just being told that the story is deep and meaningful.” That would work on me. I’d be like, “Yeah, okay, that’s a flaw, but also that’s- she’s so right.” [Chris laughs] So it’s just a matter of knowing who you’re appealing to, you know? 

Chris: I mean, that is one strategy for dealing with frustration. This is one of the issues that can happen with a flawed protagonist is, if they’re flawed in a way that makes it so they create problems for themselves or others or are bad at dealing with problems and you’ve got the audience invested in those problems and solving those problems as usually you would want to… it can be very frustrating. But one way to get around that is to just make them do bad things or sabotage themselves or others in ways that the audience can actually root for, and this would be kind of an example of that technique. It’s kind of a niche technique, but especially if this is something like getting revenge, maybe getting revenge isn’t productive, but if you make a villain hated enough, the audience is gonna be like, “Yeah, but it would be really nice just to see this person gets what’s coming to them.” So even though this is self-destructive, I can probably root for it anyway ’cause I get something out of it. You could have something like that happen. 

Oren: Of course, when it comes to flaws, we should acknowledge that there is a lot of misconception about them. That’s why if you go into any writing space, you will find a bunch of posts about how characters need flaws and how if a character doesn’t have flaws, that’s bad. You will hear the term Mary Sue thrown around a lot. And of course, in reality, many heroes do not have anything that would be realistically considered a flaw. What that discourse is usually actually getting at is whether or not they have too much candy, which is different. Like, Frodo doesn’t have too much candy, but he’s not really flawed in any meaningful way, not in a dramatic way. And I don’t think he would be a better character if he was. Someone like Othello is flawed, but Frodo’s not. Frodo’s just doing his best. 

Chris: And again, character arcs don’t require flaws either because… if a character, for instance, is grieving, I would not call that a flaw. That would be weird and judgmental. But they’re, of course they’re grieving, so it’s natural that they’re unhappy and having problems, and as part of their character arc, they can heal. But I certainly wouldn’t say they have a flaw that they have to overcome. 

Again, flaws, not really necessary, but writers like them for a variety of reasons. We can talk about what we would classify as a flaw, which is something that this person would be better if they did not have this trait. 

Oren: This would be a better person, and I mean that in the real-life sense, if they did not have that. Something like greedy or selfish or cowardly or judgemental. You know, these are things where they go beyond what might be a healthy version of that feeling. Like, there’s actually a place for judging people. You don’t wanna just completely take everything you see at face value. At that point, you might have a flaw of being too credulous. But obviously you can be too much of that, at which point we start calling them judgemental, and at that point it becomes a flaw.

With cowardly, it’s like, okay, if your character is scared of something that is dangerous, that’s not cowardly. Or if they run away from something that they can’t possibly defeat, that’s also not cowardly. But if they run away from something that they could probably have overcome if they had actually stayed to fight, you could say that’s cowardice, and you could say that’s a flaw to overcome.

Chris: And again, it doesn’t have to be something that makes them a jerk. I was just reading Stay for a Spell, and the character’s flaw is supposed to be that she’s too nice, and it’s a problem because she ends up doing what other people want instead of doing what she wants. Those kinds of meek characters… I like them, but again, with any flaw, it can turn people against a character. So that is one that could create frustration, right? If you have a character who is nice and lets other people walk all over them, that’s a situation where the reader could be invested in them solving their problems, and get frustrated when they just let people walk over them instead. 

As opposed to a quirk, which is what we call it when they have a trait that sometimes benefits them and sometimes disadvantages them. Quirks are great ’cause they tend to add a lot of interest. But you don’t feel like the quirk has to be eliminated. You don’t feel like it’s something that has to be a problem that has to be solved. It’s just a permanent interesting feature of the character that can create setbacks and advantages.

Oren: And we usually find it works best to focus on one flaw, especially at a time. ‘Cause if your character has a bunch of flaws, actual flaws as we’re describing them, that increases the chance significantly that your readers are just going to hate them and not want to read about them. But also it de-emphasizes the impact of any one flaw because you got all of them, so they just kind of become noise after a while.

I’ll never forget frigging “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel” recommending a laundry list of flaws, and… what are you talking about? 

Chris: That’s a bad idea. 

Oren: It’s especially funny after using Katniss Everdeen as an example in the beginning of Hunger Games. Like, she’s supposed to be flawed, and by flawed, you mean she’s a little grouchy? Is that a flaw? Wow, that’s, like, such a shallow definition of a flaw. 

Chris: I won’t say that you can never do more than one flaw because sometimes they can be kind of related to each other or connected together. But what does happen, and I’ve seen this in many works, is that when you have too many, it really muddies the waters when it comes to the character arc. It just becomes really unclear what their problem is, and what they need to learn, and then what the solution is, and when they have actually made progress… because we’re juggling too many things, and they tend to blur together. 

There’s just so much subjectivity, when it comes to a character’s personality and their emotional state, that we do have to focus on “Okay, what exactly is the issue here?” And if we have, like, five flaws, it’s really easy for those to blend into each other, and it just becomes, “wait, I don’t understand. What, what is their flaw? What do they need to learn?” And also, we’re not gonna be able to follow up on that many character arcs in the same book. That’s gonna be too much.

Similarly, we don’t want a flaw that’s super broad. Like immaturity, for instance, or selfishness are both flaws that can mean any number of behaviors. 

Oren: Yeah, you’d wanna zoom in a little bit. 

Chris: And that also just makes it really hard to deal with, whereas if we can pinpoint more specifically in what situations is this character immature, and how exactly do they act, or in what ways is this person selfish, and in what situations, and in what ways do they behave in a way that is self-centered, then it’s easier to address that and give that clarity, etcetera.

Oren: Say what we want about Pluribus, I do think it’s pretty impressive, especially in the early episodes, which is again, that’s what I’ve seen. They manage to give the protagonist, Carol, three pretty distinct flaws that so far haven’t really blurred together, which is always the concern. ‘Cause the first thing is that she is really disdainful of her readers, and again, that’s like a secret wink to the audience flaw, where a lot of the audience feels the same way, so you know, the impact is lessened.

Then she has serious anger problems, and then she’s also an alcoholic. And part of the way that they balance that is that her being an alcoholic doesn’t play a big role in these early episodes. It’s there, you can see it in the background, but it’s not brought to the fore the way her other flaws are. And then in the second and third episode, we focus much more on the anger problem because now if she gets too mad at the uwu murder virus hive mind, a bunch of people will die, so that’s a struggle that she has to try to keep it in check. And that one’s very sympathetic because the evil uwu murder virus hive mind is the most annoying thing anyone has ever invented. [Chris laughs]

So when she gets mad at it, I’m like, “Yes, it deserves for you to be mad at it. It’s the worst.” But she has to try not to because she doesn’t want to be responsible for people dying. 

Chris: I do have a little bit of frustration when she thinks of it as her fault when people die. Yes, you should learn to control your temper. That’s a good idea, but they’re the ones who decided to infect the entire planet with a virus where people would die if you got mad at them. That was their choice. That was their doing. Also, in doing that, they killed far more people than she does when she gets angry at them. So I don’t know… I get annoyed with that because when somebody brings up that it’s her fault and then she just accepts that, definitely feels like there’s authorial endorsement at that point, that we’re supposed to believe that it’s her fault that people get hurt when she gets angry. But it’s, it’s not her fault. 

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard for me to say at this point, ’cause again, this is a show that likes to keep its cards close to its chest, and at only three episodes I don’t really know where it’s going, and I don’t trust anything anyone says about this show. [Chris Laughs] Because I’ve seen how unhinged the discourse about it is.

Chris: Yeah. We’ve had so many instances where we’ll say something on our blog, and then somebody will be like, “Oh, but this book,…” in the comments. And if we have actually read that book, it is very often misrepresenting the story. And so now we just don’t trust what anybody says about any story ever until we go read it ourselves.

Oren: I will say, I don’t like Pluribus. I find it really boring most of the time. But I do find it believable that she thinks that it’s her fault, because she’s basically being constantly gaslit by everyone around her, both the hive mind and the other humans. To me it’s believable that she thinks that because she’s been bludgeoned into it. I don’t enjoy that. It’s not a show I would watch if I didn’t have a blog to talk about it on, but  it’s interesting. It’s kind of neat to see. 

Chris: Yeah, I do think, find it very hard when you have an unpleasant protagonist who bad things are happening to them. That is typically something that I do not enjoy seeing. At the same time, and we should talk about this more, we can talk about Widow’s Bay, one of the strategies for dealing with a protagonist who audiences just find them unpleasant and don’t really like them is to just have bad things happen to them because we get schadenfreude. We get satisfaction at seeing them punished for their bad karma.

And I will say with Pluribus, Carol is, as far as I can tell, just a very unpleasant person, and the Pluribus hive mind is a very unpleasant being. And so I’m just watching them make each other miserable

Oren: Yep. 

Chris: And also in many of these cases, the stakes seem relatively low, right? If there was another innocent person for them to hurt while they were going back and forth with each other, but I do get some amusement from that.

Oren: Oh man, Widow’s Bay. This is so… Such a cool thing. I hope you could do this in book form. So in Widow’s Bay we have the mayor, Tom, I think is his name, and he’s basically the mayor from Jaws, where he’s super obsessed with having the town make money, and the beaches are staying open despite all the spooky foreshadowing, and he is really disdainful of anyone else’s problems, ’cause he only cares about himself. And man, what a surprisingly interesting character, because so many bad things happen to him, and it’s just fun to watch. 

Chris: Yeah, that can happen. I definitely think, again, there’s a number of tactics that people use. So bad things happen to him, and we can kind of enjoy that because he’s not a very good person. Humor tends to help. I think a lot of stories that have really flawed protagonists use humor as an important tactic to sort of diffuse the unpleasantness of the situation. Because again, if you just have bad things happening to a bad person, and that’s your story, it can just be really miserable. But if it’s funny, then it adds a much lighter mood, and I think really helps.

Widow’s Bay in particular is often pretty funny. We do the whole thing where we’ve got a small town full of very quirky people who are themselves often very flawed, but it’s intended to be funny, and it works pretty well. That is quite an amusing show. 

Oren: And then of course, “Widow’s Bay” also balances out Loftis [Tom Loftis, main character in Widow’s Bay] a little bit because at the end of the day, despite how dismissive and snooty he is, his goal is actually important for everybody. Town infrastructure doesn’t pay for itself. The town needs revenue. So, you can sympathize with him, and then of course he starts trying to save the town once he realizes that the spooky magic is real. At that point he becomes a lot more likable. But even before that, once he’s taken enough lumps, then you’re like, “Okay, yeah, I mean, you’re a jerk, but you kind of paid for it, and also you do have a goal that I sort of sympathize with. Yeah, all right, Loftis, I guess you’re okay. You’re okay in my book, Loftis.” And then, of course, you could go the Eleanor Shellstrop route from The Good Place, which is a whole elaborate song and dance number to make it okay that this main character who abused old people is actually your favorite. And I admire them, honestly. Hats off that they managed to do that. 

Chris: Again, we have unnamed old people who are off-screen that she was defrauding. We see the call center that she worked at, but we don’t see any of the actual people that she harmed. The one time we see a person that she harmed, we make sure that this person is also somebody that we hate. So she has a roommate who is just the worst, and therefore when she does a bad thing to her roommate, we don’t get frustrated because we kind of wanna see her do the bad thing to the roommate that we hate, and we can cheer for that even though it’s bad. The other tactic. All of the tools are used here.

The fact that in The Good Place she is actually being punished, even in the very beginning she’s like, “Oh no, something bad could happen to me,” and she’s really stressed out about facing the consequences for her bad life. So when we see her backed into a corner and in a really bad place, that kind of mitigates, we’re kind of balancing that bad karma that she’s gotten and generating some sympathy for her, and be like, “Okay, yeah, she’s already been punished, so we don’t have to resent her anymore.” All of those tactics are what helps make Eleanor just a really character that we can root for despite the fact that she’s kind of an awful person at first. 

Oren: And so far we’ve been looking at characters whose flaws are, for the most part, pretty loud and proud, but there are also ways you can have characters who have more sympathetic flaws. Like, also from The Good Place, Chidi has really bad indecision. He’s so bad at making choices. And this isn’t a problem at first because we’re much more focused on Eleanor, and Chidi is trying to teach her ethics, and we don’t discover just how bad Chidi is at choosing things and how that hurts people around him until much later in the show when we like Chidi a lot by then, but, like, this is also a more sympathetic flaw because we know that he’s trying to fix it and he just can’t. So that is another option of course. 

Chris: And again, the way that you frame it, so if it’s something that we’re really invested in a certain outcome and Chidi’s indecisiveness is blocking that, we could always get frustrated. But when we have a flashback to when he was alive, and he hurt a friend through his bad Kantian ethics, that’s not a situation that we’re particularly invested in, so we don’t have the same level of emotional response to that. Whereas if you have, we talked about the character that’s too nice, or somebody who’s reckless or irresponsible, if we’re really invested in their success and they just completely drop the ball in a really obvious way, that’s gonna be much harder to deal with.

Another thing that I wanna mention, ’cause you asked about, “could we do this in writing versus can we doing it when we have a charismatic actor?” Obviously, it’s nice when there’s a charismatic actor to add some nuance to dialogue lines, whereas in text we kind of have to set the tone, and it’s hard to take that balance there. But one thing that you can watch out for is sometimes when you have a really unpleasant protagonist, you just wanna minimize how much internal narration you have. That would be the narration that reflects their thoughts and feelings. This is not a tactic that you would want to normally use. Most of the time we want our audience to be as close to our protagonist as possible and get really familiar with them, because that tends to build attachment to them and build emotional investment.

But if you have a protagonist who’s just really unpleasant, or it can happen if your protagonist tends to pontificate a lot inside, or beat themself up, or has a very negative viewpoint, who’s judging people, complaining, thinking about how much they hate themself, any lots of negativity, if you have a lot of internal narration where you’re reflecting that negativity, that becomes much more unpleasant. So sometimes with a character like that, it’s helpful to just draw back and try to put less of their thoughts in. That’s one thing that you can look out for. 

Oren: It’s been interesting to read The Tainted Cup books because, you know, that’s a Sherlock and Watson concept. Ana is the Sherlock stand-in, and she’s doing the thing that’s very popular for Sherlock and has been to a certain extent since the original stories where Sherlock is really mean to everybody, but it’s okay because he’s smarter than everyone.

And I for one just think it’s cool that women are allowed to do that now. It used to be only male characters could get away with that, so #feminism. 

Chris: That’s one thing I wanted to bring up earlier is, like, right now we’re assuming- That we’ve got a thorough endorsement for the fact that this character is flawed and should be better, and is kind of a miserable person. Whereas in some stories, it’s like the character is a jerk, but it’s meant for empowerment, where the audience is meant to be like, “Yeah, because I actually would like to be a jerk to people. I would like the freedom to be a jerk, and so I will like this character who’s a jerk.” And that one is kind of a different case. This is the Rick and Morty thing.

Oren: Is that a flaw exactly? I don’t know. The story’s not really treating it like one, but of course in real life would be a flaw. And so you get all kinds of people who are very confused who are like, “You’re not supposed to want to be like Rick.” I’m like, “Am I not? The show’s doing a weird thing if I’m not supposed to wanna be like Rick.” 

Chris: But I think Ana in the Ana-Din books are kind of similar, where we’re kind of doing the winky thing where, yeah, she’s technically she’s flawed, but she’s not. She’s never wrong about anything, always gets everything right. She solves Din’s problems for him.

I’m have not gotten to the third book yet. I’m going to soon, but in the first two books… I hope it changes for the third book, I really like this series, but in the first two books she always solves all of Din’s problems for him. And so even though she says things like, “Oh, you know, you don’t want a, a super cool superhuman person to be ruling over the rest of us,” what we’re shown is actually that would be good because she’s always perfect, even if she eats gross oysters 

Oren: She does like to eat gross oysters. That is true. 

Chris: One other thing you can think about in terms of managing a protagonist people might not like and who is really flawed is what is the right level of stakes to have? So if you have really high stakes, that does make it easier to care about a plot even if the protagonist is a jerk. We may not care if, for instance, Carol in Pluribus was miserable. I mean, I don’t care that much if she’s miserable. But if she was trying to save humanity and we felt like she has an actual chance of her doing so, then we could still be invested in that even if she’s kind of a bad person. On the other hand, if this is a character who’s gonna bumble their problem-solving and could be very frustrating, then it’s usually better to have lower stakes and kind of lower investment in those plot outcomes so that people are less frustrated when the character just doesn’t do very well.

So Carol so far has been… We’ve definitely seen scenes where she is self-sabotaging. She gets together to meet other people who are like her, the few other people on Earth, and she’s extremely bad at talking to them. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s probably my most hated scene in the show so far. Not for Carol reasons. I just don’t believe that everyone else is so blasé about this.

Chris: It’s definitely contrived, yeah.

Oren: Yeah. I, I find that extremely unlikely. But anyway, that’s not about Carol. 

Chris: I don’t actually think it’s possible for her to save humanity from this hive mind, if she messes that up, it’s not as frustrating as it would be because we don’t really have much in the way of stakes. It’s more does she have other human beings that she can connect to? So that’s just one thing to think about in terms of when you have a character who’s unpleasant. Are they gonna be frustrating? Is it better to have higher stakes and more plot investment, or lower stakes so that we’re not as frustrated?

Oren: All right. Well, now we will finally resolve our flaw of keeping the podcast going for too long. Aha!

Chris: I know we seem like bad people, but if you just hang in there, you can change us. Just become a patron. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: Twist: any form of success makes us even worse. 

So now 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.

Authors generally know what to do when their hero is threatened by an assassin. The resulting sword fight may not be easy to write, but there’s an understanding of who needs to be stopped and how. But what about conflicts where the “antagonist” is a force of nature or simply people’s apathy toward buying baked goods? That last one can be a real problem for heroes who are trying to save their school through a bake sale. This week, we talk about how to write conflicts in which there isn’t a conscious force pushing back.

Generously transcribed by Steve. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: Uh-oh, there’s a flood coming, and I’m going to sword fight it. And then after that, we have to put on a bake sale to save the school, so I will argue with the brownies to be more delicious. 

Chris: Oh, no, those brownies. They are very malicious, always trying to be as disgusting as possible. 

Oren: ‘Cause that’s how conflict works when you don’t have an obvious human or human-equivalent antagonist, is that you just personify whatever is around, and then you use the same tactics against it as you would against a human enemy, right?

Chris: Did you know that we only sink in the water sometimes because the water’s very angry with us? 

Oren: Yeah, it’s actually a character flaw on the water’s part. It is malice in the form of H2O. So today we are talking about conflicts with non-character antagonists. I’m probably gonna slip and say non-human throughout the episode. That’s not technically accurate because a character can be an animal in certain circumstances. 

Chris: A character needs intent. An animal can have intent. You could say a robot has intent if you want. But we’re talking about, you know, antagonists that do not have intent or any kind of awareness or sentience.

Oren: Right. And, a protagonist needs to be a character, as far as I know. 

Chris: Correct, because if they don’t have intent, then they don’t have agency. We could get into lots of theoretical stuff of what happens if you’re not using tension as your primary plotter, but this is about conflict, so we’re talking about tension here. And so we do need to have points where a character or protagonist has agency, and they don’t have agency unless they have intent. 

Oren: Yeah, so barring some extremely weird edge case that I haven’t considered, the main character, your hero, needs to be a character of some kind, but the antagonist, the force opposing them, doesn’t necessarily have to be a character.  This can be obvious in the form of a natural disaster, or in, maybe in the case of a panicked crowd, which isn’t a character. It’s technically made up of people, but it doesn’t act like a character. Or, it could be that you need to make money at a bake sale or something. Or, maybe in the more specific example, at a bake sale it would be that people are kind of suspicious of your brownies ’cause they look a little odd ’cause you used non-standard ingredients.  But they’re actually very delicious, and so you have to overcome people’s hesitancy to try the odd-looking brownies. Something like that, right? 

Chris: Yeah. Those are some great examples, but I think this instance of the odd-shaped brownies making people hesitant really highlights kind of how artificial this concept of a quote-unquote, “antagonist” is.  Because really what these are, are just plot problems, right? They’re obstacles. And so treating them… When we say antagonist, treating them that it’s a thing- or like it’s one thing – is in all cases very artificial. Like in this scenario with the brownies, is it the odd shape of the brownies that’s the antagonist?  Is it the people? Is it their hesitancy itself?

Oren: Is it the social construct of money? 

Chris: [Laughs]. Capitalism. Capitalism was the antagonist all along. 

Oren: Uh, excuse me. You can’t give capitalism credit for the concept of exchanging money for food. Wow, that’s super capitalist of you. Really capitalist-centric. Pardon me.

Chris: Oh, no. Maybe the antagonist is my capitalist-centrism. 

Oren: Yeah, exact- very. I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore.  But yes.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. But the point is that when you have a conflict, you have your protagonist Who is facing, and they could actually face a variety of obstacles which we could all call antagonists, right?  And they can have more… It’s not like there’s just one antagonist. Like, when you have a villain, usually what happens is your hero does something, the villain does something, and the villain is directly responsible for most of the obstacles your hero faces. But I find in a lot of  non-antagonistic conflicts, they appear as often a little bit more like bad luck, where there’s not just one antagonist.  There’s a variety of things that go wrong, and every time there’s a problem or obstacle that’s technically an antagonist. So again, for simplicity, it’s convenient to use the word antagonist because we have to talk about what is opposing the hero, but it’s also kind of a very artificial concept, especially when you don’t have a villain who’s actually opposing the hero on purpose.

Oren: Yeah. And so it’s worth asking, why does it matter? Like, why are we talking about this? And the reason is that as I have edited manuscripts over the years, I have discovered that authors…it’s not like they are always great at writing a traditional conflict with a human-ish villain, but they tend to have an easier time with that than when the conflict lacks a character antagonist.  Because when there’s an enemy, there’s an assassin, and they’re trying to get you, so you punch him. That’s pretty straightforward. Or if it’s a social conflict, you argue the chancellor down so he doesn’t pass the evil tax cut bill, or you mind meld with the alien rock monster so it doesn’t eat the town, et cetera.

That’s… Not like there aren’t a billion ways to mess that up, but I have found that writers tend to get it better than the bake sale example that I mentioned. They will often…I will read stories where there is a bake sale, and it’s important. The bake sale is gonna save the school maybe.  But how? How is that going to work? And it’s very difficult for a lot of authors to make that real enough to be a satisfying conflict. And so you often end up with conflict where stuff just kinda happens And it’s like, yeah, I guess we made enough money, or we didn’t make enough money. But why?

What was the turning point? What was the dramatic effort? What made that compelling other than just watching things happen? Authors struggle with this a lot. 

Chris: Yeah. I feel like we’ve read a lot of cozies and we have an obstacle, and then the protagonist just tries one thing and it automatically works, right?  Like in Legends and Lattes, oh, I know, we’ll just… We need customers. Let’s just do this one thing. Oh, look, we have tons of customers, right? 

Oren: Yeah, it worked actually. 

Chris: It worked. 

Oren: [Laughs] 

Chris: That was super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Yeah or my favorite one of course was in that story where they had the bread maker.  God, Skin Map. 

Oren: Yeah, The Skin Map. Not a title for a book you would think was about a bakery. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: There is also a skin map in it. 

Chris: Yeah. There’s multiple POVs in that book, and the bakery was just the best POV where it’s basically a side quest. But again, we had problems getting customers, and then we just did one thing.  Oh, wow, it’s so easy, you know? We have sweets that people will buy ’cause the coffee’s too bitter, nor why people wanna buy coffee. 

Oren: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. And then it can go the other direction too, and I don’t know of as many published examples of this just because readers are sensitive to failure.  The character can also be like, “We’re gonna save the school with this bake sale.” And then the bake sale happens, and it didn’t work, right? We made a big thing about it, and they just didn’t make enough money. And it’s like all right, well, that’s frustrating. Why didn’t you make enough money?  What occurred that made that not happen? And that doesn’t happen as often in published stories I think ’cause it tends to get weeded out more, but I see it a fair amount in my unpublished manuscripts that I work on. And so the end result of all of this is that you end up with characters that are just kind of milling around.  They don’t really know what they’re doing. The reader doesn’t know what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and that hurts tension, and then it hurts satisfaction. And if you do that too many times, you won’t be able to create tension again ’cause the readers won’t believe you, and it’s a vicious cycle.

Chris: All right. So how do we do this? How do we create a detailed conflict when we have a non-character antagonist? 

Oren: Well, in some cases, if it’s something like a natural disaster, you can sort of treat the natural disaster the same way that you would treat a character antagonist. Like, “Oh no, there’s a flood.  We have to escape the flood.” Well, that’s a life and death situation. It’s fairly straightforward. You still need to create the back and forth that Chris has described a few times. 

Chris: Yeah. So I’ll get specific about the back and forth. So in a conflict, we should see a pattern where both the protagonist and the antagonist are acting, and this kind of reflects tension structure.  So the antagonist strikes first, creates a threat. The protagonist has to scramble to sort of respond to that, and then the antagonist responds to the antagonist. This is very much just like a conversation where people respond to the last thing that the other person said. That’s kind of ideally what you want to happen, and you want both sides to go back and forth.

We’ve seen a lot of stories where this happened in “Skin of the Sea”, where we had kind of a situation that was supposed to be a conflict but wasn’t really. More like “Calamity”, where the character is out and they’re fighting a storm, but there’s… The storm is happening to the protagonist, but there’s no sense the protagonist can actually intervene in events and do anything, right?

And that’s the purpose of the protagonist. That’s what the protagonist is for. And then what happens in that sort of scenario where, oh, we’re being buffeted by the wind, and the waves are crashing over us, and all of these things are happening…but there’s no sense of the protagonist responding to them and doing anything, is that we kind of start to tune out because it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  There’s no edge of our seat, you know, will the protagonist make it or will the antagonist make it? The antagonist is just gonna get to do what they want, and we’re just waiting till it’s over. And this, I think, is one of the things that people find tricky when they have a non-character antagonist, right?

So, oh, the wave is in the boat. All right, now the boat is sinking ’cause it’s full of water. Okay, so the protagonist has to intervene in order to avoid complete disaster. So okay, I’m gonna grab something that can hold water and start trying to bucket out the water. And then we have something else happen, and again, it can be hard to think of if this is not…’Cause, like, a villain or something with intent can always choose how to respond, whereas it looks more like luck when it’s a non-villain antagonist. So what bad thing can happen? Oh, well, maybe when my protagonist was leaning over the side to dump out water, they accidentally tipped over, and that’s kind of…It looks like accident, it looks like bad luck, but it’s also they would be less likely to tip over if they were not in the middle of a storm, and that happened because of their last action, because they were trying to get the water out of the boat, and that went wrong. 

Oren: Could do the classic thing where you’re putting the water off the side of the boat, and then because of the shift in the wind or whatever, the big spar that holds the sail swings around and bonks you right in the head.  That’s classic scenario. Uh Yeah. 

Chris: So in any situation, that’s kind of what we’re looking for. Like, in “Legends and Lattes”, what if we’re like, “Hey, customers, I’ve got this magic elixir. Come into my coffee shop. I know you don’t understand what coffee is.” They’re like, “Ooh, we like magic elixir that makes us awake.”  And then, you know, they try it like, “Oh, gosh, this is bitter. You’re trying to poison us.”

Oren: [Laughs]

Chris: Right? What kind of bad luck, what can go wrong to kind of create those obstacles and create that kind of back and forth between the protagonist trying to intervene in some ways. And again, the protagonist doesn’t have to do good things when they intervene.  They’re trying to… they should be trying to succeed generally. But they can do the wrong thing and get a bad result, as long as they do something and change what happens. And that’s why a protagonist, of course, needs to be a character and needs intent. 

Oren: Yeah. And so with this one we have a fairly straightforward set of stakes and/or thresholds that the character has to meet in order to succeed.  And the issue with this kind of conflict with a natural disaster or with having to climb down a steep cliff face or something like that, is that writers often have a difficult time creating that back and forth that Chris was describing when there isn’t a character-level enemy doing that stuff.  And Chris has described how you get past that. 

The next stage of difficulty is the kind of conflict that doesn’t have the inherent clear-cut what success or failure looks like. And these are the things I’ve been talking about. These are the things like the bake sale, or writing a paper, or making a sword.  What does success at the bake sale look like? That’s not as obvious. Or how do you know if you have succeeded at “sword”? How will the reader know that you did good or bad? 

Chris: If you accidentally create a shield, you have failed at “sword”. 

Oren: Yeah, if you did, if you did a bad enough job, you’ve created a different implement.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And if it’s, like, really short, it might not be a huge thing. I’m remembering the swordsmithing scene in the Prydain books, and it’s pretty short. He doesn’t spend a lot of time smithing, so it’s not as big a deal that we don’t know what it means to make a good sword. But if you were doing that as an extended thing, and making a sword can take a while, you would need some way for the reader to be able to judge how you’re doing.  Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of question marks. Yeah, I guess the sword is being made, presumably. I’ll take your word for it. 

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in particular when we’re talking about, okay, what does success look like, obviously conflicts need tension, so this should have stakes of some kind, right?

So what disaster, what bad thing are we trying to avert by doing the bake sale, by making the sword, or whatever else it is? If we have to make a sword to impress somebody who will then train us in sword fighting, what is the threshold that the sword has to meet in order to avert getting kicked out?

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And not having any training, for instance. Or for a bake sale, assume that we’ve got some issue with money involved. And you can, of course, be sneaky and do a little switcheroo later. Conflict doesn’t always have to work out exactly the way it looks like it’s going to, and often it’s more fun that way.  But for example, with a bake sale, a pretty standard way of trying to make so readers can understand how your characters are doing is to set an amount of money you need to raise and have the character be able to have an idea of how close they are to that goal. They’re not necessarily tracking every dollar and cents, but know that you have to make $5,000.  And then you can have an idea of how close you are. And once you can do that, then you can set child arcs and try turning points to get different things done. You can do the back and forth that Chris has described. And then you might end up with a different result. You might end up that they don’t make the money actually, but they tried so hard, and that impressed someone enough that they’ll put in a good word at the school board meeting or something.

So there are different ways you can change what ends up happening, but readers need some idea of how well your characters are doing, otherwise nothing that’s happening matters. 

Chris: Yeah. So again, at the end of the day, do we avert the stakes or the worst case scenario, or do we not? And the goal itself, though, can change, right?

So our goal is to, for instance, we’ve got a bake sale and we’re trying to make $5,000. And so we can actually fail and not make the goal, but then if we still find another way to avert the stakes, oh, we didn’t make $5,000, but that’s ’cause we were really nice and didn’t wanna use unethical sales tactics.  Somebody then really liked us and then wanted to donate a bunch of money after the bake sale, so we still averted the stakes. That all works. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: So I had another situation that I think is a good example of this not going quite right is at the end of “The Spell Shop” where we have a storm that’s for the climax, and I think the problem they have is we establish, okay, they did a good job of establishing why this storm is bad. And why it’s gonna cause havoc, because we have storms earlier in the story that cause damage, almost kill somebody, and there are storms that are happening because usually magic now has to be used to kind of manage the island and the ecosystem. And since they’ve been deprived of magic workers to take care of the weather, now these storms have started.

So we kind of have a chance to establish the storm’s the threat before we have a big storm happen at the climax. And then they have this method, their kind of plan for what they’re gonna do during the conflict to try to take care of the storm, is that they have to cast, like, a group spell together. 

But then their issue is they make this spell to try to establish why this is gonna be difficult.They make the spell very finicky, so supposedly you have to pronounce every syllable correctly, and the group all has to say it together perfectly. Then what happens during the conflict is it doesn’t feel like there’s any room for setbacks without complete failure. So you’ve got two options. Either they can just say it perfectly and it looks too easy, or they can say it not perfectly, but keep going, and it feels like not saying it perfectly didn’t matter after all.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Right? And so we don’t really have a, some way to have, like, actual setbacks happen built into this spell system. I still think there is more that could have been done. I think the author could have had somebody maybe pause first or say it in a squeaky voice because something is blown at them.

Oren: Uh-huh. 

Chris: Something that would’ve been more forgiving is if they need a certain number of people saying the syllables or the spell could die. But if a person can’t say them correctly because the storm is doing something, they could stop chanting, but that starts to weaken the spell, and the storm starts to get stronger.

So if something bad happens and too many people stop chanting, the storm starts getting more and more out of hand, so that we have some level of give and take that can happen. Again, just like if you had a villain, you don’t want your villain to be so fierce that they can just kill somebody with their mind.

[Both laugh]

Chris: ‘Cause that just ends the conflict instantly, and we don’t want the protagonist to be able to do that. Again, that ends the conflict instantly. So it’s the same with our non-character obstacles. We need something other than complete success or complete failure. And this spell where you have to say every single syllable right or the spell supposedly goes wrong doesn’t offer multiple states where things can be going wrong or going right.

Oren: Right. Because in theory if you mess up even one of those, then it’s over, right? So where is the ability for characters to fail and thus raise the tension that way? ‘Cause by the nature of this conflict, they can only ever win with a perfect score, which I’m not gonna say it’s impossible to do that, but man, that’s rough. That would be very hard. 

Chris: Right. So what happens is they don’t say it perfectly and it’s clear, but it doesn’t seem to matter because as far as we know, but then at the end it turns out, oh, well we did get it quite right, but then like, ah, what was it? Flowers fell from the sky or something. 

Oren: We, you know, we, we got some magical help, right?

Chris: Right. The point is that we make it so that the actual obstacles are meaningless in effect, right? Because we can’t have those obstacles just instantly end the conflict. 

Oren: Yeah. To use an anonymized version of one from a client’s story so that I’m not putting this client on blast as they say, have a conflict where the main characters need to have an auction to raise funds for their museum, right?  They need to be able to… If they don’t raise enough money at this auction, their museum’s gonna close. And so the first problem that we had with this conflict was that it was very unclear whether it was actually even possible to raise enough money at this auction to keep the museum open because everything was very nebulous and we knew the museum needed a lot of money, but not how much, nor if there was any rough estimate of how valuable the items they had for auction were.

So that was weird going into it in the first place. You’re like, “Is this… Does any of this matter? Can we win here or are we already doomed?” Or potentially is this gonna be super easy because actually every item is worth five bazillion dollars? So you have no way of knowing. And then once we were in there, the auction continued to have problems where the auction just kind of happens and there isn’t any focus on what the characters can do to either succeed or fail.

And so as a result, then at the end they find out, “Yes, we’ve made this much money.” And I’m like, “Okay, was that enough?” And then they’re like, “Yes, that was enough.” And, like, “All right, yay. We, we won, gang.” 

Chris: Yeah. We definitely want in any conflict to try to communicate what are the implications of what’s happening, and help readers project ahead to what could happen, right?

So … And this again happens with really complex conflicts that are social or magical is very common. If you have, like, a magical fight, it’s like, “Well, how does it even work?” Or technical, where if you have a sword fight and you see one character swing the sword at another character, we automatically know how bad that is, what’s gonna happen if the sword hits. We have some idea of how tricky it is gonna be to evade the sword or block it. Just, we know those things inherently. But if you get into things that…they’re very much social constructs where it just everything depends, or it’s magical, right? So it’s completely made up, that basic: what is happening?  What are the implications of what’s happening? Like, if the protagonist is doing something, why are they doing that? And if the antagonist is attacking or creating an obstacle or what have you, what are the implications of that, and how difficult is it gonna be to deal with? And what could happen if it’s not dealt with?

And all of those things sometimes have to be explained in a lot more detail because we just don’t know that inherently, ’cause it’s not a situation that we’re familiar- 

Oren: Yeah, it is interesting that with a sufficiently arbitrary magic system you can arrive at the same problem even with a human antagonist. “The Age of Myth” books are like that, or at least the one that I read was, where the big fight at the end is between these two elf wizards, and I have no idea what they can do. They’re dropping buildings on each other, and summoning ancient ghosts. And I’m like, “Okay, is that a problem?”

Chris: Is that a problem? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, as far as we know, their opponent is so powerful that summoning ancient ghosts, no deal. You know, no big deal, I’ll just summon an ancient exorcist…

Oren: Right!

Chris: … to take care of this problem. 

Oren: The ultimate example of this, of course, being that weird fight in “The Sandman” show where Dream and… 

Chris: Oh, God.  Yeah 

Oren:… what was it, Satan? Who was he fighting? I think it was Satan. 

Chris: Oh, man. I’m gonna… We’re gonna be talking about that one forever. 

Oren: Yeah. Just took turns saying that they were a more powerful thing than the other person. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: It was just the most pointless scene I’ve witnessed in quite a while. 

Chris: It really lost me when one person was like, “I’m hope,” and the other person was like, “I am the death of hope.”

It’s like, really? You could just do that for anything. “I am a wolf.” “I am the death of wolf.” Like, okay. Well, “I’m the life of wolf.” 

Oren: I’m the death of the death of hope. 

[Both laugh]

Chris: I’m the death of death of hope. Oh, man. 

Oren: That would be so great. Oh. I’d love that. So anyway, going back to my auction example, if you were going to do something like that, to create the back and forth you would first need some idea of how difficult this is going to be. And it should be difficult, but achievable. If it seems impossible, then there’s no point.

So difficult, but possible. And then you might have an opening scene where the protagonist is able to drum up a lot of interest in this item, and hooray, they make a lot of money. Not all the money, but they make a decent amount off the item. Decent child arc turning point. But then, uh-oh, one of their most valuable pieces that they were going to sell has been stolen or broken.

How are they gonna make up the difference? And so then they have to find something they weren’t planning to sell, but has, like, special meaning to a rich person in the crowd. And there you go. That’s an example of how you could do an auction sequence like that and have it be meaningful whether they succeed or not.

Chris: Yeah. It’s also very helpful, again, if things chain together nicely, and this can be harder to do if you don’t have a villain. So you want one thing that happens to affect something else. So, ideally if you make that sale and you’re really excited, and just as you’re grabbing the item to give it away, the other item breaks.

So we have a little bit of cause and effect relationship that ripples down as the conflict continues. Again, this is… I wouldn’t obsess over this because this matters more at a large scale, and we’re talking about usually very small scale things. But having some level of, all right, because I decided to sell this item in the auction at a discount, now everybody’s expecting discounts, and doesn’t wanna pay full price anymore because I set their expectations for the prices too low, and now I’m having more problems. 

That kind of thing is just very helpful. It gives a feeling of the conflict evolving and changing, and that makes it so that everything that happens matters. 

Oren: Yeah. You don’t usually want the conflict to feel like a smooth advance towards victory, which is another problem that can come up if you’re focused too much on, like, the goal of making $10,000, right?

This is one of the reasons why Chris always mentions that the character goal model is not complete, because if your goal is to make $10,000, you might think it would work great for your character to make a series of sales that add up to $10,000, and great, but you don’t want that smooth progression. That makes it feel too easy and kind of boring. 

Chris: Yeah, I think your last example, Oren, was actually a great way to address that. There’s multiple ways to address that. One is to have things go kind of miserably in the beginning and then get a whole bunch of sales at the end, but the other is to restore uncertainty, right?

So what happens when the protagonist gets a success (at any scale) is it makes the whole conflict, the whole challenge look easier, which is why if we succeeded selling an item for $2,000, then we’re a step closer to getting our total goal of $10,000 that we need to avert the stakes, and then it just seems less difficult to do the next 2,000 and then the next 2,000, and then tension goes down and down because it looks easier and easier.

Whereas, as you pointed out, okay, I managed to successfully sell one item, but while I was doing that, I was distracted, and then somebody made off with our most valuable item in the auction. Now it’s much harder than it was before. And what I’ve done there is I’ve kind of, even though successfully selling the item makes this whole auction seem less difficult, I’ve then raised the difficulty by having another obstacle happen so that we’re kind of restoring uncertainty.

And so you can actually get incrementally closer to the total victory that way as long as something goes wrong to restore uncertainty and make it appear more and more difficult. It’s kind of this little trick we do with tension structure, where even as we get closer to victory, it looks harder and harder to get to victory, and we have to just make that happen.

Oren: Speaking of which, I know it looked like it was getting harder and harder for us to end the podcast, but actually it’s time to do that, and we’re going to succeed by ending the podcast. 

Chris: If you’d like to save Mythcreants from the twin antagonists of burnout and poverty, your turning point is to become our patron.

Just go to patreon.com/mythgrants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Cathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. 

We will talk to you next week.

These days, talk about copying stories is often related to LLMs and other slop generators, but did you know that writers can copy each other without any need for abominable intelligence? Sometimes, it’s not even a bad thing to do! But other times it is, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of it. Or at least, we’ll get to the “I know it when I see it” of it.

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

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

Oren:  And I’m Oren. 

Chris: This time we’re doing “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” an episode that we absolutely did not just do last week.

Oren:  This is a new episode. It’s different. Why would you say it’s the same? 

Chris:  It’s on the moon now. We’re just talking on the moon, so it’s very different and that will have a very large impact on this episode and how we talk about breaking the fourth wall.

Oren: We’re talking about breaking the fifth wall, because moon stations are pentagons. That’s just how it works. 

Chris:  That’s right, the fifth wall. Completely different than the fourth wall. Absolutely not inspired by the fourth wall in any way. 

Oren: Yeah, don’t even worry about it. 

Chris: Today we’re going to talk about should you copy a story for your story? Is that a good idea, a bad idea? When would you, when shouldn’t you? 

Oren:  Yeah, how literal is that phrase, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”? That’s the question. That’s really what we’re trying to answer today. 

Chris:  Obviously copying can mean a lot of different things. It’s pretty broad. But it can mean anything from, this is where you get some very loose inspiration from, to very specific. [Laughs] We have seen some things that I found kind of shocking in how on the nose they were with what they were copying. 

Oren:  Yeah. Occasionally you’re like, “Really? This is just a book that I’ve read before.” 

Chris:  We hear this a lot — and I think it can happen later too — but we hear this a lot with newer writers, right? A lot of times it is trying to be some kind of copy of our favorite story. I think because, you know, that was magical and we’re just trying to recreate the magic. So, if you really like Lord of the Rings, you might write Eragon. 

Oren:  Yeah, and it’s interesting because to a certain extent, that is a function of how old the story is. Once a story is old enough, it stops feeling weird to do “my” version of it. At this point, even Lord of the Rings is still too recent. We had a Lord of the Rings-like boom after Lord of the Rings, and now we’ve finally moved past it, and now if you’re like, “I’m doing Lord of the Rings, but different,” people will be like, “Try something new.” They will give you the side eye. But if you say, “I’m doing ‘Hansel and Gretel’ but different,” they’ll be like, “Ooh, that sounds interesting. Tell me more about this Hansel and Gretel retelling that you’re doing.” We can’t do Lord of the Rings retellings yet. 

Chris:  I mean that is still a copyrighted work that you’d have to spend so much money to write something that is officially Lord of the Rings.  But at the same time, so many people have made off-brand copies, right? That it’s almost cliche but also forbidden simultaneously. That’s not a great place for it to be in. 

Oren: And I mean a lot of it is just sort of set by the legality of United States copyright durations. But, like, I don’t know, technically speaking, Winnie-the-Pooh is public domain now. But outside of these low-budget horror parodies, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of people doing a Winnie-the-Pooh retelling. It just doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen yet. 

Chris: I mean, maybe. I guess it’s a kid’s story, right?

Oren: Right. 

Chris: I never consumed Winnie-the-Pooh when I was a kid, so I don’t know. But that kind of seems like if it’s public domain, it might show up in new Winnie-the-Pooh stories in the children’s books section, and we might not hear about it because it might not get the level of buzz of the stories that we hear about, but maybe something like that might happen.

Oren: An example that people were totally doing this even when the stories were technically still in copyright is, like, Sherlock Holmes, for example. Well, some of the later stories were in copyright longer than you would’ve thought, but people were still doing retellings of Sherlock Holmes even when it was partially still copyrighted, and that didn’t seem weird, right? That didn’t seem creatively problematic. It was just cool to do because people like to see different takes on Sherlock Holmes. You still need to do something interesting, but even if copyright wasn’t an issue, I don’t think anyone would be interested in my “What if Wheel of Time, but they’re all crabs!” take. I just don’t think that would be interesting to people. 

Chris: I’m sure somebody wants to read Wheel of Time as crabs, at least for a laugh. But it’s not really the same, though. 

Oren:  Yeah.

Chris: I mean, if it is really in the public domain, right, because we were just talking last week about, for instance, Little Women, and how many adaptations there are because it’s public domain. And so if it’s a famous story and anybody who wants to can make an adaptation, there’s tons of adaptations. So if you don’t have a super huge budget, like you’re making a movie, then you need to put a spin on it, or you don’t really have anything to sell your story on, why would your story get attention? 

By the way, past Chris Winkle could benefit from this knowledge. Not that she really cared when she did a “Snow Queen” retelling. 

Oren: Follow the Sound of Snow is an excellent novella. 

Chris: Yeah. It happened to hit at a time when the fairy tale retellings were receding as a trend, which is the worst time. But also, it just didn’t have an easy hook, right? It’s not like “The Snow Queen,” but Gerda is dead or something. 

Oren: “The Snow Queen,” but crabs. 

Chris: [Laughing] “The Snow Queen,” but crabs. Or like Cinder House, which is a Cinderella retelling that did actually get nominated for Hugo, right? Yeah. It’s Cinderella, but Cinderella is dead, is a ghost in the house, right? Just something that’s really obvious you can sell the book on where it’s different. 

Oren:  That one definitely deserves to win. That’s easily the best of the six novellas that were Hugo nominated this year. 

Chris: If it’s public domain that’s what you want. But what happens with a lot of new writers is they see their favorite story, and then they just want to write their own and recapture the magic. And usually that’s something that doesn’t work out so well because it doesn’t have–  Again, we want the author to put in their unique vision, and a lot of times you’re just doing the same thing that somebody else did, but not as good.

Oren: Right. I mean, the classic scenario that we run into a lot with our clients is that the story has all of the problems of the work that it’s copying, and none of the things that made the work it’s copying good. It’s easy to copy the mistakes. It’s harder to copy the parts that worked well. 

Chris: Yeah, because you need the same situation, and you’d be surprised how much changing one thing breaks something else and it doesn’t work anymore. So that’s something that happens. I think it’s good for people to, if they’re going to take inspiration from another story, just go into it intentionally.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And of course, when we have that first big idea, then we just have to write it. There’s often not a lot of intention that goes into that. And sometimes I feel like people just aren’t necessarily consciously aware of where their inspiration comes from. Like, I had one client that the story was clearly very based on a video game, and I asked him what his inspiration was, and he named some other things. Now, it’s also possible that he knew it was heavily based on this video game, and he just didn’t want to say that because he thought it would make him look bad or something. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But it was a situation where the same world elements from this video game that were named the same things that just made it very obviously on the mark, right? And he was like, “Oh yeah, now that you mention it, maybe I did take inspiration from that video game.” It’s like, you didn’t know? Because when I was looking at the work, I was like, “Why is this named this? That’s a weird name for it to be called. I wonder why it’s named that.” And it turns out it’s just because that’s what it was called in the video game.

Oren: Really weird to be reading a story inspired by Solitaire, let me tell you. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: My general advice for writers is when they are thinking about if they see something in a book that they really like, and this is not an old book where you could copy it and then put your own spin on it and call it a retelling — we’ll assume that’s off the table — you can use that, but you have to change it to the point that it can’t be recognized. If a lot of people can read this and reliably say, “Oh yeah, you took this from such and such,” that’s not great.

Chris:  We do get people, though, who ask us because they’re worried about copying where it’s just fine, because there are so many repeated tropes and things like that, that like, okay yeah, your model book has this, but tons of books have this. So a particular type of character or a particular type of plot, right? Those things oftentimes are so common that they’re not going to really make your work stand out. Just like that copyright case, Oren, you were looking into where broody love interests came up.

Oren: So this was the case of Lynn Freeman versus Tracy Wolff, in which Freeman was suing because she claimed that Wolff had copied her YA vampire romance novel. Wolff’s book is actually published. The series is called Crave. I read the first one because I was really curious after I read the whole, like, 200-page ruling.  And the ruling was against Freeman, that no, actually, there was no copying here.  And in fact, actually there’s a twist on this. Wolff was just awarded attorney’s fees in that case because the judge basically acknowledged that, yeah, this actually didn’t have any merit and the plaintiff should’ve known that, and the only reason that it took so long to resolve is that none of the previous judges who had this were willing to read the books to see if the claims were accurate.

Chris: That judge read like six different drafts.

Oren: Yeah, she read all four published Crave books, and then two more later just for fun that were published during the proceedings, and then she read all five or six of Freeman’s unpublished drafts, which, oh boy, I’ve done a lot of reading for some editing projects. I’ve never done that much. 

Chris: There are so many situations where I see people make assumptions that if there’s similarities in the story that somebody must have copied their work. I will say that unless your work is a published bestseller, it’s really unlikely that anybody would want to copy it, and in this case, things that seem like people copied your idea are almost certainly just a coincidence.  Because ideas just don’t really have much value, right? The value is in the work, and people will repeat the same ideas quite a bit. So it’s only that plagiarism happens because people are, for instance, trying to sell something with no effort, in which case they’re going to copy something that’s popular. Or now they just use AI. 

Oren: Right. Now they just create a bunch of slop books. That case is actually really interesting because I think it has something that is valuable here. So for example, it was ruled that the fact that both books feature vampires who are broody in Alaska, that’s not copyrightable, right? Those are not similar enough to give rise to any kind of legal action, even if Wolfe got the idea from reading Freeman’s unpublished drafts as the accusation went, or having the information given to her by her agent, I think, was the specifics. 

Chris:  Right. And also, like, a broody vampire in Alaska is not  going to sell your book, right? Those ideas are not success, right? It’s implementing those ideas.

Oren: You know, Judge McMahon — correctly, as far as I can tell — pointed out that even though these are two vampires in Alaska, they are very different. They are in very different contexts, right? The unpublished one really sounds like it is in a very Twilight-y situation of characters being in a small town, and then the published one, Crave, is basically at a magic school, which is entirely different. But I still think that this is not a copyright issue. This is not a legal issue, but I do think Crave, the published one — I can’t speak to the unpublished one because I haven’t read it — suffers from channeling too much Twilight. 

I think that its love interest is just not very interesting because he’s just Edward again. He’s Edward. I’ve read Edward before. I’ve read a lot of Edwards. This character is very stale at this point. And he also is Edward in ways that don’t really make sense. Like, he’s supposed to be a cool loner, but he’s not a loner. He has a posse that follows him around everywhere. As a result, he seems like a total loser. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m the cool loner. Everyone respects me,” and he’s backed up by, like, five identical guys. 

Chris: [Laughs] I mean, that is the risk also of copying, right? Again, you need to add something so that it stays interesting because the more an idea is used, the duller and more boring it gets to everybody, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So bringing something unique to it is important, right? When you’re taking inspiration for something else. Like how much copying is where we get to the point where, as Oren said, it’s uncanny? You can not only identify the source material, but it kind of feels like we’re crossing a moral line, even if it… And I don’t know in these cases. Some of these cases, honestly, I would be…  in copyright court, I would wonder if there could be successful lawsuits there. At least for me, just setting the law aside, what feels like too much? 

I would say that if you’re trying to imitate — and I mean yourself with your own brain and your own hands typing on the keyboard, not with technology — one specific aspect of a story, where let’s say you really like the main character, or you like the character dynamic, or there’s a plot point that you really like, or there’s a wordcraft style you really like, or something about the world you really like. Just imitating those things in your own story is not a big deal because you’re  going to make lots of other creative decisions that are completely different from what your inspiration made. And then if you’re doing a good job, you’re  going to adapt, right? So your main character put in a different world is going to be different, and all those things are  going to change. They’re all going to affect each other, and by the time you’re done, again, you probably won’t have … Your inspiration is likely not going to be that recognizable anymore, and most of the book is going to be your own, right? 

Even if you were to take like a main character from one story and a plot point from another story and a world from a third story, if you actually can meld them together and have them work together well, I think in the end they’re all  going to be pretty unique. But when I see works taking more than one aspect of the same story, that’s when it starts for me to feel like it’s beginning to cross a line, or it’s too adhering to the original. If I can take a paragraph from your book and a paragraph from your inspiration and see that you’re making the same points in that paragraph, right? Or like I take a page and see how you’re basically saying the same thoughts page by page. 

Oren: Yeah, but you hit it through a thesaurus, so like, you know — Sure, The Tale of Two Cities said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but I said “It was the greatest of historical periods, it was the least good of historical periods,” which is different. So don’t get on my case. I did have to make it worse to try to make it different, but don’t worry about that. 

Chris: Yeah. That’s when it starts to become too much. And seeing that happen to Name of the Wind a couple times is just very cringey.

Oren:  Yeah, The Sun Eater is the one that I feel comfortable talking about because it’s already selling extremely well. 

Chris:  It’s best-selling, and I did a critique of it, and I showed a passage from Name of the Wind next to a passage from The Sun Eater, and that is not normal. Right? Again, the wording is different, but some of the passages, like, the paragraphs of exposition are thought by thought basically following the long, same chain down, and it’s like you should do your own thinking. 

Oren: And it has just some extremely similar plot points, and the ones that I can think of off the top of my head are the way that it opens with a similar framing device of the main character being like, “Oh, man, I did something really bad that was vague in my attempt to save everybody, but you want to know what that’s about!” Maybe with this series, the people will actually find out what it’s about, because it looks like it might actually be finished. And then later the street urchin phase is extremely similar in both books. To me, that just was not acceptable. I have no idea if it would give any rise to any kind of copyright claim. I would guess probably not.

Chris: It feels like Rothfuss, if he wanted to… I mean sometimes lawsuits take a long time. But at the same time, all the evidence is there, so it feels like if Rothfuss wanted to sue, he would’ve done it already. But this just feels like a situation where he could, and I don’t… Again, not a lawyer. Don’t know for sure, but that seems…. that’s uncanny. 

Oren: I’ll come back in three years and let you know. 

Chris: Three years, you contact Rothfuss and are like, “Hey, so do you want to take care of this?” 

Oren:  More likely, in three years I will be able to say that this is not my specialty area/field of law, so I should probably not comment on it.

Chris: You have a disclaimer that we’re not giving legal advice. 

Oren: Yeah. Disclaimer, not legal advice. 

Chris:  You go to three years of law school so that you know how to give people a disclaimer that you’re not giving legal advice. That’s what those three years are for. [Laughs]

Oren:  It’s valuable. 

Chris:  Because sometimes when people copy a story, the goal is not really taking inspiration. The goal is that they don’t know how to plot their story, right? Or they’re having trouble coming up with what could happen, and so they’re just looking to another story to be their model for what to do and how to write a successful story. 

Oren:  Yeah, that’s true. 

Chris: So this is another thing that we see. Honestly, as editors, if somebody comes to us with something like this, it’s kind of useful because then we can study the story that they’re copying and better explain to them why things are working or not working by comparing it to what the original work did. This is done enough that I know that in some situations it is useful. For instance, if you are writing a haunted house story, there is a very specific constraint that those stories have, where we have to have an explanation for why people don’t just leave the house. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: It’s a thing that every haunted horror story has to explain, and I have a post with ideas for how to explain it, so there are ways to do it. But if you were to take inspiration from another haunted house story, you could use its explanation. Now, what might happen is you change something else and that explanation doesn’t work anymore. But, it’s not like this can’t have use, or it can’t be useful. I do think that it’s sometimes just a replacement for actually learning how storytelling works. 

Oren: Yeah, they’ve got to learn somewhere, right? 

Chris: Right. You’ve got to learn from somewhere. You’ve got to start somewhere. So if your understanding isn’t that robust yet and you need some sort of inspiration for how to plot using a model, it kind of makes sense. I do have questions about, like, Oren, what do you think the success rate is? How often does that actually benefit the story that people are working on?

Oren: In my experience, it is pretty awkward unless the author is skilled enough to take that and then mold it into whatever they need it to be for their story, in which case I usually can’t tell. The chances are high that if I notice that something is like, “Oh, this is from this story,” it’s probably because it isn’t working, and it stood out for not working. And then I was like, “Oh, hey. That’s weird.” Not always, but that’s a good chance that that’s what’s happening. Because if it was working well, I would probably just read over it, and unless it was really obvious, I wouldn’t even notice that it was taken from something else. 

Chris: I mean, I do have a question of, if we’re doing this to make up for lack of expertise, it’s always  going to take expertise to successfully copy aspects from another work, right? Because you have to understand why they worked in that context so that you can replicate that context in your own story or adjust them. 

Oren: I feel like it can be decent training wheels, especially for things that authors often kind of instinctually get, but don’t know how to explain, like turning points. 

Most authors have some understanding of turning points, and so you can start to understand them by copying one from another story. Like if you read Lord of the Rings, you can get an okay understanding of the “surprise reinforcements” turning point. And that doesn’t mean that yours is going to be great, but you can at least sort of understand how it works, and you can start to learn that way.

Chris: It’s probably better than using a pseudo structure. It’s probably better than, for instance, The Hero’s Journey or Save the Cat, and taking those beat sheets and trying to follow them. 

Oren: Yeah, because those are just gobbledygook, right? Like, those don’t mean anything, whereas at least Lord of the Rings is a real book that exists. And it might not be right for you, but if you are completely new to this and you don’t know how any of this works, taking your story, especially, like, a first story that you’re writing and getting experience with, and being like, “Okay, I’m  going to do my own version of some people from a little town meet a wizard and they go out and do stuff,” it’s like, all right. That’s probably not going to sell. At this point, agents don’t want that. But get some experience. You know, could be worse.

Chris:  Mm-hmm. You do want to pick something, of course, if you’re going to pick a model, that is the same genre and the same tone as what you’re doing, so you’re not transplanting something into something that’s totally different, right? If you don’t want to do action, don’t copy something with action, because it’s just not going to work as well. 

Oren: Yeah, you probably wouldn’t be copying Die Hard if you wanted to write a cozy. It’s also just important to — whether you are doing a full-on reimagining of a story that’s old enough for it to be okay to do that, or if you are just sorting through the discount book bin for spare parts — you’ve just got to make sure that it fits in the new context that you’re putting it into.  One of my favorite examples is of the sadly only one-season Netflix show First Kill, which is a Romeo and Juliet adaptation. They goofed because they have hunters and vampires instead of Montagues and Capulets. The problem is that vampires are evil and hunters are, at the very least, a lot less evil. And so the Romeo and Juliet premise doesn’t really work very well because the two houses are supposed to be alike in dignity, and there’s a serious dignity deficiency here.

Chris:  Yep. When you change something, the rest doesn’t work very well. I did notice, however, on the positive side, one of my favorite T. Kingfisher stories is What Moves the Dead, and I feel like the reason I like that one better is because it’s basically a House of Usher retelling. Because I know plotting is often not Kingfisher’s strength, but “The [Fall of the] House of Usher” has a very simple, kind of easy-to-execute plot. And I feel that one has a stronger plot because it’s just based on “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Oren: You know, House of Usher is old enough that it’s okay to do that. I have a hard time intellectualizing exactly why a book being old makes that okay, but I know it when I see it. 

Here’s a question, since we’re near the end here. I was curious, how do you feel about copying writing styles? We’ve talked about when you copy the actual text, and that’s not great, but, like, trying to emulate another author’s prose. At what point is that a problem? 

Chris: Yeah, I mean, again, when you use AI — 

Oren: Right. Don’t be doing that. 

Chris: Because the AI can only do that because it’s stolen the work, right? And you just should not do that. Also it’s not improving your own wordcraft skills, right?

So I do think it’s very beneficial or can be very beneficial for somebody to look at other narration, find out, okay, what kind of narration inspires me, what do I like, and then refer to that. Because there’s all sorts of moments of: How do you open a scene? How do you do body language? How do you do description? And [they] look at their favorite authors who have the wordcraft they like and see what they did, right? And just like copying the plot, it might not work out. Maybe that author is actually very bad at description. They have great lyrical prose that you like, but they’re bad at description, and so maybe copying their description isn’t actually a good idea. Or they’re overly distant, right? So again, it can still have liabilities, but there’s so much to learn about wordcraft and so much to practice, and I think having a reference for let’s see what other people did in general is really useful. 

And I also think that if we’re actually doing it ourself by hand and not — again, you should not do what Sun Eater did, where you are actually copying the thoughts. We’re just talking about sentence structure, word choice, right? Things like that — I think that once you do it yourself in your own words, it’s just going to be different. It’s not going to be exactly like somebody else’s narration because you’re a different writer and you have a different vocabulary than they do.

Honestly, if somebody mimics somebody else too closely, oftentimes it’s  going to be a famous author, their style’s going to be pretty well-known, and I think at that point you’re just losing out in your opportunity because there are some agents and publishers out there who really do wanna see a unique quote-unquote “voice” from writers, right? So I do think that if you were to do it too closely, probably what would happen is somebody would read it and be like, “Oh, this is this famous author,” and you just would lose out on opportunities to distinguish yourself.

Oren: Or what if I could trick them into thinking I was that famous author? Kaboom. 

Chris: But I don’t think there’s a super huge risk of that happening, right? If anybody is worried, they can reference more than one author and read several different books. I do think that having a model is instructional, and so much about wordcraft is just based on practice and is always going to change based on who’s writing it, that as long as you’re not actually copying the thoughts that the writer puts down (Suneater), I’m not really worried about that becoming a problem. 

Oren: All right. Well, I think that is a nice and positive message to end this podcast episode on. 

Chris: So if you liked this episode enough to copy it, consider instead 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, who’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.

As writers, we spend a lot of time crafting our narration to feel natural and immersive. But what happens to that immersion when we break that illusion to address the audience directly? This week, we’re discussing fourth wall breaks: what they are, how they’re used, and why some feel like endearing jokes while others are just awkward interruptions.

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Did you know that we are actually recording a podcast for an audience? 

Chris: You mean we were inside the podcast the whole time?

Oren: Yeah, that’s why I often have to make jokes to break the tension. It’s not just a normal, natural thing I do. It’s part of a bit. 

Chris: Wow! I thought we were just talking.

Oren: Yeah, you would think that, but actually this whole thing is organized by the “Shadow Mage.”

Chris: [Laughter] Oh.

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.

Chris: Don’t worry about it. Not gonna be a problem ever again.

Oren: So today we are talking about breaking the fourth wall, which is a kind of a hard topic to adjust to a podcast opening bit. Not really a narrative format.

Chris: Yeah. We tried, okay?

Oren: So now I’m going to read the whole text of “Why We Use the Fourth Wall and Why We Break It” by Chris Winkle, because, you know, that basically just has everything I was gonna say in it already.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, let me introduce what the fourth wall is. I do find the origin of the term to be very interesting and revealing.

So it comes from plays—which a lot of things do because that’s the oldest form of professional storytelling. It’s not that we didn’t have books around, but they were much rarer and people went and saw theater. So a lot of our, like, old storytelling terms all come from theater.

Oren: It’s certainly quite old and the theater predates the novel by quite some time. I don’t know if it’s the oldest professional form of storytelling, but it certainly has a venerable history.

Chris: And there might be some, like, really old novels, but they weren’t—they didn’t come into vogue until printing got cheaper.

Oren: Well, like, the first novel I think is generally considered to be The Tale of Genji. Tale of Genji is from 1021, and I’m sure that you can quibble about whether or not that is actually the first novel, but that’s 1021 CE, whereas theater exists in thousands of years BC. So theater definitely predates novels.

Chris: I mean, in the West it’s in ancient Greece, but not ancient Egypt. I’m sure in China it’s older.

So the fourth wall basically means that when the actors are acting on stage, instead of that there’s an audience there watching them, they pretend that that border of the stage between them and the audience has a solid wall. And so they cannot see that people are watching them. They just act as though the audience is not there.

This basically now is what we used for any convention, which is in most, almost all stories to some extent, where we’re pretending that the story is real instead of being fiction. Because if actors were to acknowledge the audience, they would also be, like, calling attention to the fact that this is a fictional story. Because you know, in like, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead. He doesn’t also think that there’s people watching him mourn Juliet. To make that immersive we gotta cut that out.

Oren: There are various stages of it. Like, if a character in a story straight up says, “Wow, this chapter’s kind of boring, huh?” that’s probably a fourth wall break. Unless you’re doing some kind of story within a story, in which case they’re only breaking the inner story’s fourth wall. That gets confusing. But in most cases that would pretty unambiguously count.

But then you have things like characters having monologues, which is weird. Like, obviously that’s not something that a character would do just on their own, like they’re not soliloquying to themselves. But they also don’t directly acknowledge that they’re giving this to an audience, so, eh, gray area.

Chris: Breaking the fourth wall, of course, like literally in theater is when we do something other than pretend there’s a solid wall there. But like now when we’re thinking about it metaphorically, we mean something that just calls attention to the fact that the story isn’t real, and that reminds people of the fiction in a way that’s often disruptive. 

What we’re doing when we suspend disbelief we’re pretending the story is real, is we’re engaging in compartmentalized thinking on purpose so that we can hold two facts in our mind simultaneously, where we have the real world where we know that there are actors on stage, or if we’re reading a book, we know that this book has an author.

But then we can also hold it to be true that the characters are real, and they’re in a real fantastical place. Even though those facts are contradictory, we can play along with both of them, and so that’s compartmentalized thinking. But we keep them separate. We don’t want to think about, like, Romeo and Juliet usually within the context of having an audience, so we have to compartmentalize them.

But if we were to break the fourth wall in that moment, we would have to reconcile all of these scenes of, you know, Romeo and Juliet having their, like, private love affair that’s like secret with the fact that they’re being watched by an audience. That mix of reality and story can, like, create cognitive dissonance that we would then have to, like, reconcile.

Oren: It kills immersion. It makes it harder for you to immerse yourself in the story and to, you know, let the events carry you away. Because once you start thinking, “No, none of this is real, none of this matters,” it’s like, that’s not good most of the time. Usually, that’s not how you approach fiction. That doesn’t mean that you should never do it, it’s just why it isn’t the norm.

The most obvious use for it is when you want to make a joke. That’s probably the most common, at least in speculative fiction. You see it a lot on TV. If something is supposed to be funny, there’s gonna be lines like, “I’ve lived in Sunnydale for a long time, and you know what I’ve never seen? A big honking castle.” That’s kind of a fourth wall break. That’s calling attention to the fact that this thing is not real.

Chris: So a fourth wall break, as we said, it’s gonna break immersion typically, and it’s going to lower the sense of realism in the story. Events just have less impact when they feel less real and credible. You know, realism is really restrictive, so you don’t necessarily want super high realism in your story, but you also usually want as much realism as fits what you’re doing.

If we’re coming up with a joke that breaks the fourth wall, the question is, why are we not worried about breaking immersion and, like, lowering the realism level? Now with something like Buffy, where we’re making that joke, it’s already really campy. The realism level’s not very high, so not really worried about putting in a joke right there.

That one is also a “lampshade,” where the expectation is viewers of that episode seeing a castle and knowing this is just a small town, what are the chances in a small town in the United States that there would be a castle? There’s a good chance their immersion is already gonna break with this very contrived thing that’s just showed up.

Oren: It’s a silly episode.

Chris: And so there’s already something unbelievable that’s likely to break their immersion. So by lampshading it, we’re able to smooth it over and just have a laugh over it and then move on. Yes, we acknowledged a castle’s not realistic. And so that’s why breaking immersion to make this joke in particular pays off. There’s already not very much realism, and there’s already not very much immersion.

Oren: And you can compartmentalize it too. Like Avatar is famous for doing “The Ember Island Players” episode, which is self-contained, and in that one they make a bunch of fourth wall breaking jokes like, “Did Jet just die? It was kind of unclear.” That sort of thing. And that’s a weird thing for them to say. Like in context, they would probably not say that about Jet’s death considering that it was pretty upsetting. But the point is to make a joke about the production. 

Korra actually ends up doing the same thing in the last season because they had an episode that they didn’t have the budget to make. So they had to use a clip show, which would normally be terrible but it’s full of hilarious jokes. Or at least it was in like 2014 when I watched it. We’re in a re-watch right now, so we’ll see if I still like it when we get to it. 

Chris: Breaking the fourth wall is great for jokes because it is usually surprising. Maybe it wouldn’t be surprising if you have a story that is just constantly breaking the fourth wall. Then it would probably lose some of its surprise value and not be as funny.

We don’t normally break the fourth wall. Usually that’s the exception, not the rule. So then when you break it you get the surprise, which is required for jokes. It’s easier to create humor that way and so we can get some very funny jokes. Like the Buffy, you know, “Dawn’s in trouble again. It must be Tuesday.”

Oren: Which is an interesting example of breaking the fourth wall without making it kind of absurdist. I think partly because when she says, “Must be Tuesday,” I didn’t even realize until you wrote that in your article that that was a reference to the fact that the show airs on Tuesday—or at least it used to. I had no idea. I thought that was just like the character making a dark joke about how Dawn is always in trouble. It’s interesting. That one worked on several levels.

Chris: Because it’s very similar to “for him it was Tuesday,” which is another way of saying, yeah, it happens all the time. I always saw that as a fourth wall break.

That was, in fact, the first episode of Buffy I ever saw! I just happened to be at a con and there was a sing-along with that episode. And so to me that’s always been a fourth wall break, but yeah, that one can kind of disguise itself as maybe not a fourth wall break.

Oren: Some people use fourth wall breaks to introduce commentary.

Chris: This one is interesting because usually there are better ways to do commentary. Obviously, there’s lots of ways of sending messages in the story itself through character opinions or what people are struggling against and all that. But like, if you want to comment on storytelling itself, what most writers do is they use a fictional fourth wall break instead of a real one.

Funny to think about whether breaking the fourth wall itself is real or fictional! But basically, if you put a story in your story, then you can have your main character engaging with the characters that are in their book they’re reading. That’s how you create that sort of meta commentary about storytelling.

If you’ve ever seen The Princess Bride and we open with the kid and his grandpa, and they’re reading The Princess Bride, the story’s always stopping so then they can discuss the book some more. That would be like a fictional fourth wall break. It doesn’t really risk jarring the actual viewers—the real world viewers too much because we already know the story within a story is fictional. We’re not… In The Princess Bride maybe there’s a little exception because we spend so much time with the inner-story characters, then it’s more like a framing device—the kid and his grandpa. We’re really fully immersed in the whole Westley and Buttercup story. But again, if you bring the fourth wall break often enough. So maybe that could be considered a true fourth wall break because of how much time we spend in that inner story. But if you bring it back often enough people get used to it and it’s not jarring anymore.

Oren: That’s the technique used by common friend of the show, Interview with the Vampire; season one to greatest effect and then season two to a certain degree. It is an actual interview. The guy doing the interview is asking questions and probing and poking at inconsistencies, which is super cool and an interesting use of commentary.

But we know that the outer level story containment is intact. They don’t turn to the camera to be like, “I wonder if this interview is also an interview with somebody else,” looking at camera, right? They don’t do something like that.

Chris: [Laughs] That one is almost a bit like the equivalent of unreliable narration. Because it’s not purely fictional, the story that’s being told in Interview with the Vampire, right? It’s supposed to be the character’s actual history. It’s almost like we don’t really have a fourth wall there because we’re both in the same world, but then we’re pointing out about the unreliability of the character speaking his own history. So I almost think that’s a little bit more analogous to unreliable narration.

Oren: And you can also have something like Discworld, which has things that kind of look like fourth wall breaks, but in the context of Discworld are not necessarily. You know, Discworld has characters talking about how if you have a one in a million shot it will always hit. But if you have like, a one in a 999,000 shot that’s gonna miss ’cause those odds are impossible.

Chris: So I would definitely classify that as a fourth wall break that is both joke and commentary. ‘Cause we’re calling attention to the fictionality of the work, but we’re also making a joke about stories in general. So we’re making some commentary on storytelling, and it’s just a good joke. 

Oren: Discworld is also just a place where that sort of thing is sort of literally true, at least sometimes.

Pratchett will sometimes turn that off when he doesn’t wanna deal with it, but often that’s just literally how the world works. Over time it kind of stops feeling like a fourth wall break. It just becomes a thing the characters do ’cause you get used to it.

Chris: The nice thing about that, of course, is when Terry Pratchett is doing that he’s commenting on stories in general. He’s not commenting on his own story. Because storytellers who comment on their own stories are often kind of obnoxious! 

Honestly, when we saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, that was actually one of the lesser where she actually had something to say about the story and about the author who wrote it. For anybody who’s not familiar, the character Jo in Little Women, who is often called the main character but honestly in the book she doesn’t really seem more important than the other sisters in my opinion. But she’s based on the author of the book. So in the Little Women she writes in the original book—but in the movie they always have her write the book in the movie, so she writes Little Women in the movie Little Women. Not a thing that is done in the book. And it’s a little recursive, but not necessarily a fourth wall break, ’cause you could tell the story of how you wrote a novel in your novel if you want to.

Oren: It’s a little meta, but it’s not quite a fourth wall break.

Chris: But then she has the character Jo meet with the publisher to talk about the ending. And then after they make an agreement about the ending, then we move to the actual ending in the movie. The intent there was to make the end of the movie seem fictional because the author wanted a different ending and the publisher forced a particular ending on her. But we also are not willing to actually take that ending away because now it’s classic.

Oren: I wonder if Greta Gerwig made that movie now if that ending would be different. In the interviews that I’ve read, she says that she had to fight for that ending, and so I’m like, okay, what did that fight look like? You know, is this ending the way you wanted it where it’s kind of hard to tell if the wedding actually happens or not, or is it all just in the book that the main character is writing? Or if it happened now after Barbie when Gerwig can just kind of write her own checks, could she have done something different and done whatever she wanted?

Chris: I mean honestly it would’ve been better if it’d done more changes. We have so many adaptations of Little Women, right? We don’t need another one that sticks closely to the book. We can do something different.

So another one that, again, is more obnoxious unfortunately, is in the TV show She-Hulk.

Oren: Oh yeah. That ending is weird.

Chris: So this one first, this does have more occasional fourth wall breaks where the main character just turns to the camera and talks to the viewers. And there’s no like other premise. Talking to the camera does not always equal fourth wall break, but you would need some other premise like it’s found footage film to support that.

So if you just have a regular movie and then somebody turns to the camera and starts talking to viewers … So we have those fourth wall breaks. I don’t know that the show really benefits from them. There are some shows like House of Cards that I think it really benefited.But this one I guess it’s a campy TV show. Whatever. She does it.

But then with the ending we do a prolonged fourth wall break where the main character goes to talk to the fictional show writer to try to argue for why a specific ending is the right ending.

Oren: Yeah, I just remember that went on for a long time. This feels like the juice is not worth the squeeze here. We are taking a really long time to argue that we should have a slightly less than expected ending.

Chris: I would personally say that if you have to argue that your ending is the right ending to the viewers—because that’s what it feels like, because we’re doing it in the show, right? It feels like the writers wanted to argue with the actual show as viewers. You should never have to justify your ending to your readers. That means it’s not a good ending. Your story should stand for itself. You shouldn’t have to hang out hovering over people’s shoulders while they read your book and then argue with your reader about why it’s good. That’s not a working story. That’s something that’s not working.

Oren: I think what they’re supposed to be doing is discussing the ways in which comic book adaptations are expected to have specific endings, especially Marvel ones. The Marvel ending has become a joke at this point. I don’t think they had a sky beam. They should have if they wanted to do real Marvel ending commentary.

I think that the intent is to be like, “Hey, let’s have an argument between our main character and our creative team where our creative team wants to do a standard Marvel ending, but like, our main character wants to do something different.” Like, okay. I can see how in their head that isn’t supposed to be them arguing with the viewer that their ending is good, but the commentary is just not that interesting. It’s kind of a little bit “baby’s first commentary,” and it goes on forever.

Chris: I mean my objection here—and this might have been the tension between how much does this show conform to like, Marvel brand versus how much is it its own thing. But the argument was like, “We don’t need to have action in our ending.” But like, this is a show with action in it.

If you made the ending appropriate to the show people just wouldn’t notice or object. If this was a show where there wasn’t fight scenes happening nobody would expect a fight for the climax. But if you have lots of fighting that’s kind of expected because it’s hard to get the same level of immediate pulse-pounding excitement through other means, and also that’s just the convention you’ve set up with the earlier episodes. We didn’t have to have a fight scene for the climax, but why are we doing fights throughout the show then? Why are we making it a show that includes fighting if we don’t wanna have fighting in our ending? 

That’s my objection. And it might have been that, no, they would have liked to have written a show that didn’t have fights in it, but they weren’t allowed to because that’s not the Marvel brand. That also determines your ending, right? The show’s gotta fit itself.

Oren: To me it just felt like too much. Once you start breaking the fourth wall like that the fictional contract is kind of null and void. And so I just didn’t really feel like that had that much to say. And by the end I was just like, okay, you’ve just thoroughly hammered home that none of this is real. Why is the ending that the main character She-Hulk wanted better than the other one? Like, why does that matter? None of this matters.

Chris: ‘Cause yeah, things feel less real when you point out how fictional they are.

Oren: The weirdest one that I’ve seen recently was in that same Little Women movie where a couple of the main characters when they’re I think writing letters—instead of doing the normal thing it does where they are writing at their desk and it does a little voiceover to tell you what they’re writing, it instead did like a YouTube confessional scene where they’re just talking directly at the camera.

Chris: Basically what happens, just to lay this out so people understand, is you’ll have a character receive a letter from another character. And normally what you might have is you watch that character reading their letter and meanwhile you have voiceover from the writing character who wrote the letter so we know what it says. Or you might have the scene cut to a flashback to when the character was writing the letter, again, have their voiceover on a scene that feels appropriate for there to be voiceover saying what the letter says.

Instead, whenever there’s a letter, we flip to a scene of the letter writer just staring into the camera with kind of a blank background just saying what they wrote directly, like with eye contact and everything, and it is very odd.

Oren: I get a serious fourth wall break from the whole genre of LitRPG.

Chris: The point I make in my article with fourth wall breaks is that you can adjust to anything that’s unrealistic if you have time. If you had that thing happening in Little Women where people staring at the screen talking directly to you for every letter, if that happened all the time, you would totally get used to it. You would just be like, “Oh yeah, this is how the fictional world works.” 

Same with, I think, a lot of soliloquies in theaters. Some people are like, “Oh no, the actor is talking to the audience when they do their monologue.” Technically a monologue has another character present witnessing it, whatever. That’s just a conceit that often comes with fictional stories, the same way you shouldn’t actually treat your narration, which is coming from your POV character in your book, as though it’s like real stream of consciousness and literally what they are thinking. That’s not how that works. We have to bend a few rules for the logistics of the fiction to work out. And so we just get used to those things and we write it into the rules of the world and we adjust to it. 

But like, if you change the rules without warning and people are not used to them … Back in ancient Egypt, you couldn’t just use first person in a book. People would like introduce a third person character and that third person character would start talking and that’s how it would become first person, because that convention had not been fully introduced yet. 

With LitRPG, it is very strange if you are not used to LitRPG. 

Oren: It’s really strange, and it’s also really strange in like what is clearly—this is something from outside the book that we are putting into the book. I guess that technically everything in books are like that. But it’s really noticeable with the LitRPG game mechanics.

If anyone is not familiar with it—little late to mention it, but LitRPG is a genre that is defined by game mechanics being a literal thing that exists in the world. The characters can like get levels and earn skill points and it’s extremely intrusive. It takes up a lot of your mental real estate figuring all that out and some books do a fair amount of work to try to justify the premise. Like if you’ve read Dungeon Crawler Carl, if you’ve read one LitRPG book it’s probably Dungeon Crawler Carl. In that one there’s a whole setup to explain this. So a lot of LitRPG books don’t even bother. It’s just, that’s just how the world is.

Chris: We enter the new world, something attacks, and the main character fights it. And then once it’s dead a mysterious text appears saying, “You have gained one level.” And that’s it. There’s all the explanation you get. And it’s very jarring if you are not used to LitRPG. It is very strange and definitely breaks immersion. Again, people who read that genre enough, they’re gonna just adjust and after a while it’s not gonna break immersion anymore.

Oren: Since this is a podcast and we are in fact performing it for an audience that does mean eventually the podcast has to end. And that eventually is now.

Chris: Have you considered breaking the fourth wall, listeners, by talking to us?

Oren: Whoa.

Chris: You can if you become a patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.com

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

We will talk to you next week.

We all know how important it is to make a good first impression, but it can be a struggle to convey enough information in an opening scene without a confusing infodump. Not to mention, you need to set the right tone and keep things interesting or risk alienating your audience. This week, we discuss common mistakes people make while crafting their beginnings, as well as ways to avoid them and make those first sentences shine.

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: Hello, I am your very important host, Daisy. Today we will talk about… Oh, no! The villain has me! Ah, I die…! 

Oren: Well, that’s fine. You were probably not the real main character anyway. 

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast, where we have lots of prologues. I’m Chris. 

Oren: And I’m Oren. Hang on a second, though. I have to explain to you my backstory for 10 pages, because that’s what you’re here for, right?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Exposition dump me. 

Oren: Okay. All right. [laughs] Getting a little spicy in here. Anyway… 

Chris: This time we’re talking about common beginning mistakes, which I see a lot of because I frequently do analysis of beginnings of bestsellers that could use some improvement. And also, when I’m looking at my clients and followers and their works, it’s always easiest to take the beginning and analyze it, because that doesn’t require any context. So I’ve just seen a lot of beginnings, and they are also probably the trickiest portion to write. The climax is also tricky, but beginnings are really, really tricky. 

Oren: The first mistake is beginning your story, because if you never begin your story, then you can’t make any other mistakes. So if you think about it, the beginning of the story is actually responsible for more mistakes than any other choice you might make.

Chris: Maybe we can just cut it in the middle and make… Oh, no. The middle has become our beginning. 

Oren: Uh-oh. 

Chris: It chases us. No matter how much we cut the story down, we can never escape the beginning. 

Oren: Due to the linear nature of time, your story will always have to begin somewhere. Even if it’s a weird, wonky story that jumps around, it’s still gonna have to have some entry point where the reader engages with the story. Now, of course, I suppose you could do something really weird like a book with multiple places that readers are supposed to start at random, but then it would just have multiple beginnings, so you’re back to the same problem. 

Chris: Are you saying every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending? 

Oren: Yeah, technically that is true. The most technical truth that has ever happened. 

Chris: I know that when people say that they have something in their mind, they have some structure, when they say that, it goes to show that we haven’t really intellectualized some of that knowledge. 

Oren: I think most people when they say that, they mean that there’s an introduction where you have to set the scene, and then there’s a bunch of stuff that happens, and then there’s a climax, is what I think people are trying to communicate. It’s just not a very helpful concept on its own. If someone doesn’t already know that’s what it means, then the words are not helpful even to that extent. 

Chris: I think people use it when they don’t have an intellectual understanding of plot, but they kind of have a feel for it, and so they don’t know how to otherwise put it into words that their story has plot, so they just say it has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

Oren: See, one common beginning mistake is getting sidetracked with a different topic in your podcast about common beginning mistakes. 

Chris: I think with exposition, kind of the big demon for most openings is too much exposition. Although the opposite can also be a problem. We can talk about that. I think the trick that happens, it’s not necessarily that people get super sidetracked with their exposition, it’s mostly that the devil is in the details. The readers do need to know about this, but they don’t need to know all of these details about this. And really honing it down to what’s important, that can be something that happens. 

Oren: The most straightforward example I’ve seen of too much exposition is not even a book: it’s the first episode of the Netflix live action Avatar show, where the characters exposition dump a bunch of information in dialogue that we don’t need to know yet. And the reason I know we don’t need to know it yet is that this show follows the animated version very closely, and we didn’t know most of that stuff by this point in the animated version, and it was fine. We did not need that information so quickly. 

Chris: I think they explained what the Avatar is three times, and it’s just, hey, you already had a really colorful intro that was based on the animated show intro that said what the Avatar is, and now you’re saying it again? Yeah, it’s technically possible somebody wasn’t there for that part, but if so, this is on Netflix. They can just replay it if they’re confused. 

Oren: I wonder if anyone’s used that as one of their writing-for-the-second-screen examples. Because the show as a rule doesn’t really do that, so I don’t think it would qualify. It’s just that the first episode is loaded with exposition for some reason. 

Chris: One thing I’ve seen in a couple novel openings is that the author really feels like they need to get in a lot of information, and this is possible that what’s lost is between the outline and drafting, where they made a cool scene in their outline, and they’re like, “Okay, I just need to add a few notes of information so that the readers know what’s going on.” But then when they actually started writing the scene, it was tons and tons and tons of information, and it just spiraled out of control. And what you end up with is a scene where you have the main character just standing around doing nothing, walking around doing nothing. Literally nothing is happening, and the scene is just a bag of exposition.

And in some of those cases, if those details are really important, that’s definitely a sign when you should just add more scenes to your beginning. And you do want to make sure there’s some kind of conflict in them, interesting and engaging. But if you have groundwork that’s that important that you have to lay it in your beginning, then maybe you just need more scenes to bring it out. I’m thinking of Shield of Sparrows, where the main character is just standing around thinking about whether to jump into the water and swim and how envious she is of her sister. That one is an odd one. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s always tricky to tell when you’re looking at something that has too much exposition. Is the problem that this exposition is just being inefficiently delivered? Could we fix this by reducing how much exposition there is and adding information later when it’s needed? Or is the issue that the concept is just too complicated? Because that was my problem. The Abbess Rebellion just has a lot of backstory because that’s my toxic trait. My characters have tons of backstory, and there was a bunch of important stuff that had happened in the backstory that set the tone for certain relationships, and a number of important characters from the backstory were dead, and them being dead was really important. That was a problem. And the solution that we came up with was to add a new first chapter and then flash forward in time. 

I wouldn’t personally call that a prologue. Some people will. Whatever. But I would say that it’s an imperfect solution. I didn’t love having to add in a big time jump, but it was the only thing that we could do realistically to manage the amount of information that I had set up, just because otherwise it was too much. Readers couldn’t keep track of it. 

Chris: What I’ve seen is like in Shield of Sparrows, for instance, you have to look at it and what task is this supposed to perform? In Shield of Sparrows, author Devney Perry is trying to build some sympathy for her main character, and also trying to compare her like, “Oh, see, she’s treated so poorly,” whereas her sister is their parents’ favorite and gets all of the attention. And you kind of have to do that beforehand because once you move on in the book, we quickly get the plot going in actually not that long. We could maybe emphasize that. I think there’s some scenes where they get ready to meet the new ambassadors who have just arrived, so maybe we could fit some of the family dynamics in there. 

But at the same time, creating sympathy for your main character so that people like them right away is a valid reason for having a scene. And part of the problem is that the main character comes off as really petty because all those… that resentment of her sister is all told and not shown. So, if we saw, we witnessed firsthand how everybody is treating the main character unfairly, then the main character would be sympathetic. But when we’re told in exposition, it sounds petty. 

Oren: And it literally feels the same way as if you meet a stranger and the first thing they do is start complaining about somebody else and about how bad they have it and about how this other person is super mean. And it’s like, I don’t know you at all. Why do you think I have any context for this? And it makes you suspect that maybe they are actually the asshole. We don’t know for sure, but that’s the feeling it gives. 

Chris: And They Mostly Come Out at Night had the same issue with its beginning, where the main character is just a ball of anger. Well, that’s a separate issue, but he’s just wandering around looking at things as an excuse to exposit. There’s actually a really eventful backstory scene that’s when he was a kid that sets the stage for everything. And I was just like, you know, you should’ve just called for a time jump afterwards. You still should’ve done it. You still should’ve had that backstory scene as your opening instead of expositing about everything and how everything’s unfair now. Show the source of the unfairness, how this event happened, how the main character was unfairly blamed for it, so that we can sympathize with the main character and not just witness him walking around seething at everybody. 

There’re definitely some situations where if you have tons of exposition and it’s supposed to make your main character sympathetic, lay other emotional groundwork, or establish characters then you might just need more scenes instead that are supposed to show those things instead of tell them. In general, in the opening, the information load is always so high because the reader is coming in fresh and they have to learn everything. So generally in the opening, if you can delay giving information in the opening scene, you should delay. Another thing−I see this a lot−besides exposition is just did you have to name the country or the kingdom yet? Was that necessary? Can you just give the name of that later? Or we’ve got minor side characters, maybe we could learn their names later. All those little details, because every name or label that you put on something, that’s something that the reader has to learn and remember. Just using titles for minor characters, saying “that’s the bartender” instead of naming the bartender even if the main character knows their name, people won’t know the difference. But it’s really helpful for delaying how much the reader has to learn initially. Space is just so precious in the opening because you have to teach the reader necessary things, but you’re also trying to engage them, so things really have to be very important and essential for the opening to include them in your opening.

Oren: You can also shape how much information your opening demands immediately by creating the circumstances in which it takes place. If you were writing a steampunk adventure story about a cool inventor, you would maybe open with them in their workshop trying to get this cool device to work properly, and okay, that’s stuff to explain. You gotta explain this cool device, you gotta introduce who this character is, and suggest this is steampunk, but that’s a lot easier than trying to introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle. I’m not gonna say you can’t introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle, but you are making things harder for yourself.

Chris: The thing that I see that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum of having a character just stand around while you dump exposition is having problems that don’t have time to breathe. The reader does need time to anticipate and feel things. Again, the goal of the problem is to create tension, and tension is based on negative anticipation of a possible bad future event. The readers need time to anticipate. If you have in your opening scene, in the very first paragraph, suddenly a mecha shoots at your main character, that doesn’t offer time for anticipation. 

Oren: You can open with some kind of high-stakes conflict. That can be done. It’s just do you have the ability to establish what those stakes are and why they should matter in such a short time? You usually wanna err on the side of simplicity if you’re doing that. 

Chris: It’s not impossible to open with a fight scene. I do think some extra paragraphs to appreciate who is the opponent, who is the antagonist your protagonist is about to fight, size them up, and be like, “Oh no, I’m in deep trouble now.” Or, if it’s a more complicated world problem, it’s time to explain. I do think that personal problems tend to be better openers because they allow you to multitask introducing your main character with introducing some form of tension, a tense problem. And introducing your character and giving them the best introduction you can give them and making them often sympathetic or what have you is really important.

Personal level problems, I don’t mean it just has to be an emotional problem. It could be, like, oh, the person doesn’t have anywhere they can go, or something that’s like, “Oh no, I can’t pay rent, and I’m dealing with an eviction notice.” That’s an external problem, but it’s also a problem for them personally, as opposed to a world problem where there’s a plague happening, but the main character isn’t affected yet.

Oren: There are different things you can do that require more or less explanation. If you really want to open with a fight scene, you probably want your character to be doing something that is so straightforwardly sympathetic that readers don’t have to ask questions, like protecting a child or, if they’re a military character, protecting civilians or something. If it’s more complicated than that, even if it’s the main character themselves being attacked, we don’t know who that is. The book Black Sun starts with what looks like the main character being attacked by a witch, but I don’t know who this main character is. I don’t know why this witch is attacking them, and that makes it hard for me to be like, “No! Not Main Character being attacked by a witch!” I haven’t been given any context that would make me care about what’s happening here. 

Chris: If you ever have your main character encounter somebody from their backstory who they have deep emotional stuff going on there, it’s not a very good opener because you want to establish all that context so that it has emotional meaning to the reader, and you can’t really do that right away in the opening scene. Rushing things is definitely a problem, so just try to start with one problem. Give it a little room to breathe. Make sure readers understand why it’s important, and make it tense before you move on to adding a second problem. 

Oren: The Blade Itself is another interesting example of this, where it’s sort of the opposite of the problem of there’s too much exposition to explain this conflict. It’s like, the conflict happens, and nothing is explained, and you’re just trying to figure out what is going on. This guy, he’s fighting somebody, and it’s something, and it’s called a Flat Head or a Shanka. Are those the same thing? Who knows! It mentions the Dog Man. What is going on in this scene? And it takes so long to figure it out because it doesn’t explain things, and that’s the other risk if you start with a big elaborate fight scene.

Chris: Some people sneer at opening paragraphs that are exposition, but I think exposition can do a lot, and there’s some very good exposition openings because they just offer you more flexibility for what you say in your opening paragraph. However, it is very common, if the opening paragraphs instead of being like, “What is happening right now?” they are informational, they are exposition for you to stuff in way too much information in that opening paragraph. Because remember, readers can only learn one thing at a time, and exposition can be super information-dense. Really gotta slow down. One important idea per paragraph. And don’t throw in unfamiliar terms.

For instance, the opening of Blindsight does this thing where I think it’s trying to create intrigue by referencing all of these wild things like vampires and Big Ben and aliens. 

Oren: And fireflies! 

Chris: Right, fireflies, like all in the opening paragraph. But that’s not mysterious, because in order for people to get that sense of mystery, they have to be oriented enough to know where their knowledge gap is. If people are completely disoriented, and they have no idea what’s going on, and there’s a bunch of random pieces, they don’t know how they fit, that’s not really mysterious anymore because they can’t evaluate that. We need to establish a situation, make it understandable, and then ask the question, then raise the question that is unanswered to create that sense of mystery and intrigue.

Oren: You need to have some understanding in order for the parts where you don’t understand to matter, otherwise it’s just noise. Another big one is disconnected action. This isn’t even about the action being too hard to explain, but rather that it’s action that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story, or it’s not about the main character, or it’s just filling in some backstory that you’re gonna learn about later anyway. Authors often do this. This is sort of the classic. They start with an unrelated or disconnected action scene because their actual intro is very slow. I Am Number Four is probably the most straightforward example of that that you could ask for, where the bad guy chases down and murders a side character who we will hear about dying, but is not in the rest of the story and is not very important.

Chris: Yeah, this is what I was basically making fun of with the intro: the classic prologue, which thankfully are becoming less common. 

Oren: Yeah, I haven’t seen one for a while. 

Chris: I think they are supposed to be hooking the readers by introducing the villain and making the villain or antagonist seem scary. So like in I Am Number Four, some people we don’t know and are not important die, but it’s the same villain who is after the main character. I think what people think is, “Okay, well, I’ve done my action, so now I can just have a slow chapter focused on my main character, and I don’t have to worry about action.” It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes backstory openings can be this way too, where you have some exciting hook in the backstory that is supposed to translate over to the rest of the story. But when you go to the next chapter, whether it’s a prologue to chapter one or chapter one to chapter two, and that next installment is clearly unrelated, that tension doesn’t stay. That hook doesn’t operate anymore. In fact, the slower chapter now will seem even slower yet by comparison, because you just succeeded in giving somebody an exciting scene, and then you dump them on a chapter that’s really slow. Now they have something to compare it with, and it feels extra slow, and they were hoping that this villain would be followed up on in some way. 

Oren: One of the weird ones that I have encountered more recently is what I started calling the false promise, where the story opens with an intro that makes a big startling impression and is like, “You wanna know what’s up with that?” And then later when we finally catch up with that scene, it turns out the reveal is basically nothing or extremely disappointing. 

Chris: Oh, are you thinking about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet? 

Oren: No, although that one is actually an example, because she’s not the main character. I thought she was the main character, but there really isn’t a main character. One of the crew members is in this pod, and she’s thinking about, “Oh, no, I have to escape. If anyone finds out my secret, it’ll be terrible.” And then later we find out her secret, and it’s nothing. It’s that her dad is a bad person. It has nothing to do with her. But other books do this too. Red Seas Under Red Skies is an example I go to a lot where it starts off with the main characters being like, “How could you betray me?” And I’m like, is it … Are they lying? Because they lie all the time. Is that the answer? It’s a flash-forward, and then we catch up with that scene, and yeah, they were lying. They always do that. That’s the answer. 

Chris: [laughs] And it’s a little more transparent when you don’t have actors. Those are based on heists, right? So that’s kind of a classic heist thing. I call that over-promising. We’re basically promising something that we cannot keep up, cannot follow through with. And yeah, that’s obnoxious. I can’t say that it’s not effective. I don’t know, maybe it is. Maybe you get more readers by over-promising. That’s not the experience I want people to have personally. I don’t want people to get to the content and then just feel disappointed. 

Oren: Maybe black hat techniques are effective, but that doesn’t mean you should use them. 

Chris: Yeah, that’s a bad one. But related to that, there can be a variety of reasons why your beginning is just not the right beginning, and we talked about prologues and the fact that the big problem with the classic prologue is it does not include your main character. So then you have to cut away to your main character, and your main character is not involved in the plot yet and doing nothing. Whereas it would’ve been better to just look at your main character and try to cultivate, “Okay, what problems do they have?” And if they’re really just living an ordinary life without problems before the plot starts, maybe they should have problems. 

Oren: Maybe that’s not the way your story should be set up. 

Chris: Every story is different, right? With a different situation, but that suggests maybe something should change already. You can also have a situation−I have a recent article talking about whether you should open with backstory−and this is, again, different because in this situation you do have your main character, you just have a time jump afterwards. So what we were talking about with The Abbess Rebellion, where we have kind of action, and then we meet a bunch of backstory characters, so they’re easy for readers to remember, or what I was suggesting with They Mostly Come Out at Night, where it’s like we have some really important backstory that establishes this entire situation and is also exciting; I think we should just open with that. I definitely think that backstory is a good opener sometimes, but there are things to watch out for, such as is your backstory really setting the right impression for the story? Because if it’s completely different in tone, for instance, you don’t want people to think that your story is a lot darker and grimmer or whatever than it actually is. 

A lot of times those backstories are pretty tragic [laughs], pretty dark. This was an issue with Starfleet Academy. I knew people who started watching the first five minutes, and then were like, “Oh, this is the worst,” and turned it off because they just didn’t want grimdark Star Trek, and I don’t blame them. And it turns out that’s not actually the tone of the whole show. That’s a backstory that’s meant to be something that the characters have to emotionally wrestle with and redeem themselves and resolve throughout the season. But you don’t know that when you’re first watching it. Just looking at I need to get this backstory done, maybe it would make a great opener, but if it’s really misleading, it’s probably not the best choice for you, and you might want to just work it in later.

Oren: That’s a really odd one, but by the same token, you probably don’t want to start your introduction with action if your story doesn’t have any action in it later. That’s just setting the wrong expectation. 

Chris: I will say that with The Abbess Rebellion, when we added that opening chapter that was backstory, one of the goals was to get more action in because the story has a lot of action disproportionately in the later chapters, which is normal, but we wanted readers to know that there would be action in the book.

Oren: Maybe this is a thing of the past, but I’m thinking about stuff like The Sword of Shannara opening, or to a lesser extent, The Name of the Wind or The Eye of the World, where we just kind of go to town to a new area and just like search for the hero for a while. Is that a thing anymore? I haven’t seen that for a while.

Chris: Yeah, maybe not. I can’t say that I remember seeing that recently. There was The Architect. Oh man, okay, so this is something you should absolutely not do with your opening. I was so mad at that opening. I was so angry. The Architect is a Tchaikovsky book. 

Oren: Oh, The Final Architect. [The Final Architecture]

Chris: Yeah, The Final Architect. We open with a battle sister or whatever they’re called, like, this warrior woman who’s part of this warrior fleet is our character that we’re following in the opening, but she’s just there to watch super precious boy who has super brain who will take out an invincible alien ship by himself with his super brain. 

Oren: In this way that is extremely vague and that the author seems to regret having done because they never try that again, despite it being seemingly somewhat effective. That intro is really weird. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s established in it that goes against what we will learn later, and I genuinely do not understand why it is introduced that way. 

Chris: And so then what is the female POV character has no agency in this big opening battle. The only thing that she does is smile at the special boy. And that’s her contribution. I was so mad. 

Oren: And here’s the thing, this is a great example because any time we bring this up, fans of that series will get upset and be like, “How can you say that? This book has so many great women, so many great female characters.” And I agree! It does! So why would you introduce it that way? What is the reason if your story has all these great women who get to do stuff, why would you introduce it in such a way where your main woman has to just kinda watch the dude do stuff and then smile at him? It’s just the most bizarre intro to that story. It does not make sense. 

Chris: In the beginning, it’s really important to establish who your main character is and set expectations because whoever seems to be your main character, people will actively try to get attached to that person and start rooting for that person, and that’s how their expectations will be set. So when we have Warrior Lady, I’m like, “Ah, cool, a warrior lady,” and then she’s just there to play emotional support for some guy, I actively resent his presence. And that’s just what happens. This is also why there are a lot of people who just absolutely hate prologues where you have a POV character who gets killed because again, they assume this is the main character, get attached to them, I’ll just say that if they’re about to die they’re probably sympathetic, and just hate that experience of them having that person killed. The Raven Scholar has a decoy protagonist but managed to switch off I think only because the actual protagonist is so similar that they felt like the same person. 

Oren: Do you like nerdy, ambitious young women trying to overcome their station in life? Well, great, because we’ve got two of ’em! 

Chris: [laughs] So I did better with those ones, but even so, the problem with The Raven Scholar is everything takes longer than it should. There’s a lot of backstory in there that is genuinely useful, but we didn’t need to spend that much time on it. Similarly, we don’t need to spend so many hours in the opening just with a decoy protagonist only to kill her off. That was a waste. 

Oren: With that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to know your beginning mistakes, you can actually submit 500 words to me if you’re a patron, and I will gently, in a friendly fashion, critique them on our weekly Patreon newsletter. And you can find out all about what you could be doing better. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And it is going to be a friendly critique. I know for all you people who are like, “No, be mean to me. Destroy my beginning.” It’s like, no, that’s not a service we provide. 

Chris: We don’t do that. We always use the tone that is as friendly as possible while still making it clear where you can improve. 

Oren: If you want that really mean tone, you have to go publish a best-selling book, and then we’ll do it in a lessons post. Now it’s actually time for us to head out, and 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 we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week

Fantasy has plenty of cannons, and so does scifi, if we include beam weapons. But does either of them have a “canon?” The concept of a literary canon is squishy to begin with, and it is not the gold standard of quality the way some people insist, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. This week, we’re discussing whether speculative fiction has something similar, which books would go in it, and what that even means.

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

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Recently, I heard someone asking if science fiction and fantasy had a canon, and I thought that was weird ’cause, yeah, like, lots of them. Like, what kind of cannon do you mean? Like, there’s… flintlock fantasy is a whole genre, and if there’s, like, laser cannons, that’s even more! But then I realized they were spelling it with one N, and they meant does it have, like, a literary canon, and I don’t know. I wasn’t sure if it did or not. So that’s what we’re talking about today.

Chris: I mean, that’s not a formal thing, right? I mean, we do have extended universes, which are generally non-canon. So is it maybe everything that’s not in an extended universe?

Oren: Well, it may be, but before I answer that, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, we could use your help. We are currently looking for more transcription volunteers to help us make sure that every episode launches with a transcript, and we are very grateful to our existing volunteers. We just wanna make sure that they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode every six weeks or so at the most, so if you’re interested, go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.

Now, yes, I think that’s actually the answer. We have many canons, because spec fic nerds won’t stop arguing about what’s canon and not canon. But of course, the first question is what is the literary canon? And the answer is it’s very nebulous.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, this is just the books that people worship, right?

Oren: I mean, more or less. You know, they are books that people with literary clout both think are influential and also good, right?

Chris: See, I guess, I definitely don’t always like the idea of having a list of books that we’re supposed to be worshiping. That’s unhealthy, right? It’s unhealthy to hold up these works because a lot of times they’re treated as though they’re perfect in some way, and all stories are flawed, and it’s important we understand that. And it comes along with the idea of “the greats,” right? There’s these people who are destined for greatness, who write great literature, and it’s not a matter of skill so much as it is a matter of cultural clout that somebody is treated like that. And trying to aim for that level is… again, in the end, I don’t think it’s healthy, right? We’re trying to aim for something unattainable that depends on the validation of others. So, you know, I don’t like that idea in general. However, I do feel like we could maybe separate the ideas of what’s influential from what’s perfect.

Oren: Right. And there are a lot of books that are influential that would never be considered part of the literary canon because they don’t, you know, get lauded in the same way. Like, a book has to be lauded to count. And I’m not asking whether we should have one, I’m just curious if we do have one. I think the answer is yes, whether it should be or not.

Chris: I mean, I can certainly list books, and I’m happy to do that, that I think would be part of the canon if we were looking at what is influential and has helped shape and define the genre or subgenres. You know, we could definitely go over that list. I would just want to specify: the goal here of this list is not to treat every influential book as though it’s a masterpiece.

Oren: Right. ‘Cause in the literary canon, these are books like Grapes of Wrath, uh, anything by Tolstoy. If you had to read it in high school literature, there’s a good chance it would be considered part of the canon. People, of course, argue about what books do and don’t belong there all the time.

Chris: Yeah. I do think that there’s this old idea of there being a set of classic books that all educated people are supposed to have read, right? And this is a point that I think Wes made in an old episode, where one book would allude to another classic book because that was its way of saying, “Hey, I’m knowledgeable. I have, of course, read the books I was supposed to read.” Right? And that, that group, that list of classic books that everybody who’s educated reads then becomes part of the cultural conversation and how you prove that you’re educated, by having the knowledge of these classic works. And it creates this exclusive literary club. Again, I don’t think this is a great idea, but I kinda wonder if the canon is tied to that idea where, of course, you know, you have to read this set of books or you’re uneducated.

Oren: Yeah. And I do get the appeal of, like, what if there were certain books that everyone had read? Because then we would have a common base of reference.

Chris: Yeah, it’d be easier to have examples that people were familiar with if everybody had read the same books.

Oren: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I use examples from Lord of the Rings so much, right? Lord of the Rings and movies, because it’s much easier to guarantee that a larger percentage of my audience has seen those. Whereas if I’m using, even from relatively popular book series, like, you know, Temeraire did very well, but I have to explain a lot more of the Temeraire example for it to work, right? Whereas with Lord of the Rings, nearly everybody who comes to our site is at least aware of Lord of the Rings, even if they haven’t read it. So I understand the concept. I just don’t really think it’s workable because the moment you try to do that, you are having to exclude a bunch of books, and it’s hard for me to imagine any criteria you would set up that would A) be something you could get other people to adopt, and B) would not be, like, exclusionary along some lines that you don’t want to exclude books on.

Chris: Yeah, it would definitely introduce a lot of potential for bias. Not that the bias wouldn’t happen anyway, you know?

Oren: Sure.

Chris: I think there is a lot of bias when people share around books and what books they worship. There are certain patterns in who the authors of those books are.

Oren: Yeah, we’ll never know what those patterns are. Impossible to know.

Chris: So I guess that kinda happens anyway, but I think the problem is when you have a set classic list of books that everybody’s supposed to read. Hopefully in time books will change and you’ll diversify that list, but then it becomes really controversial if people are like, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t read Catcher in the Rye in class.” And it’s like, “What do you mean? It’s a classic!” It’s like, “Okay, but should it be, though? Should it be?”

Oren: Maybe we should read something else. I mean, because that is sort of the thing. If you’re going to have a canon and you wanna add books to it, you have to take some out, otherwise the concept is meaningless and it’s just all books now. But looking at speculative fiction specifically, it’s pretty clear that we have some books that people do treat the way that literary people treat their canon.

Chris: Lord of the Rings is probably the most obvious one.

Oren: Right.

Chris: It’s interesting because Frankenstein is another one that’s really famous, but Frankenstein is probably less referenced among just speculative fiction fans and more among actually literary fiction. It is science fiction, and it is, I would say, part of the canon, but definitely Lord of the Rings… because its influence, I think, is greater or considered greater or more relevant today anyway, right? That is the one that immediately comes to mind for everybody as being an important thing that everybody knows and everybody references. Even if you haven’t read it, even if you haven’t seen the movies, there are probably some things you know, like that there’s an evil ring in that story, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. And then there are, like, a handful of others, and then it starts to fracture based on your subgenre. You know, Dune is another one that is, you know, not only influential, but it’s also highly lauded as having a special kind of literary merit. Obviously, I don’t agree.

Chris: Is it?

Oren: Yeah, absolutely!

Chris: Okay. Yeah.

Oren: For one thing, there’s Dune fans, and they are, like, easily the most pretentious of the fan group that I’ve upset. But just the way people talk about Dune is that it’s, like, extremely deep, right? You have people quoting Herbert’s ideas from outside the book about how a charismatic leader will lead us to damnation. You know, as if that’s very profound and not something that everybody says at all times, and arguably isn’t even in the first book. But that’s the way people talk about Dune, and people talk about Song of Ice and Fire the same way. That’s a much more recent one that I would say is treated the same way that literary canon books get treated.

Chris: Yeah. So what do you think about Wheel of Time, since Wheel of Time is clearly derived from Dune?

Oren: Derived from Dune and derived from Lord of the Rings.

Chris: Very true.

Oren: Personally, I don’t think Wheel of Time is there, and this isn’t a quality judgment. As I’ve stated, I don’t really think that being considered part of the canon makes a book better. But I don’t think that there is the same attitude towards Wheel of Time as you get for, like, Dune or Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire.

Chris: So you’re judging this not by, like, how many books have imitated this book, but by the worshipfulness with which people talk about it.

Oren: I think it’s both. I think it is a combination, and I think one often causes the other. You know, for example, Twilight was hugely influential, but no one is ever gonna talk about Twilight the way they talk about the literary canon. They might do that for Hunger Games. Like, Hunger Games is starting to get there. Gut check here, right? I can’t scientifically test this, but just the way people talk about Hunger Games as, like, how important its messages are and how insightful it is. And, you know, I like Hunger Games. It’s a good book. I’m glad to see it getting recognition, and I think that it might get there, and it’s also extremely influential.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, with Twilight, I think Twilight is influential, and I hope someday it will be less disparaged. Not that it’s a perfect book, right? I just don’t think that there’s anything about it that deserves the kind of ridicule it gets. At the same time, we can go back to Twilight and see, well, I would say The Vampire Chronicles are the ones that would be considered part of the speculative fiction canon, the Anne Rice vampire series.

Oren: Oh yeah, that’s definitely one. I should’ve thought of that.

Chris: Because that influenced Twilight, right? So if we go back, that’s what started our paranormal romance vampire subgenre, it started with Vampire Chronicles.

Oren: Yeah, and it has the veneer of awe, right? The way people talk about Interview with the Vampire, which is extremely funny in the context of Anne Rice firing her editor on Facebook.

Chris: Because her every word is perfect.

Oren: That’s such a crass thing to do for the author of a series that people talk about the way they talk about Interview with the Vampire.

Chris: Yeah. But it speaks to how much he was worshiped that she just didn’t feel like she needed to be edited. There’s a lot of arrogance in that move that probably comes from being worshiped too much.

Oren: Yeah. And Discworld, people talk about Discworld in a similar way. I just don’t know if Discworld has reached the level of popularity that I would say is required to make-

Chris: Really?

Oren: Uh, yeah. 

Chris: Well, maybe I just hang out with a bunch of Discworld fans.

Oren: You do.

Chris: ‘Cause it feels like Discworld definitely, as a whole entity, is there. It’s definitely worshiped. It’s very popular. I would be surprised.

Oren: I mean, you definitely do hang out with a certain subgroup, but also, you’re not wrong. Like, Discworld is popular, and people both rightly and wrongly laud Discworld for its supposed brilliance. It’s just to me, I don’t think we’re quite at the worshipful level yet. But I could be wrong. [sarcastic] Maybe we are, and I just don’t see it because of how amazing and beautiful Discworld is. It’s outshining the way people worship it.

Chris: Yeah. Well, let’s just say I think we still have a plugin, it’s possible that I had to disable it on our website, that is a tribute to Terry Pratchett ’cause it sends messages over the interwebs that represent the clacks messages.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right? Like, you know, that was one of those things that I feel like people had a great deal of reverence for, calling him Sir Terry Pratchett, so yeah.

Oren: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that very well could be right.

Chris: And he was knighted, right? I do think that speaks to a certain level of cultural reverence.

Oren: Yeah, he did get plenty of recognition. He was not toiling in obscurity.

Chris: One book that I have to say, you know, I might begrudgingly put on this list is Name of the Wind just because I’ve seen enough knockoffs of Name of the Wind now. I can’t point and say Name of the Wind started this specific subgenre, but people definitely speak of it in very worshipful tones, which annoys me. And again, we’ve seen a couple of extremely blatant knockoffs, one of which is its own bestseller, which again speaks to the fact that people are inspired by it and are copying it, and so it definitely has some level of influence.

Oren: Yeah, it’s possible. Name of the Wind did pretty well for itself. It sold a lot of books, and certainly a lot of people talked about how brilliant it was. At the moment, I haven’t seen the kind of extra-textual discussion that I associate with people talking about canon works. Like, you know, I haven’t seen anyone quote lines from the book as wisdom the way they do with Lord of the Rings and Dune. And Pratchett, honestly – and so I think that that speaks to your point actually that Pratchett probably does count.

Chris: Yeah, in fact, I think I quoted Pratchett myself in one of my blog posts. Um, although actually the funny thing was I was quoting another author quoting Pratchett.

Oren: I haven’t seen that sort of tributes for Name of the Wind, but maybe.

Chris: Yeah, and maybe it’s a little new and it will get there or something like that. You know, we’ll see what happens with its cultural influence if it spreads. What do you think about Narnia?

Oren: Yeah, I would say so.

Chris: I mean, it’s very popular… I feel like almost everybody has been exposed to Narnia or was when they were kids. I’m kind of struggling to think about what books were inspired by Narnia. I mean, it is a portal fantasy, so we’ve had other portal fantasies. It’s probably not the first portal fantasy. We’ve got Wizard of Oz, it’s also a portal fantasy.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t think Narnia had the same kind of effect that, say, Lord of the Rings did. But it popularized a subgenre, and we have The Magicians now, which is grimdark Narnia, so, like, that exists. And there are a lot of other portal fantasies that have come and gone. I just don’t think most of them have achieved the same level of success that big epic fantasies have.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: One of the things that’s actually really interesting is that if you’re looking specifically at the science fiction and fantasy canon, a lot of the things that fill that role are actually not books. Like, if we’re talking about a literary canon, it by definition has to be books, but in the genre that we’re talking about, a lot of that role is filled by movies and TV shows, which is, you know, one of the reasons why we often use them as examples.

Chris: Yeah, ’cause people have seen more of them. Yeah, it can be tough sometimes when I’m looking at this list. It’s, because again, it’s almost like a self-fulfilling cycle where people are much more likely to venerate works that are written by, you know, white men and talk about them in this worshipful tone, and then they make our literary canon list because people worship them, right? And looking at how fast, for instance, women get eliminated from this list. Romantasy is really big right now, and it’s really new. We can trace back what are some of the influential books in creating current romantasy trends, but they’re not worshiped.

Oren: No.

Chris: And maybe someday they will be, but they’re certainly not right now.

Oren: I actually have a pet theory that romantasy is responsible for the fact that almost nobody comments on our critique posts now to say that “it must be good because it’s popular.” I think it’s because romantasy is super popular, and also because it’s for women, people are allowed to point out that it’s bad despite being popular. And so now people have much more internalized the idea that something can be really popular and still not be good. And of course, that was true way back when we started Mythcreants, right? People would still get really flustered if you brought up Twilight when they made that point, but it was less obvious. Like, all of the big famous fantasy stories that were selling well were still primarily by men and primarily for men. And now we’ve got romantasy, which has completely upended the genre in that way. And so now everyone’s kind of internalized, “yeah, just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good.” Which is true, it’s just funny that it took romantasy to get people to see that.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it’s very true. Now the tension that has arisen on the blog is, first of all, we have the occasionally grumpy person, which is like, “romantasy isn’t fantasy.” It’s like… yes. Yes, it is. It’s both fantasy and romance, and they’re mad that we’re covering it on the blog. And other people who are like, “oh, well, you know, I don’t really like the romance posts that you put on the blog as much, but I’ll tolerate them.” And this is the thing, I have tons of people in my classes that are writing romances, which is honestly kind of a tough thing to deal with because romances aren’t just tension-based, and they’re like… actually, how they work structurally is actually very complex. I know they seem simple, but it’s very complex. And so now I’ve got tons of romantasy students, right, that I’m trying to coach through all the different things they have to do in a romantasy. So yeah, there’s some tension between the people who are romance fans in the speculative fandom and people who are not.

Oren: That’s rough, buddy.

Chris: Have you seen a lot of works influenced, that you can think of, by The Broken Earth?

Oren: Not yet.

Chris: Hopefully we will have some.

Oren: I mean, Broken Earth is… obviously it won three Hugos. It was very lauded. It’s a work of dark fantasy, but it isn’t like what I would normally think of when I say the terms dark fantasy. When I say dark fantasy, I almost immediately imagine medieval-ish, everyone’s dying of the plague.

Chris: The Witcher.

Oren: Yeah, The Witcher. The, what was the one, the, the Joe Abercrombie book that I critiqued a while back?

Chris: The Blade Itself.

Oren: Yeah, The Blade Itself. That sort of thing, right? That’s what I think of as dark fantasy, and of course, The Broken Earth is completely different than that.

Chris: Jemisin’s work seems to be very much in the, often in the epic fantasy or have some epic fantasy elements. I mean, not all of them. I’m assuming… The City. What was the one about the city? The City We Became.

Oren: Yeah, that’s kind of its own beast. 

Chris: That’s its own unique butterfly. 

Oren: Yeah. But I mean, Broken Earth is very dark, right? It’s just also not realistic, right? And by not realistic, I mean it does not resemble anything from the real world. 

Chris: Not high in realism at all. 

Oren: Yeah. Whereas dark fantasy tends to distinguish itself by trying to be as much like at least people’s popular understanding of what a medieval society would be like as possible. Broken Earth goes in a completely different direction and is extremely fantastical and has lots of very complicated magical worldbuilding, and then is also really dark.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I would say The Witcher is actually pretty low on realism too. It is however smaller in scale. It’s more like the sword and sorcery…

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: …scale, right, of one muscly hero going around bashing in heads from town to town, and that gives it kind of a different feel to something that’s more of an epic fantasy like Broken Earth. 

Oren: Yeah, so far I haven’t seen a lot of books that feel like they are super influenced by Broken Earth. But again, Broken Earth won its three Hugos only 10 years ago.

Chris: Yeah, so it has time. Speaking of The Witcher- I have never had so many people mad at me, I feel like, who are actually fans as when I critiqued The Witcher. And I guess I don’t read enough dark fantasy to… ‘Cause we’d also have a look at, okay, when was it published? Does it have any precursors? But certainly it feels like people are very inspired by The Witcher, and it has its own video game franchise and everything.

Oren: It’s hard for me to draw that line just because I haven’t read as many books in The Witcher’s genre. You could also say that sword and sorcery has a lot of overlap with dark fantasy but is not necessarily the same thing.

Chris: Or with The Witcher anyway, ’cause The Witcher is like if you re-skinned Conan to make it dark fantasy, kind of. Yeah, I don’t know. Listeners, if you read a lot of, like, super grimdark dark fantasy, tell us how influential you think The Witcher is. Have you seen lots of books that are clearly inspired by The Witcher? We wanna know.

Oren: And it’s hard to trace The Witcher’s evolution in itself, because of course its author is Polish, right? So he’s probably got a different frame of reference than most Anglophone writers. Or maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know, I’m not Polish.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard because there are a lot of works… I mean, the US has a really huge publishing market, and so there may be more cultural interchange. Probably a lot of people in… I think it’s probably easier for our works to get across the seas than vice-versa, if I were to guess, just because it’s already… The downside of having a huge market is it’s extremely competitive. So some people in smaller countries… your work is not gonna sell as much if you just go with a local publisher, but it’s also easier to get published with a local publisher. That’s what we’ve been told by various people.

Oren: Yeah, who do publish in smaller markets.

Chris: Yeah. Whereas in the US, if you break through, there’s a very large market, but because there’s a very large market, there’s also lots of authors competing to get in. So it might be that people in Poland have read a fair number of works that are translated from the United States, but it’s hard to say for sure.

Oren: I’m sure they have, I’m just not sure if that’s the big influence for The Witcher author or not, right? And I just don’t know. This is like getting into much more speculative territory even than we’ve already been doing, but I am curious whether Dungeon Crawler Carl signals a mainstreaming of LitRPG or if it will be a fluke.

Chris: Yeah, that’s gonna be interesting.

Oren: Because, you know, Dungeon Crawler Carl has broken containment in a way that I don’t think any other LitRPG book has. There’s obviously a very passionate LitRPG fandom, but it’s fairly self-contained. You don’t see a lot of LitRPG books being discussed at award shows or having online discourse among the general fantasy community. But that’s definitely not true with Dungeon Crawler Carl. Everyone’s reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. Are we gonna see more now? It is going to require some more books, right? Because Dungeon Crawler Carl is above and beyond much better written than most other LitRPG I’ve encountered. And it’s possible that I’ve only encountered bad LitRPG, but the other ones that I have read, even if people are interested in the genre, I don’t think are gonna do the job.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it might depend on, for instance, whether traditional publishers decide that they wanna pick up LitRPG, because it’s popular enough. And also, again, if some of these young men, boys even, who read LitRPG are just very young, some of them might age up, right, and become better writers.

Oren: That’s true. 

Chris: And so we might see in time that the pool of writers who are writing LitRPG becomes more skilled, right? And we have more works that can kind of mainstream and break out. But that will be interesting to watch, or maybe we do have some authors who are already writing who like Dungeon Crawler Carl enough they decide to write LitRPG, right? So, you know, it could happen. We’ll see. Speaking of new genres, it’ll be interesting to see how Legends & Lattes ages.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, at the moment, Legends & Lattes is in that odd space of being extremely influential but, like, not lauded. So it doesn’t meet the classic definition of a canon book because, you know, most people think of Legends & Lattes as, like, a fun beach read or alternatively an existential threat to literature.

Chris: I mean- This is, again, an issue that Terry Pratchett faced extensively in his life where people do not take light books seriously, whereas people take works that are darker more seriously. And it’s unfortunate. I wish it was not true. But Pratchett definitely had this issue where, you know, he had very serious messages in his work, but because his works were light and funny, people often overlooked that and did not take his work seriously. And so of course it’s worth saying the same thing with cozy fantasy, where Legends & Lattes did get nominated for a Hugo. Did it win? I can’t remember.

Oren: I don’t think so.

Chris: But generally it’s definitely harder for a cozy to be nominated, I think, because people don’t revere them. And there were cozies before Legends & Lattes, for sure, right? It was not the only cozy, but that seems to be the one that made it a lot more popular and became famous. And we’ve seen, just like Court of Thorns and Roses changed what the titles of all of these other romantasy books are so that they were all “X of Y and Z” or something, we saw tons of books come out that were “This & That,” right, that were like cozies or designed to be appealed to the cozy audience, that were just fashioning their titles after Legends & Lattes.

Oren: That is true.

Chris: So it speaks to how, like, you can already see its influence there, right? Because of the way that people are titling and packaging their books to make them as close to Legends & Lattes as possible. So I don’t know, maybe it being as light as it is and being a cozy will keep it from being revered, but maybe, again, people revere old things more than new things.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Maybe once it gets old.

Chris: Once it gets old, we’ll overlook the fact that it’s light because it’s old.

Oren: Yeah. Maybe when it’s old, people will start to talk about the brilliance of paying the mafia boss in goods and services instead of money. It really subverts the traditional economic paradigm. Yeah, all right, that’s gonna be a think piece in 20 years, just watch. All right. Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: So this podcast is never gonna be in the speculative fandom canon, but we might get .00001% closer if you became one of our patrons and helped us out. Very motivational, right? It’s a very big difference, your contribution! Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: 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. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.