Your characters start in one place. You would like them to be in another place, and the magic system doesn’t include teleportation. That means it’s time to depict some travel, which can range from the best moments of a story to the equivalent of needing to eat your veggies before dessert. Which end your story falls on depends on both understanding how travel works and properly setting expectations. Also, having more than one horse per person. That’s very important.

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

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

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: So Oren, I want my protagonist to go on a dangerous journey to the center of this dark, enchanted wood. But then I realized I also want a friend from their hometown to just to be there when the protagonist arrives. And to be clear, this is somebody that the protagonist left behind at their hometown.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So they needed to get there ahead. And I was just thinking, well, I suppose the town could just invent a transporter while they are traveling. You know? Problem solved.

Oren: Is that you the later seasons of Game of Thrones?

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: Which is funny because I never watched later seasons of Game of Thrones. That’s just a thing people say about it. To me, reading the books, it was the opposite. Suddenly in the books it takes forever to get anywhere.

Chris: Yeah, that’s sort of hard. The catch-22 of travel where you want something to take a long time, but you also want it to be super fast whenever it’s plot convenient.

Oren: Right. We made the mistake of being into fantasy, and usually in fantasy stories you don’t have super fast transit. You know? Usually a hallmark of fantasy is that you’re limited in how quickly you can move around. Which, you know, is cool and flavorful until you need to be somewhere. Then it’s a pain.

Chris: I do suspect that in space it’s easier to make everything just move at the speed of plot. ‘Cause you know, space is big and amorphous and it’s not that you couldn’t establish, like, Earth to Alpha Centauri-whatever takes this such and such time, and then later have it be a different time. But …

Oren: I mean, that is something that has been increasingly noticeable to me in every iteration of Star Wars and Star Trek, which is that travel times seem to shrink. And I don’t know for sure. It’s not like I’ve measured them. But I’ve just noticed that, especially in the newer versions of Star Wars and Star Trek, it kind of feels like when they want to go somewhere they’re just immediately there.

And maybe it was just more about the pacing of the actual scenes than real travel time, but it certainly felt like it took a little longer to get places in older iterations of both franchises.

Chris: I mean, I can believe that because usually the pace of stories is also continuously kind of sped up as times pass. But in this case, it’s partly about the believability of how fast. Does it feel real? Does it really feel like they’re traveling if they go there instantly? But like, once the audience gets used to, “okay, we could get there, but it felt like a day passed.” And that becomes realistic, you can kind of keep pushing the boundary if you want characters just to show up instantly.

Not that there isn’t reason to want some delays in travel. We can talk about fantasy. That’s one thing that’s interesting is just by being in different settings fantasy tends to have a very different relationship to travel than science fiction often does.

Oren: Although, I mean with certain magic systems, if you want, you can just start introducing teleportation magic and say, “I don’t wanna deal with that anymore.” It’s not my favorite.

Chris: Yeah. You better put some restrictions on the teleportation magic.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a huge ability. It has a lot of ways that it can potentially interfere with the plot. It’s not something I typically like to introduce.

Chris: Yeah I mean, I think if you wanna use teleportation magic, again, it’s a lot easier if you make it more an analogous to modern day travel or you travel to a portal zone and then you can go from one portal to the other as opposed to spot to spot teleportation.

Oren: Yeah, just being able to teleport wherever you want is gonna ’cause you some problems.

Chris: I mean, it helps if you have to have been there before or if you need an accurate picture of it. I mean, in modern day an accurate picture would be nothing. In some fantasy settings an accurate picture would still something, but I think even those will wear down.

Oren: Oh man! This is a great new plot idea. So you need an accurate picture of something, right? And in modern day, that’s not a problem, except because the internet is now flooded with slop. You look up a picture; is that really what it looks like? Is this a real picture? Who knows?

Chris: [Laughing] I just love the idea of like—so what happens to you if you tried to teleport into something that’s been like slop-ified. So it has something weird in the picture. Like a crab turning into a cabbage, you know?

Oren: Not good things happen to you. Let me tell you.

Chris: Do you go to the alternate slop dimension? Ah man.

Oren: you come out really convinced that you can replace forty percent of your workforce with an LLM.

Chris: [Burst of laughter] Oh no. Let’s get back to the speculative fiction. Let’s escape again, please.

Oren: Yeah. The optimistic fantasy world.

Chris: [Chuckling] Let’s go back to the optimistic fantasy world.

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: So yeah, science fiction, it’s not that there’s no considerations. I do think that the trope of aliens leaving behind warp gates is particularly interesting.

Oren: Yeah, sci-fi authors love alien warp gates because they both give an explanation for where this technology came from and why the rest of your setting doesn’t seem that advanced. And they help create a reason why people don’t just blow them up if there’s a problem because you can say that they’re made of, like, special alien stuff or like, we can’t rebuild them or they’re invincible. Because that’s a problem with if you have some kind of warp gate system, it makes any kind of interstellar fighting very hard.

And you see this in Babylon 5, where in Babylon 5, after a while they just kind of gave up and every ship could open its own warp gates now. So the actual warp gate next to the station really didn’t seem like it mattered that much. Whereas in like, The Expanse or in Mass Effect their teleportation gates are made outta weird alien stuff. And so they either are afraid to mess with it or it’s too difficult to destroy, so you just have to accept that ships are gonna be coming through that.

Chris: I did notice in Star Flight Academy how they did have to come up with a reason why Discovery—the Discovery ship couldn’t just use its special drive to come to their rescue.

Oren: Yeah. They had to give a reason for that. It’s funny. The spore drive would’ve caused less of a problem if it hadn’t been a prequel, but it’s still kind of a problem. It’s like, your ship can teleport anywhere? Like, alright.

Chris: Again, it’s that point to point teleportation. Because at some point in time just having every single ship, every single force on the enemy or on the good guys be able to go anywhere instantly—that’s just a very different kind of conflict with very different logistics.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it. I am gonna say that most writers don’t know how to write that. I certainly don’t. 

Chris: I mean, for the purpose of storytelling, we usually need stories where our protagonists are isolated. ‘Cause usually, you know, we have our little scrappy hero who is supposed to be the person who saves the day. And we have to come up with reasons why more powerful people can’t help them. And being physically isolated is a pretty important component of that. So if people are doing teleporting anywhere that certainly makes that harder. Which is why Starfleet Academy of course decided, oh! You know, Discovery’s just busy right now. Can’t come.

Oren: Yeah, they had a techno battle thing about it. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

Chris: The other thing that’s interesting is the fact that technically the speed of travel should usually affect the speed of communication.

Oren: Yeah. That’s another thing that is hard to wrap your head around as a modern person. The idea that messages in a lot of fantasy settings can’t go that much faster than a person can travel. There are some options. Fantasy settings can have limited communication over distances. You can set up smoke relays. If you’re a little more advanced, you can do something like the clacks towers from Discworld, which are based on a real thing. The Discworld versions are a lot more capable than the real version, but you know, they exist. And the more advanced you get the more options. But generally speaking, there isn’t a lot of information that’s going faster than a human can travel. And that’s also the same in some sci-fi settings actually. In some sci-fi settings there’s no intergalactic wireless. Messages move at how quickly a messenger ship can get there.

Chris: Although I do think in a lot of Star Trek episodes don’t they have some very long distance video calls?

Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. No, Star Trek doesn’t work like that. In Star Trek you can Zoom with anybody at any. And they have an explanation for that. They call it “subspace buoys,” which is how they explain how you can call Earth to anywhere in the Federation. But Voyager can’t call Earth ’cause there aren’t any buoys in the way.

Chris: But Voyager does eventually. Is it when they reach the buoys?

Oren: No, they access an ancient alien communication network. So sort of, but not Starfleet’s. I think it’s the Hirogen who used to be real big on building interstellar communication networks, and then they decided to be “diet Klingons” instead. Interesting cultural evolution.

Chris: I guess the useful thing of having all of your protagonists doing a long journey—traveling from one place to another—is if you have like one spot where people have the ability to communicate across the galaxy, then they’re only gonna be there for a temporary time, and then you can just take it away again.

Oren: I mean like, if you’re having it based on infrastructure you have a lot of flexibility. Because if you want your characters to be able to get messages and not have to go across the universe to get them, you can say, oh well, we stopped at a planet that had a big subspace antenna and so we were able to get some mail. But now we’re going out into the less developed area, so we’re not gonna be getting those.

Chris: But I will say that if you do want—kind of regardless of what you do, this is one of those things where if you’re doing it consistently it’s probably gonna constrain you at some point. There is no perfect solution that means that everything is plot convenient for you when you’re plotting as possible, but still is gonna seem perfectly consistent to the reader.

Oren: And you have to decide how much do you wanna lean into this? Because if you look at, for example, just a relatively recent example in real history in the run up to the American Revolution a lot of what happened had to do with the speed of travel. There were several attempts to cool down tension between the colony leaders and Parliament in the UK, but these messages take weeks to get across the Atlantic. And very often something happens while you’re waiting for a message.

Like the British general is waiting for a message from Parliament and the message says, “Don’t do any fighting stuff.” But before he gets that message he sees the colonials are up to something shady and he decides, “Well, I don’t have a message saying I’m not supposed to fight them yet, so I’m gonna go fight ’em.” And you have that kind of dynamic, and that can be fun, right? It helps. It makes your world more immersive. It helps you feel like you’re not just modern people wearing costumes.

But it also gets confusing and difficult. The further you get into a long story the harder it is to keep that up, because the more times you’re gonna risk your character, like missing the crucial information they need to be at a certain place for the story to work properly.

Chris: Yeah. And today everybody’s so used to having their cell phones that the default mindset is like, oh, this is really inconvenient. That character’s over there, but I just want them to know the things.

Oren: Right. Oh man, in role-playing games that’s especially bad because all the players are sitting around the table and they can just talk to each other.

Chris: Yeah, at this point I swear when I’m role playing, it’s like whatever. The team just has a hive mind.

Oren: Yeah! The party hive mind. Recently, we did a little mini Delta Green game and it was set in the ‘60s and I gave you guys walkie talkies. The idea was supposed to be that these were not as effective as regular cell phones. They were supposed to have limited range, and they were supposed to be kind of dangerous to use because they operate on a frequency that other people can listen in on. But after a while it just became clear that that was not what you guys were thinking of them as, and I hadn’t really made that clear in the game. So I just let them function effectively as cell phones, because that was clearly the direction we were going and I didn’t feel like fighting that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, unless you really are in the mindset to leverage those communication gaps for drama, it just becomes too cumbersome to like, okay, you know? The other players just watched us play this out, but now I gotta repeat it over the walkie-talkie in character. But again, if you want actual travel adventures, which is what fantasy tends to lean into, because by nature it kind of is usually in a setting where traveling is a lot more cumbersome. And we were talking about Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which is a travel story where clearly Percy is supposed to be having travel adventures, but it’s awkward because it’s in modern day. So we have to start with an excuse for why he can’t fly.

Oren: ‘Cause Zeus is mad at him.

Chris: Zeus is mad at him, so he better not get in a plane.

Oren: Fortunately, he can’t take a high speed train because this is the United States, so he can’t do that. And for reasons only he and two other twelve-year-olds are allowed to go on the trip, so they can’t drive either. So you know, that worked itself out. [Sarcasticly] Don’t pay too much attention to the explanation for why only him and two twelve-year-olds can go. Just don’t worry about it.

Chris: But yeah, the same thing goes for, again, that balance between do you wanna have a venture while traveling or do you want people to get somewhere instantly? In a lot of fantasy settings one of the tricky things is anytime there’s water people will travel by water. But boats are just kind of—oh! Oh no! I was about to say boats are boring and Oren is— [Laughter]

Oren: [Indignant] How dare—I do beg your pardon, madam!

Chris: Look, there’s just less things for characters to do when they’re on a boat than there is when they’re land traveling.

Oren: Look, they got so many different kinds of knots that need to be tied and there’s a lot of cleaning. You gotta clean boats all the time.

Chris: [Noncommittal] Yes. Uh, it’s very exciting.

Oren: [Chuckling] That is actually an example of the difference between what I was in my notes referring to as active travel versus sedentary travel. Whereas in active travel, you’re either walking or riding a horse maybe. Like, the idea is that it requires constant effort on your part as opposed to sedentary travel where you are just sitting down waiting. If you’re a passenger on a boat or if you’re on a train or in a car that’s mostly sedentary travel.

It’s easier to skip over all that. People don’t expect you to cover it as much because it’s just sort of assumed, yeah, the boat will get where it’s going eventually. Whereas if you’re traveling on foot, it’s like that’s a little bit more of an effort. Readers may expect a little more from you there. 

Chris: Yeah. Let’s talk about that, because that is an issue with fantasy. Do you have to show the traveling? Just because there are many stories where that’s not really what the writer has in mind as far as what they want to depict. Now I’ve discovered that I apparently like depicting traveling, and so I basically designed the plots for my stories to have tons of travel adventures, and that’s part of the fun for me.

But if you’re like, doing a political intrigue and your character just has to move from city A to city B, but you feel like you have a setting where that journey is really perilous for some reason, then it becomes a lot harder to deal with. Because traveling also doesn’t feel like it should be part of the story, but you also don’t feel like you can skip it.

And the reason is basically if there is an expectation by the reader that it is gonna entail a lot of hardship or danger. That it is risky in some way. Then that means it’s basically an arc that kind of starts a plot arc right there.

Oren: And it can be a little frustrating. Because if you’re like, okay, this story is about the dangerous politics of “Elftown,” but between you and Elftown is the cursed forest. And I’m like, okay, I guess it should be hard to get through the cursed forest. But I really wanted the politics of Elftown. Like, this cursed forest is taking a while.

Chris: Yeah. So that’s tricky. Again, one thing you can do if you can: make the travel feel more routine and easier than—basically it’s more natural to skip ahead. And it’s not all about like, if you’re walking or sedentary. If this is like a really well traveled road that is maintained by some empire, there’s not a lot of bandits because the security is good, and there’s tons of people on it that feels a lot more like modern roads. That feels very routine, matter-of-fact. And then instead of making a big deal in your narration, I mean you do want to mention how long it’ll take, but instead of making a big deal out of the fact like, oh, I gotta travel across X, Y, Z, you just focus on the destination presented as not a big deal.

Oren: Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the order of operations was when I was editing the travel sequence in my novel. ‘Cause I remember, I think what happened was that readers were feeling a little bored by it until a more exciting thing happened partway through. But I didn’t feel like I could just skip over it, because as part of the tension I had in fact set up that this was gonna be kind of a dangerous trip.

So I think in that instance, the solution ended up being to more properly set expectations that this was gonna be risky, and then have the risk kind of discharge itself in a major conflict scene. And then afterwards set the expectation that now I’m gonna summarize ’cause now we’re assumed to be safe, so don’t worry about it.

Chris: So I think there were multiple things going on in The Abbess Rebellion. One of them actually was the fact that you just had a lot of information to convey, given the fact that it’s got political intrigue. And so you have, I know, some early character conversations that were there that were really important for setting up the story that were just happening while they were traveling. And so one of the reasons we couldn’t make that tighter is because that was actually information that the audience needed to know. You also did set up an arc, but it didn’t come to a head right away, of that maybe there would be danger on the road. And then later the summary—again, I think a lot of this was just the setup work that also happened to happen at the same time as the travel when there was quite a bit of summary that was covering here’s what the land looked like, the different provinces looked like along the journey as they got closer to the capitol. And again, that was kind of a way to tell readers here’s what the state of the empire is. Because that matters to the story. And so there was a lot of setup being done, and I think that was part of that. In that situation, it wasn’t just the management of tension that was the issue there.

But I do think if it’s just tension in a lot of cases, kind of something similar to what you did where you do have an initial arc, but then you resolve it and then you skip ahead is a good technique. So basically I’d try to identify, okay, what is the central issue that you’re gonna have with traveling? 

Is it just an issue of like, oh, well my character has been very sheltered and pampered and so they’re not used to like the hard life on the road and we need to show them adjusting. Is it like, okay, they’re gonna be locked on a boat with somebody they don’t like and there’s an interpersonal issue that could be there? What is it? Or is there some initial dangerous step in the journey that can end after they get to a more crowded road, for instance. And then have a little arc over that that then shows readers, okay, this is what traveling is like, and here we’ve gotten over—me and this person who I don’t get along with have learned to coexist in some manner. Or, here I’m sore, but now I’ve adjusted to riding on a horse. Or whatever it is.

Try to make it an interesting tense arc that’s fun. And then get done with it. And then just, alright well, the rest of the journey is gonna be routine now. Then jump forward to the destination. And then fill in, oh, this is the state of my character. They’re so tired, they’re so stinky. They’re so dirty, they’re so worn out. Whatever it is. And then you can kind of backfill: oh, the journey was routine or there were a lot of long days or whatever it was.

So that’s kind of like a middle ground that, alright, we recognize that there is some inadvertent tension created over the traveling and so we’re gonna keep up to that, but try to keep it as short as we can.

Oren: And I realized as I was talking that this is a situation that I’ve seen a number of authors struggle with. Which is your leader is in the capitol or whatever, and you want to have them go check out something that’s happening out in the provinces and go look for and see for themselves. And in a modern story this would be easy. Your character would hop in a helicopter or in a car, and it wouldn’t take too long. But if you’re in a fantasy setting that is a long time to be gone from your capital, especially if plotting is afoot. So this is the thing that I’ve definitely noticed. It feels like everyone just takes a pause, like, “Nah, we’re not gonna do any plotting while the main character’s gone. Don’t worry about it.” Which is incidentally, in real life why the court often traveled with the king. ‘Cause the king needs to go see things outside the capitol, but he can’t afford to have all of his nobles like, scheming while he is not there. So he brings them with him.

Chris: Wow. Does that mean that they were often coerced?

Oren: I mean not necessarily like, “Come with me or I’ll kill you.” But like, “Everyone else is doing it.”

Chris: “You will feel my displeasure if you don’t come with me.”

Oren: Right. Like, “I’ll be upset.” And also everyone else is doing it. So if you don’t do it, then you’re not gonna get the influence ’cause you won’t be where the king is.

And you know, various kings have done this to various degrees. King—I think he’s Louis XIV. Whichever one the Sun King is of France. He was famous for getting all of his most powerful nobles really isolated in his relatively tiny castle and palace area, and just having them be constantly in very close proximity to him with very little contact with the outside world. 

Sometimes they would do stuff like that, but at its most basic the traveling court is basically a way for the king to be able to keep tabs on all his powerful people. And in return, the powerful people have access to the king which is something they want. So it works out for everybody.

Chris: I think another good question when we do want travel adventures is how dangerous should travel realistically be? Because there can definitely be something where it’s like, oh! It’s super dangerous. It’s like, okay, but how do people trade? Because people should be trading and it can’t really be that dangerous if every single person is set on by bandits.

Oren: Yeah, I do wish people wouldn’t use bandits like random encounters. It’s not like banditry never happens, but I do think it deserves a little bit of setup. I don’t think you should just assume that the moment you walk outta town, you’re likely to be attacked. Because if that happens people are going to respond differently. Like if the countryside is that dangerous then the way people travel will be very different.

First of all, where are all these bandits coming from? Bandits don’t just materialize out of the air. Who are these bandits and how have they been able to hang out in this area that is apparently both rich enough to support them robbing people, but also doesn’t have the resources to drive them out?

And there are answers. You can come up with solutions to these questions. I just think you should think about them. Same thing with monsters. If monsters are constantly attacking travelers then there aren’t gonna be very many travelers. Travelers will adapt.

Chris: I just want people to stop using wolves. Like they’re just murderbots or something.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, animals will almost never attack a group of people. Especially a group of armed people. Mmm-mm, no. That’s almost not going to happen. Not impossible, but extremely uncommon.

Chris: Yes. Wolves are not murder machines. Other wild animals are not murder machines. So I mean, you could increase the likelihood of danger by giving your protagonist a unique misadventure where they kinda lose their way. And then there’s more danger off the main road, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. Having to go through an area that isn’t well traveled is already a danger, right? Maybe they have to do that. That in itself, that’s gonna suspend a lot of what we were just talking about ’cause it’s specifically not well traveled.

Chris: It’s also worth noting that in a low tech setting, like many fantasy settings, roads really do require maintenance. It’s interesting how long Roman roads were used past when they were built, because of just the work that it takes to build roads and maintain them. But having those pathways established is actually really essential because that determines whether you can use wheels or not. ‘Cause wheels require a flat surface. So I mean, if you have just a dirt track and an open prairie that’s already flat you might be able to make wheels work, for instance.

But in most forested, hilly areas you can’t use wheels unless there are actually roads. And for that there has to be somebody keeping the roads clear. So if you have a situation where you’ve got a bunch of isolated villages and you’re supposed to be really far from civilization and there’s no big empire that’s got crews manning the roads, then that’s not gonna be an option for people. Which is why animals are more useful in those situations.

Speaking of animals, animals can be really fun. It’s definitely a good thing to do a little research. And in many cases you could use something other than a horse to give it a little variety. But note about horses: you do need a horse for every person and then another horse to carry any packs. 

Oren: Yeah, that was something I really liked about The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is that he has multiple horses.

Chris: Yep, multiple horses. So if you want your humans to ride a horse rather than walk with the horse, there should be more than one horse per person. But other than that, the animal that’s used really does change the travel experience enough that it’s worth looking up.

For instance, oxen have probably better stamina than horses, but they have to rest midday when it’s hot ’cause they’re sensitive to the heat. So that means you kind of have a long lunch break every day. Camels apparently got very good stamina, but they’re very hard to get going in the morning. So like people sleep on camels, because once you get them going you want really long days and you never wanna stop because once the camels stop they won’t walk again. I find those differences very interesting and they can add some interest to travel.

Oren: So sadly, no research yet on traveling by bear, but we’re working on it.

Chris: Yep. [Chuckles] I’ve been trying to research reindeer for doing a story that has just a little minimal mention of reindeer. And I’m finding what I can, but the information on reindeer—I wish it was a little bit more plentiful.

Oren: Well you heard it, folks. Please send us all of your reindeer sources.

Chris: Yeah, do it.

Oren: We have a need. Alright. Well with that I think we will call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to fuel our tanks or feed our four horses, since there are two of us…

Oren: [Snickers]

Chris: …you can support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

Yes, obviously. But maybe not in the way some people think? This is a weird question that comes up every so often in The Discourse, and it inevitably reveals more about emotional states than it does the craft of writing. It’s worth investigating what people actually mean when they ask this question, what role reading actually plays in writing, and why Interview With The Vampire is a fantastic adaptation.

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: So, I have a book that I want you to buy and read, but I will never buy and read your book. I actually hate your book. I think it’s worthless. I hate the whole concept of your book. No, please buy my book. 

Chris: Oh, no. 

Oren: This opening bit is actually also setting context for an important part of our topic today, which is the question of: Do writers need to read question mark?

Chris: Is there really a question mark? Is there a really a−

Oren: I mean−

Chris: −question?

Oren: −sometimes. 

Chris: Is this really any question? 

Oren: I mean it’s a weird bit of perennial discourse that pops up every once in a while, and it’s like, I think it is 90% motivated by fear, in my experience.

Chris: Definitely feels like rage bait discourse. 

Oren: Yeah. I have no idea how many people there are out there that seriously think that they can write a novel without ever having read a novel. Every once in a while you see someone who claims that, and I’m like, are you a real person? Who knows? I’ve certainly never met one of these people in real life. But at the same time, writers are scared that these people exist. And it’s for the reason I just described. At least, in my opinion it is. I’m doing a little bit of armchair psycho-analysis here, right? 

You know, we’re all scared−for a bunch of reasons−but in this most immediate reason is that we all see the news articles about how reading rates are falling and who’s gonna buy and read our books if no one is buying or reading books? And then you’ve got these maybe real people who want to sell us their books, but refuse to read ours in return. And it’s, uh, it makes us very mad.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, even without the falling reading rates, it’s just so competitive. And we want people to buy more books so that more of us can have careers, or there could be kind of an implied insult to the medium itself. Like, well, if you’re not reading, it feels like the easy conclusion to take from that is that, well, you don’t enjoy reading. It’s not a fun pastime for you. So, if you don’t like this art medium, why are you creating stories in it, for instance? So, again, that can be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but that is certainly how… I think, why it enrages people so much. I mean, that combined with just the fact that people really want to complain about new books and how they’re worse than yesterday’s books. 

Oren: Yeah, they do like to do that.

Chris: I honestly think it’s the reverse. Over a long enough time span, I think books are getting better, not worse. It doesn’t mean that this year’s books are that much better than last year’s books.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But yeah, it’s just always very popular to complain about the books these days. Just like we complain about the kids these days. 

Oren: Right, and if anyone has been able to find a well-known book by an author who never reads, I don’t know of that. I don’t think that’s a thing. 

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a thing either, but it certainly plays into the fear. It’s that like, oh, all of the books are now bad because writers don’t read anymore. 

Oren: Right. And of course this combines with the young people panic, right? Every once in a while there’s a viral story where some professor will be like, the people in my class don’t know how to read books anymore. And it’s one of those things where on the one hand “kids these days”, this is a perennial complaint. Everyone always complains about kids these days. But I don’t want to entirely dismiss it because the education system is worse funded now than it used to be. 

Chris: It’s worse funded. Yeah. 

Oren: And of course there is the brand new, very fun variable of LLMs being everywhere, and we don’t really know exactly how that’s going to affect people. There are some preliminary reports that are pretty scary, but it’s still only, it’s still actually fairly new, and it’s hard to separate the real data from the panic pieces.

Chris: Yeah, it is. The idea that kids aren’t, for instance, not just not writing their own papers, but they don’t have to read books anymore because they’re just summarizing them, you know, it’s scary. I don’t know how much that’s common, right, but it’s−

Oren: −and to be clear, that happened before LLMs.

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Right? 

Chris: Yeah, no, all the CliffsNotes. We were always doing that. I mean, I didn’t personally do that, but I assume lots of other people did. People who−

Oren: −yeah, I mean, I’m−

Chris: −were more reasonable with their time− 

Oren: −I’m not− 

Chris: −sometimes.

Oren: −I’m not gonna say that I never did that. 

Chris: When I look back, at the time when I read through all of Atlas Shrugged, I was like, why didn’t I do that? Why did I make myself read over a thousand pages of Ayn Rand?

Oren: Right. So, but anyway, this all ties into the anxiety that people have about this supposed cohort of authors that don’t want to read books, and as a result, people are primed to jump at some random account with 15 followers that claims you don’t have to read books and may or may not be a real person. But at the other hand, at the other end of it, I’ve noticed another defensive reaction, which is from people who don’t just not read but maybe don’t read as much as they feel like they should read. And they feel judged by this whole thing. You know, like people who have read a lot but maybe don’t read much or at all anymore for whatever reason. That’s a pretty common narrative. You talk to people who are like, yeah, when I was in high school I read like a book a week, and now I just can’t get myself to do it.

 And these people then feel judged, and they get upset, and then it just becomes a round and round and round endless cycle, and it gets… at that point, it’s less about the initial question of do writers need to read and more about how cool of a nerd you are in one way or another. 

Chris: I do think that if you’re one of those people who feels a little insecure about how much you read because you don’t read as much as you would like to be reading, personally, I don’t think that’s the person that everybody else is panicking over.

Realistically, I think that when people get this negative reaction to the idea of writers not reading, they’re imagining a very stereotypical person who just hates books, or is, you know, at all… right, and doesn’t think that they need to put any work in and or whatever. They’re not thinking about the person who actually does like books and has read many books that they loved, but is doing a million things and raising kids, and taking care of their aging parents at the same time or whatever it is that you’re doing. Right? And is having trouble squirreling away the time to read. I don’t think−, that’s not the type of person that people are thinking of.

Oren: Right. There is a specific breed of writing advice giver whose first advice to any question is always go read lots of books.

Chris: Because they’re bad at their jobs. 

Oren: It’s not good advice, right? Like yeah, reading… it can give you some help, right? It can be useful for your craft, but this idea that like more books equals more better writing, it’s not true.

Chris: If somebody gives that advice on top of also giving lots of good craft advice, okay, fine. But like−

Oren: Sure.

Chris: −I definitely feel like there is some, oh, you know it when you see it. I don’t want to have to personally do the work to figure out what that means or what the rules are to teach it to somebody else, so just read and you’ll just know it when you see it, too, if you read enough, right? 

Oren: Yeah. There’s this attitude that if you read a lot of books, you can kind of absorb the skills through osmosis. 

Chris: And it’s not impossible to do that, but it’s certainly not reliable, and it’s definitely slower than actually sitting down to really learn.

Oren: Right, because if you do want to learn from books, you have to be able to read critically, and that’s a kind of confusing term for some people because some people what they think that means is you should read a book and just trash everything in it. And don’t get me wrong, trashing will be involved, but you have to be able to do more than just find problems. You have to be able to look at the reasons why things are happening. And often this means looking past not only your own positive reactions, but also your own negative reactions.

 Like, you didn’t like something−, this is something that I have to deal with, for example, when I’m reading a dark story, because I don’t tend to like dark stories very much, and so it’s easy for me to assume, “Ugh, I hate this character because they are a bad character and they’re terribly written.” It’s like, okay, is that really the reason or is the reason that I just didn’t like that they did dark things in a dark story? That sort of thing. Or, another big one is like, “Oh man, I hate this hindrance character so much. I wish that hindrance character was dead. This book would be so much better if that hindrance character was dead.” But is the issue really the character or is it that the author doesn’t want to move the plot forward and if that character wasn’t around, they would find some other reason? 

Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of things that storytellers do that get blamed on characters, but we also hear from a lot of people who, again, when they’re new to this and they’re still learning to do critical reading, it takes some long time to figure out, “Okay, I’m not into it. Why? I don’t like this. Why?” And that just basic pinning down−, first of all, recognizing what you feel, which right can be a big step. Again, a new storyteller generally does not know what tension feels like. You have to pay attention to that and pay attention to your own feelings and learn that, and then from there, try to figure out why you are reacting the way you do. And then from there, you can start to get sort of storytelling lessons as you read material, but a lot of that takes a lot of introspection. And sometimes if you can’t tell right away, it might take: I’ve read several novels and was able to compare this one to this one, and it didn’t bother me in this case, but it did bother me in this case, and I think here’s why.

That takes a lot of time and introspection, but it does help for sure. 

Oren: Yeah. And then there’s the more immediate benefits of keeping up with reading. Either, if it’s your own genre, then you know what people are doing in the genre. You have some idea, and that can help you decide which story ideas to pursue. I’m not suggesting you try to write to the market. I don’t think that’s viable for most people, but if you didn’t read modern fantasy these days, and by modern I mean fantasy written today, not fantasy set in a modern period, if you didn’t do that, you might think we were all still publishing Lord of the Rings clones, and that’s just not the case. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and you wouldn’t know that. So, you could end up being like, yeah, I’m going to write my own Lord of the Rings clone, and it’ll flop because everyone’s like, we’ve all read Lord of the Rings, man. Or maybe the genre is set for a resurgence, and there’s Lord of the Rings clones all over the place!

But if you don’t read in the genre at all, you won’t know any of that. You won’t be able to make an informed decision. 

Chris: Again, we don’t encounter this very often, and so we don’t−, it doesn’t usually need to be said, but generally you want to be a fan of the genre that you’re writing in.

Oren: Probably. 

Chris: That may seem obvious, but occasionally we run into somebody who has never read that genre before or is kind of like, oh, that genre’s so bad, I’m going to do it better; doesn’t really like it; doesn’t have an understanding, therefore, of what fans like about the genre, right? And that could be, like, if you read that subgenre and those types of stories and you don’t like them, then trying to mimic them is probably not a good idea. 

Oren: And I understand writing out of spite. I’ve done that more than a few times. But there’s still like, what is it about this genre that you do want to have in your story? It’s probably gotta be something, right? Otherwise, why this genre? Pick one you like better. And this is a very long way of saying that if you are able to read critically and do this kind of analysis, that’s more important than the number of books you read. You don’t have, there’s not like a, I gotta read 20 books in a year. There’s no point in measuring it like that.

Chris: Obviously, people like to brag about their Read pile sometimes, although I think sometimes writers like to talk more about their To Be Read pile and how hopelessly big it is. So, if there’s all these books that you intended to read and never do read, you’re at least in good company.

Oren: That’s a very sympathetic problem to talk about these days, and it also helps them justify why they haven’t read whatever book you recommended to them. It’s like, oh, I totally would, but my To Be Read pile… it’s so big! 

Chris: It’s so big, I can’t do it! 

Oren: One talking point that I hadn’t seen before but has come up more recently is this idea that you can tell someone doesn’t read books because they don’t have any internalizing, which I find very weird. 

Chris: I mean, I could see why somebody would make that assumption. That’s what it looks like. That’s why we call it film POV. 

Oren: Yeah, and you can imagine some… you’re like, oh, okay, well, they’ve never read a book, so they don’t know what an internal narration looks like, so it’s all described from the outside like a camera. But this is one of the reasons why it’s hard for me to remember that not everyone has the same experience we do because I read lots of client manuscripts and they are often like that, and it’s not because the author doesn’t read. Now, certainly someone who doesn’t read could make that mistake, but also a number of authors that I’ve worked with who are voracious readers have made that mistake.

Chris: It’s funny because I’m sure if somebody stares at text−, and again, I say stare at text because I personally consume a lot of books on audio because that’s how I fit them into my schedule, right? I listen to them while I’m cooking, for instance. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder for me to consume as many books as I do. But a lot of readers, if you are looking at text on a page, a lot of times you would assume that people would know basic things, but everybody picks up some things and not other things, and so we get new clients that don’t know paragraph breaks. Just don’t know how to do them. Either they have almost no paragraph breaks or they just have too few, and so there’s huge chunks of text, for instance. 

Oren: Or, people who haven’t learned the basics of when to start a new paragraph around dialogue or around character actions, that sort of thing. 

Chris: That’s very common. Dialogue is pretty futzy. Another one I see is they don’t know how to integrate thoughts into the narration. There’s some of these things that writers, once you just get a little experience, you start to take for granted. But new people, they don’t know that. It’s not like when they’re reading a novel they’re staring at the text when somebody thinks and is like, okay, that’s how you do it. So, they just don’t pick up on a lot of those things. Naturally, they have to learn it. 

Oren: One thing that I find funny, which is that a thing that’s a weird bias that sneaks up on you if you are the kind of person who reads a billion books, is that you can develop your own bias where because you read so many books, you start to crave something weird and different in a way that the average reader doesn’t. And I found that can kind of color people’s perception of stories, and I just find that funny. It’s like, that’s a taste thing. That’s not inherently good or bad. It’s just weird when you see that leaking into someone’s review of a book where they’re like, this book is so cliche. It’s like every other book. I’m like, is it? They’re like, well, not really.

But I can see how if you have read 500 books in this genre, you just desperately want something different. 

Chris: And some genres have a lot of constraints that make it so that they have a lot of things in common, because that’s what you have to do with the constraints that it’s under. I feel like it’s very unfair, for instance, to accuse romance of being formulaic because it’s under a lot of constraints. With everything that’s going on, it’s actually quite complex, and that complexity means that it’s almost harder to do things that are different because it has to fit all of the constraints.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: So who knows? I do know one person who is a speed reader who said that she didn’t like short sentences because the periods make her stop. Otherwise, she reads really fast. But I don’t think that’s a normal taste that most people have. I don’t know, maybe that’s a common thing among speed readers. I couldn’t say for sure, but that would be a little different than average. 

Oren: If your story has too many short sentences too close together, people will start to describe it as “choppy”. But it will also have a similar problem if sentences are too long, too often. You need a mix of both most of the time. 

Chris: You need variety in your sentence length and form. For sure. 

Oren: Another kind of emotional aspect of this discourse sometimes seems to be this fear over authors who originally wanted to do like an anime or a TV show or a comic book, and those are expensive and hard to do, so they want to write a book instead. And it’s like, okay, again, I get it. I understand the emotional reaction. But first of all, it’s 2026. Let’s just be grateful that they are actually trying to write something themselves instead of just using a slop generator, which is a thing that some people do now. So it’s like, let’s not punish the behavior we want to see.

Chris: I think we all need to keep in mind, again, it can be, if you’ve been doing this for a while, it might be easy to lose touch with what you were saying, with the level that people start out at, right? Which is very basic. And if somebody−, let’s say you had somebody who really wasn’t into books, right? They like to play video games, watch shows, and then they had just had a story idea. As many of us do at some point. And then it was like, okay, well I can’t make a video game and I can’t make a show, but I can write a novel. That person is in for quite the workout when it comes to learning all of that stuff that they need to learn. And they’re not going to make it unless they can deal with words. They’re just not. That’s tough. That’s really tough. It’s a huge, huge thing to take on if you don’t like the written word at all. So, yeah, I think that person is probably just mostly in for a load of hurt if they don’t… unless they actually take to it, unless they actually appreciate the medium.

Oren: Which is what my advice to them is. If that’s something you want, right? If you are like, hey, I haven’t read books much, but I play these video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has really inspired me and I want to write. Okay! Great, but much the same way as if you were a novelist who wanted to do a video game, you gotta learn what you’re doing or you’re just going to crash and burn. It’s not gonna be a fun time. And, we don’t get to see that reversal that often because it’s actually very hard to get into a position where you can have the resources to make a video game or be in charge of a TV show. But every once in a while we see a novelist put in that position without a lot of experience, and, uh, it shows. 

Chris: It shows. Different mediums are different! Which is one thing when I get worried when a novelist gets an adaptation and gets too much control and is gonna be running the screenplay…

Oren: Yeah… no thank you. 

Chris: I think the latest one is, it looks like Sanderson is going to be writing some of his own screenplays, and he at least is humble enough that I believe he will get help. So, if it’s okay, that’s going to be why. 

Oren: He has oddly talked about how he wouldn’t want to do that in the past because he has acknowledged that screenwriting is a different skill. So…

Chris: So he appreciates it. He appreciates it. But his humility might pay off for him there, right? But for a lot of writers, novelists, that would not work out and not be a good idea. Plus, the thing is about having somebody else do the adaptation is if they’re any good, they can spot problems that you did not spot and do neat little fixes for them. 

Oren: Yeah. Get you someone who loves your book the way the people who made the Strange and Norrell adaptation loved that book. Man, that is a loving adaptation. Same thing with the Interview with the Vampire show. At least, the first season. Just like. Wow, they clearly are so into the material that they not only faithfully adapted it, but they actually improved it in ways that are really hard and that, like, book nerds tend to assume never happen because the trope is that the adaptation makes it worse. 

Chris: Or like the Lockwood and Co. adaptation to the TV show where it looks like it’s almost all the same, but if you read the book right after you look at the show or vice versa, you’ll see there’s all these like very neat, you know, small edits that do a world of good, and really smooth the story out and fix all its little flaws but keeping it mostly the same.

Oren: For one, the biggest example is that they toned down the degree to which the main characters are mean to each other just a little bit. Like, they toned it down just a little so that now they are, they seem like they’re stressed out and sharp-tongued and they give each other a hard time as opposed to sometimes in the book, it really boils over and just makes it seem like, wow, they hate each other, I guess. You know, I really wish the show−, I mean, I wish the show had continued for a bunch of reasons, but I was really curious what they would’ve done with Holly. Because in the books, Holly is introduced to be the next like, because Lucy, the main character, has sort of settled enough of her differences with George that they aren’t constantly fighting, so we introduced Holly to be the next character, the next coworker that she doesn’t like. 

But it’s kind of gross. It’s very like, “ooh, girl fight” kind of thing. And I don’t like it. It’s not my favorite. And I was really curious to see what the show was going to do with that.

Chris: And I stand by my assertion that it was all Lockwood’s fault, and he completely escaped any blame for that situation.

Oren: He did cause a lot of that problem by being a bad boss. But as we know, he’s a beautiful, special boy, and he can’t be blamed for anything. 

Chris: I don’t think that it’s really a problem for people to change mediums because if they don’t like the writing medium, they’re just going to get in trouble. And I understand why people do it, too, right? Because it’s something they can do on their own. Some people can write comics on their own, but you have to really−, with comics, it’s really all about the drawing. And if you just want to write for a comic, trying to find an artist−I’ve been asked about that before−you cannot count on fighting an artist if you want to write for a comic because it’s really the artist that gets to call the shots usually. Unless you’re already a famous writer or something like that. Generally, that’s the person who has the more obviously hard skill I would say, instead of soft skill, so it’s the artist that gets to pick the writer, not vice versa. And often artists want to write for their own comics, but if you really like drawing, that’s another one you can do besides writing. But, you’re going to spend most of your time drawing, not making up the story. 

Oren: Yeah, drawing comics takes a long time. All right. Well, with that, I think we have more or less answered the question, which is actually very easy to answer, but it’s more interesting to explore the reasons why it becomes a question in the first place. So, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Now, if you want to read with us, you can join our Patreon to participate in our quarterly book club coming up. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

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

We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and how are we even supposed to do that? There’s so much information that must be balanced, to say nothing of what happens if you need to introduce multiple characters at the same time. Fortunately, we have some tips.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Hello, I am Chris. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and that is all you need to know about me. Now you have a very clear picture of who I am and what I look like. 

Oren: (Intense voice) There is also… Podcaster 2. He is very tall and he has a very distinctive gravelly voice and many weapons. Don’t worry about why he has those. He’s not important. He’s just a background character. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Normal guy, Podcaster 2. 

Chris: [Laughing] Is that like a video game NPC? Is that what that is? 

Oren: No. He’s got five paragraphs of description because he’s actually the secret villain or love interest or rival, or… 

Chris: [Laughs] That’s what I was gonna say, love interest. 

Oren: He’s a secret something or other. We don’t know exactly what. 

Chris: Both villain and love interest perhaps. 

Oren: Could be both of those things. But the important thing is that the author is trying to disguise him as a normal character in the scene, but obviously we can’t do that ’cause we need to say how cool he is.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve read something like that in a published manuscript, but I still see it in client works. You’re like, “There was a guard by the door and there was a courtier, and then there was a spooky figure in the shadows with the robe over his head and a jeweled staff. Anyway, moving on.” I’m like, “Okay, so that’s the villain that we just saw.” 

Chris: [Laughs] If it is a romance, I can see having, there’s a royal guard there, like, “Oh, that one guard is really hot.” And that is supposed to be the first time the protagonist notices the love interest. And then we’re gonna build on that later. But if we’re really trying to make a character blend in, adding a bunch of description is not gonna do that. 

Any case, this time we’re talking about introducing characters. For a storyteller, this is not usually the most challenging task, but there are still a bunch of different little things that can go wrong. And we often see this in manuscripts, so it’s worth kind of talking about how you do character introductions. 

Oren: You say it’s not hard, but I spent the last two weeks trying to revise a scene where I introduced two characters and it was too much. It was too confusing, and so I had to revise it to introduce one at a time, and that was really hard. 

Chris: That is one of the trickier things is getting the timing right. First thing I wanna mention, there are characters that don’t need an introduction. But they’re not important, so they’re only usually kind of barely characters. They also have a label that explains specifically why they are in the scene. If your character walks into the lobby and sees the receptionist, that’s a label. We know why that person is there. They’re called a receptionist. We don’t really need more than that if we’re just walking by them briefly or saying just a few words to them. Doesn’t really need much introduction there. 

The thing that we see in a lot of writers who don’t know how to do introductions, when we’re looking at manuscripts, we just drop a name. “I was going to the store and I stopped by home and George said, ‘Hi,’ and then I kept going.” And it’s like, “Who’s George?” I don’t know who George is. What is the relationship between the narrator or the protagonist and George? Why is George there? 

As opposed to like, “Oh, I saw my neighbor George” or “I saw my coworker, George,” tells you what the relationship George has to the other elements in the story. It can be really funny in speculative fiction works because a lot of times we’ll just get proper nouns and I don’t know whether this is a person, a place, or a vegetable.

Oren: It’s like a fantasy story, and they say, “I saw ‘Gula.’” What is Gula? Is that a person? Is that a soup? What is that? 

Chris: [Laughs] Oh, is that a strange monolith in the middle of the street? I don’t know. 

Oren: It could be. Anything’s possible. 

Chris: [Laughs] We literally have no idea what this thing is, whereas at least if it’s in a contemporary setting, I know George is a person. 

Oren: But it could also be a cat. If you don’t describe it at all, it’s like, “Is that a person or an animal?” 

Chris: It could be really jarring if George walks in and you assume it’s a man, and then the protagonist starts petting George. 

Oren: Hey, I don’t judge. Live their lives however they want. 

Chris: That’s the first rule, is don’t just drop in names. Give “George, my neighbor.” That two words is everything. And if you’re writing in a really close, limited perspective, don’t overthink it. Somebody might normally not think to themselves, “Oh, there’s George, my neighbor.” But don’t overthink it. Just put it in. 

Oren: You’re already editing what the person’s train of thought is. When you see another person, you don’t just register their name. You almost certainly have other associations with them that if you tried to write them all out, would overwhelm the narration. We can abstract that down to “my neighbor.” 

The one that I struggle with is when we introduce a character once and then they show back up again several hours, or hundreds of pages later, like I’m supposed to know who that is. Yeah, technically we did mention them, but I don’t remember who that is. It’s been too long. My memory is not that good. 

Chris: Definitely if we’re doing a reintroduction, and it’s been a while, sometimes what actually needs to happen is we need to consolidate the characters. If we have lots of characters who only perform very small roles and there’s no logistical reason they have to be different. For instance, if your character is traveling, that’s a reason why people need to be different. ‘Cause otherwise you get the Kazons. It’s like, “How are they following us?” 

Oren: There’s that one Kazon guide. He’s always there. Well actually we know how he’s keeping up. It’s ’cause Voyager keeps stopping to do side quests.

Chris: [Laughs] If you have the same character show up in different places as your protagonist travels, that will require explanation. But otherwise, if you have lots of little characters with tiny bit roles and they’re actually named people, not “the receptionist,” a lot of times you wanna merge those together and make it one person who reappears more times. So that helps. 

Even so, there may be reasons to have one person who pops up early and then disappears for a while and pops in again. In some of those cases, your readers may kind of generally remember the incident and that there was somebody there, but pretty unlikely to remember exactly what their name was. 

Names especially are very hard to remember. In that case, your kind of reintroduction needs to include some kind of reminder. Unless your protagonist sees this person all the time, this can often be framed as like, “Oh, who is that again? Oh yeah, that person.” 

Oren: Assuming this is a significant character we’re introducing, I’m never sure, how much descriptive information do I need? I tend to go with a lot because I like describing characters and theoretically I put work into figuring out what this character should look like. But I always feel like I’m overdescribing them. Do we need to know all that? Who knows? 

Chris: People definitely have different preferences here for how much description they like to put in. Some people do like to do a lot and some people don’t like to do very much. So there’s definitely some subjectivity. Probably one of the biggest signals for how important the character is going to be is how much description you have. And so what that means is if they’re important, you have some description. If they’re gonna be hanging out for the whole story, usually you want some description of them. 

Whereas if they’re a bit character like the receptionist, you can say a few things about how the receptionist in the lobby looks if you want to, but you really don’t have to. The other thing is how long is this story? Makes a lot more sense to spend more time on description if the story is longer and you’re gonna be spending more time with those characters.

That leads into the question of, should you give away that a character is important? There’s multiple options. Usually, yes. Particularly if this is a protagonist. If the reader knows a character as a protagonist, I do think that they will kind of give that character a little bit more of the benefit of doubt, and they’re more willingly, emotionally invest in them.

If the reader doesn’t think the character’s important, that can be fine. If they have a bit role, it can be fun to have a character that seems like a minor character, and then for their role to grow and then to discover they’re important. So that’s not necessarily bad, and in fact that works better than the reverse where we think a character is important and then suddenly they’re not important. ‘Cause that could disappoint somebody who liked the character. 

Oren: What gets me, this happens occasionally when you have a main character who is an ambassador or some kind of politician or other social character. And they have a bodyguard and they get attacked and the bodyguard has a fight scene, and I’m like, “Oh heck, that unnamed bodyguard seems cool. Tell me about them.” And then that bodyguard dies at the end of the scene. I’m like, “No, what? I wanted to know about that character. That seemed cool.” 

Chris: [Laughs] It was better that you did not get attached. 

Oren: That happened in one of The Bad Batch episodes. Some senator who was trying to do some behind the scenes politicking had a random guard who had this whole badass fight scene. And at the end of that he just dies. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I guess he’s done now. 

Chris: Bodyguards are for redshirting. 

Oren: If they get redshirted, whatever. But it was just weird how long and drawn out that fight was. And it feels like we were treating this as though it was her fight. But she’s not fighting ’cause she’s not a fighting character. So it’s just her unnamed bodyguard.

Chris: I wonder if it’s because of all the stories where bodyguards are important characters. If the person who was depicting that, that rubbed off a little bit and is like, “Oh, well it’s her bodyguard, so this person must be really important to her and somebody she knows well and must be badass to be a scientist or bodyguard,” but that doesn’t actually change their role in the story. [Chuckles]

Oren: That could be. 

Chris: That kind of thing where you set up that expectation. If you describe them and they’re really cool and unique, it definitely makes it feel like they’re gonna be important and it could get audiences interested in them. So after that, if it turns out they’re just not important, that could be disappointing.

Whereas if you have a really important character and they have a bit role at first, you can do that and then expand. But you just have to be conscious of the fact that if you don’t make them look important, readers will likely to forget them or not gonna get attached to them yet. When they bring them in the second time, you might need to be like, “Oh yeah, that was Guard #5. Oh yeah you were one of the guards over there.” 

Oren: I’ll never forget you, Guard #5. 

Chris: Just reintroduce them. Remind readers what they were doing and then build off of that. I don’t want them to be a jerk if they don’t seem like they’re gonna be an important protagonist. In general though, it works fine if you completely give away a character is important and do that by giving them a budget description. 

As for what description to give, that’s another important question. I was joking in the intro about just hair and eye color, which is a thing that people tend to default to just ’cause that’s the fun description, I guess. 

Oren: Hair color, sure. That’s something you would generally notice. I’m not sure how many people notice eye color most of the time. 

Chris: Authors of course make the eye colors, like, violet.

Oren: I’ve occasionally met someone with really bright blue or green eyes and been like, “Wow, okay. Pretty intense.” But it’s not common. Most of the time I would never be able to tell you what color someone’s eyes are. 

Chris: That’s an interesting one. It can have a surprisingly strong effect on somebody’s appearance, but you wouldn’t consciously remember exactly what their color of eyes are. But no, it’s very popular to be like, “Oh, and they were bound with flecks of gold and black.” Flecks are all the rage right now.

Oren: People love flecks. 

Chris: Instead, what you really want is to give the big noticeable things first so that if the reader fills in the rest with their imagination, and then you describe more, it’s not jarring later. If you don’t specify a character’s age and then their age is not what the reader expected, that’s very jarring.

That’s the experience I had at the beginning of Sword of Shannara. I don’t know that anybody had the same experience that I did because when I looked at it, there’s just a few lines in here where his face is “weathered” and then he’s also got a whole “calm but alert.” Any person’s face can be weathered, but without any other context, that kind of worn downness. The things about it seemed to make him feel like he was like a really seasoned traveler that was used to the road. That was the impression that the first paragraph about him created. 

So then we find out he’s really young. The associations we have with youth are more fresh faced and excitable and impulsive and energetic. Not all young people are that way, but when you don’t have that information, readers just fill in whatever feels natural. 

Oren: I had the opposite experience. I was reading the beginning of a fantasy book, and it starts with the protagonist and she’s whimsically laying down in a field and looking at the clouds and skipping her chores and thinking very rose-colored lenses about traveling and how wonderful it would be to see the world. She would love to visit new things with her aunt and talking to her imaginary friend, and I’m like, “Okay, so this character is like, 12?” 19. 

Chris: [Laughs] I’ve met some like less mature 19 year olds that would do those kinds of things. 

Oren: It’s not like a 19-year-old can’t do any of those things. If they are mature, maybe you just enjoy being in a field and thinking about traveling.

Chris: And you still skip your chores. 

Oren: And you still skip your chores, lots of people do that. But it was just a combination of things made me think this was a fairly young character, especially since they seemed to have very little concept of social relationships. I would expect a 19-year-old to care more about what their peers might think. 

Granted, young kids care that way too. But that’s the thing I associate with late teenagers, is that they think about their peers a lot, and this character doesn’t seem to do that at all. Could be that’s just a trait of theirs, but wasn’t specified.

Chris: And of course, your character doesn’t have to be a stereotypical whatever. The point is that you wanna give that information early so that it feeds into that first impression. Instead of them forming a first impression without context and then finding it really jarring when you introduce information that contradicts what they imagined. Age is one, race is another one. And again, we want to specify race for everybody. Including white people. So finding some time to specify people have pale skin is a good thing to do. 

Oren: It is weird to me when second-world fantasy settings use modern racial categories. That’s a little strange to me. It’s like describing someone as white or black. That’s such a context-specific term. Obviously all English words are context specific and everything’s being translated anyway, but it’s still just strange to me. It feels almost like calling someone Asian in a continent that doesn’t have Asia. 

Chris: Oh man. Let’s not even go there. Because race is a social construct, there are some races that you can only communicate via cultural signals. That’s something that’s especially hard for somebody with no expertise in the culture, to then not only communicate those cultural signals, but translate them to a fantasy setting and make it feel right. That’s a difficult thing. 

But if you want an Asian character, that’s kinda what you have to do. You have to have some cultural signals. ‘Cause otherwise, if you try to describe them physically and you say more than the fact that they have, for instance, black hair, it’s just gonna come off as racist. So be careful about those things. 

So basic demographics or anything else that would really stand out. So if they have scars all over their face, that’s probably something a protagonist would notice first thing. If you don’t mention it and then it comes up later, the readers would be like, “What? Oh, there were scars all over their face? Been imagining this person for three chapters, I didn’t know about these scars all over their face.” That’s a big enough impression that would kind of change. 

Oren: One that I see strangely often is if they have a weapon, that should probably be described pretty early. People notice weapons if nothing else, because they’re dangerous. Very weird to have a character who you’ve known for several pages to a chapter or so, and they suddenly talk about drawing their sword, like, “Whoa, they have a sword? They’ve had a sword this whole time?” 

Chris: And if you introduced a character as a guard, that would probably be less necessary. If they’re a guard, we assume they have a weapon of some kind, but if we don’t have the context to foreshadow or make that fit into place, that might be something important. This is a setting where everybody just walks around with longswords. 

Oren: If you establish a setting where everyone is armed as a matter of course, you wouldn’t have to describe it every time.

Chris: Should we talk more about timing? 

Oren: Yeah, as in when to introduce? 

Chris: Yeah, about the timing of introducing characters. 

Oren: So it’s basically in the first third of the book. Or if you’re introducing characters as a teaser for next time, in the epilogue, and nothing in between. 

Chris: [Laughs] If you have a traveling story, I think that you can get away with having characters that are at a stop along the way that are named from that one place because expectations are different then. But then that character wouldn’t show up and be a big help with the climax.

We would assume that we would say goodbye to them as opposed to, 2/3 of the way through, we stopped in a town during our travels and we met a named character, and then that character decided, “Oh, I’m coming with you now.” That would be too late. It can feel weird and lopsided. Or it can feel in the worst case scenario, like they’re an interloper and they’re stealing the spotlight from the characters that we have grown to care about.

Oren: There are some exceptions. The most obvious is for the villain. Very often it won’t really make sense for your characters to come face to face with the villain before the 1/3 mark. Usually in that case, what you wanna do is you want to establish this character by the effect they have on the world, not necessarily by their name or what they look like, although that might also be part of it. Depends on the specifics. 

But especially if you have a secret murderer who’s killing people spookily at night, we might not actually meet them or know that we’ve met them until much later. But you show the murder scenes. You plant the image that this villain exists. 

Chris: There is foreshadowing. We can foreshadow characters exist instead of introducing them early. 

Oren: And that tends to work best for villains. It would be kind of weird to do that for the love interest. 

Chris: [Laughs] Maybe in a series. And the romance is really mostly for book 2. 

Oren: We spend the book foreshadowing, “There’s this really hot person people sometimes see in the middle of the night,” and then they show up at the 2/3 mark.

Chris: [Laughs] The more I look at villains, the more I feel like they’re less like protagonists in their story role and more like plot hooks or plot problems in the way that they kind of behave in the rules. They feel more like story hooks, whereas a protagonist is somebody that the reader is supposed to be rooting for and has attachment, and so you would have to handle that.

You have to think about the fact that somebody could really care about this character if you’re gonna do something horrible to them. Maybe try to prevent people from getting too attached to them. All of those rules, they can apply to villains if your readers get attached to your villain, but that’s less likely, especially if your villain is powerful enough. If your villain is underpowered, it’s more likely to happen. 

Oren mentioned this earlier, but having lots of characters introduced at the same time. I can’t give any hard and fast rule about how many characters you can introduce at once. It’s about the total complexity. How many details do you need to communicate about them? How easy are their names and other details to remember? 

And sometimes if two characters play off of each other really well, they’re best introduced together because they’re kind of conceptually linked. So if you introduce two twins, it might make sense, if you have a way to clearly contrast them with each other to introduce them together. Because that association between the two of them almost makes them easier to remember.

Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does get away with introducing the four kids, the four protagonists, right in the beginning, but there’s just not much else going on. Otherwise, it’s extremely simple. So we have to learn four first names for characters that are all in the scene, but we don’t have to learn anything else. Because everything is just focused on them and that’s the only thing you have to learn, it actually works to have four new people together. 

But in many other times, especially in a speculative fiction story where you have to introduce the world at the beginning, that’s gonna be too many. So you kind of have to find ways to put one character, make an appearance first, give people time to get to know them, and then wait the next scene for the new character. Or just push people back, delay them, take them out of scenes, that kind of thing. 

Oren: You do have a fair amount of runway. You don’t wanna wait too long, but the first third is a lot of book. They don’t all have to be introduced in the first couple pages. 

Chris: The thing that I see that really doesn’t work is when somebody tries to put in a big meeting scene early in the story and then tries to introduce everybody in the meeting. Don’t do that, that’s not gonna work out. People cannot remember that much information. 

And also you don’t have time if you’re introducing that many characters at once to have them have a significant role in the scene because it’s more than the introduction. You also have to reinforce that new knowledge by making that character matter in some way. If you introduce 10 people in a meeting, not only can people not absorb all of that information right away, but how much can you make all 10 of these people matter in that one scene so that readers retain that information? 

Oren: Before we go, there is one thing that I think is important to consider. The appropriateness of making a character seem cool when you introduce them. If you’re introducing any character, it is a good chance you want them to be at least a little cool, depending on the type of story you’re telling. If you’re telling a story that has a reasonable amount of action, you probably want them to seem a little cool, especially since it might make your protagonist seem a little more sympathetic if they’re meeting these people who seem all cool and put together.

But, A, if you make them too cool, they’re gonna be annoying, especially if they’re an ally. They might steal your protagonist’s thunder. If they are a rival, you can lean harder on making them seem cooler because they’re gonna be messing with your protagonist and that’s fine. If they’re a love interest, you have to strike a really careful balance ’cause you want them to be cool and desirable, but not make them seem like they’re gonna take over the story. As often happens with heteromances. 

Chris: That’s hard. And definitely the trend we see is writers often fall in love with their new characters and really wanna make them cool. Usually when we’re writing, we use our own feelings as a proxy for what the readers will feel. But sometimes they’re just not on the same page with us.

And when we come with a cool new character that we’re attached to, it takes them time to also become attached to that character. Isn’t the raccoon who is pulling everybody’s strings so funny? Who is really behind it all along? So cute. It’s so funny, so devious. 

Oren: I hate it. 

Chris: [Laughs] That can be something that just seems cute, funny to us, or we really like that. “Oh, it’s so cool,” to us, but the reader has gotten attached to the characters that are important that we’ve already introduced. And so often, these cool characters can come and show them up in a way that builds a lot of resentment from the reader. 

Oren: Well, with that, I think we will have to introduce the ending of this podcast.

Chris: Consider introducing yourself to us by becoming our patron. That way you can chat with us on Discord and everything. 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’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

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

You’ve heard of fantasy romance, steampunk mystery, and paranormal thrillers, but don’t those seem a little… normal? Mixing genres is nothing new, but it does tend to fall into patterns. Some genres are more compatible than others, and those are the ones we see combined over and over again. We think it’s time to get weird with it, mashing up genres that were never intended to go together. Literary thrillers, slow burn litRPG, and cozy tragedies. Okay maybe not that last one; we don’t want the readers to burn down our house!

Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So we’ve heard about science, fantasy, steampunk, romance – all that stuff. That’s old news. Get ready for my time-travel, slow burn, LitRPG, character-driven thriller.

How’s that for a genre mashup? Is that the same but different enough to please the Publishing Gods?

Chris: “Slow burn”: so does that mean it’s a romance?

Oren: It’s a slow burn LitRPG. It means that they do, like, one LitRPG element. They’ll call up the game menu and then 10 chapters later, they’ll select their inventory.

Chris: Oh, I see. I see. Well, I suppose that might make it easier to fit other things in there if we’re basically like, “I swear we’ll have LitRPG later.”

Oren: As little LitRPG as I can legally get away with- I’m not a fan of LitRPG. I don’t know what to tell you.

Chris: Oh no.

Oren: I should try to maintain an air of “neutrality”, but that’s hard, so I’m not gonna.

Chris: I’ve looked at a bunch of openings for them, and I honestly haven’t found one that’s both really popular and is bad enough that I want to critique it.

Oren: I’m not saying they’re all bad. Dungeon Crawler Carl’s a good book.

Chris: I’ve seen really bad ones, but they’re not the super-. It’s hard to tell what’s a mega hit in the LitRPG space because I think a lot of their traffic happens on Royal Road and other places. So I’m not sure-

Amazon with its easy-to-see ratings… numbers is the best measure, always.

Oren: Plus, as Men’s Fiction, it’s not really that relevant, let’s be honest

Anyway, so today we are talking about weird genre mixes and/or “Genre Mashups”, I suppose,  is the technical term. 

Chris: What even is a Genre Mashup? Are they all Genre Mashups?

Oren: So, that’s actually an important question. At what point does it stop being a Genre Mashup and become its own sub-genre? For example, “Science Fantasy” is like a mashup of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but it’s also just sort of recognized as its own thing now.

Chris: Yeah- I think that once it starts to have its own tropes that it’s uniquely known for, then it starts to get to be its own- like Science Fantasy just has a number of things where it’s not just a unique mix between Science Fiction and Fantasy: we know there’s probably gonna be space royalty, for instance, a very specific trope that often appears in those works, and I think that’s kind of when it becomes its own thing and isn’t really a mashup anymore.

Oren: It’s also things like Sci-fi Western, is that a mashup or is that- I’d say that’s probably its own genre at this point. Its own sub genre.

Chris: Is it? What is there- what am I missing that’s a Sci-fi Western?

Oren: I guess the things you expect from a Sci-fi Western are basically various combos of Sci-fi and Western, right? Like, you expect people to be riding horses even though they have spaceships. Why do they do that? Who knows?

Chris:Admittedly, when I think Sci-fi Western, only Firefly comes to my mind. What am I missing?

Oren: Well, there’s a lot of books that are Sci-fi Westerns… I guess you could argue Cowboys Versus Aliens, right?

Chris: But that one, that one definitely doesn’t seem – that’s definitely a mashup, right? Because they’re even getting novelty and humor out of the fact that it’s a mashup.

Oren: And here’s the thing: if you trace the origin of a lot of Sci-fi TV, even though it isn’t exactly what we would think of as a Sci-fi Western in the way that Firefly does it, they are heavily influenced by Westerns. Like a lot of older Sci-fi serials have a very Western – as in cowboy movies – flavor to them. You get that famous line of Gene Roddenberry describing Star Trek as “a wagon train to the stars”, which is not really accurate. like at all. But it was a way of pitching Sci-fi shows that producers understood. Because Sci-fi was relatively new, Westerns were pretty established, so you could convince producers that you were just doing something that was kind of an iteration as opposed to like a weird, spooky new genre.

Chris: I guess you could call the Mandalorian a Sci-fi Western. Although, that’s almost subtle, right? It’s like Western-flavored Star Wars.

Oren: The Mandalorian is more – again, it’s Sci-fi with Western themes. Like Firefly is a lot more direct with its Sci-fi Western-ness. ‘Cause again, they actually ride horses and have cattle ranches and spaceships. But in The Mandalorian, it’s more like we have put Sci-fi things in place of Western tropes. So, but yeah, that’s another Sci-fi Western for sure.

Chris: Yeah. -, maybe I’m just not familiar enough with Sci-fi Westerns, but to me, they don’t meet the Science Fantasy benchmark where it kind of has its own tropes. Instead, it feels like each Sci-fi Western is its own unique mix of Sci-fi and Western because it’s copying, it’s not copying other Sci-fi Westerns, it’s copying Science Fiction or Westerns.

Oren: What’s funny to me is I was wondering about-  is Fantasy Western a thing?

Chris: The Gunslinger. The Gunslinger Series, I think would be the biggest. But that – again – not that common, I don’t think.

Oren: Well, that’s the thing, right? Is that it sort of is, but in a not obvious way because the subgenre called the Weird Western.

Chris: That is its own subgenre.

Oren: Right. That’s definitely its own subgenre. And you could definitely say that that’s a Fantasy western. It’s just like spooky fantasy, mostly. Right?

Chris: Yeah. I, I think that that when you look at speculative fiction as a whole, I don’t know that it always has things that are that recognizably fantasy, right? Like Wild, Wild West – for instance – was a lot more Steampunk, but that would still be classified as a Weird Western

Oren: So I don’t know how many people have actually played this game, but a role playing game, which seems to have inspired a lot of people’s ideas of what a Weird Western is. It’s called Deadlands. And that one’s kind of again, its own mashup. It has Steampunk elements, but it also just has straight up spooky magic. Like there’s vampires, and I think Abraham Lincoln might be a vampire hunter in that series. I think that might be where Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter came from. Don’t quote me on that though, but like it has, you know, classic monsters, uh, many of whom it turns out are actually very appropriative. So, uh, ignore that.

Chris: One of the things that I’d have to say isn’t a mashup, because, that’s just standard. But before I knew, what really struck me was realizing that there’s cosmic horror in Conan and Sword&Sorcery stories. And I didn’t know that until I read The Eye of Argonne, which is just, you know, some kid copying Conan, right? I’m like, wow, okay. Suddenly this kid who clearly doesn’t know much about writing is clearly copying cosmic horror. And then found out, okay, wait, the original Conan also did that, and it’s such an odd thing.

Oren: Like Howard and Lovecraft and a bunch of other writers from that period all knew each other. They were all exchanging ideas and borrowing each other’s stuff. They all published in magazines, like Weird Tales, if I remember my early Spec-fic history correctly. In that case, that was like a mashup that came around because a bunch of writers happened to know each other, which is interesting. It’s not how it usually goes nowadays.

Chris: I just think that without that influence, the type of villains that would’ve existed in some of those stories would’ve been very different, had a very different feel to them.

Oren: I think that’s probably true. It is interesting to look at which genres are easier to cross and which ones are a little more challenging. You’ve got genres that are defined by a type of plot and genres that are defined by a type of setting. Those are almost so easy, you don’t even notice.

Chris: Right, right. Which is why Romantasy works and it is both Romance and Fantasy. Just in case we have that one listener who wants to think Romantasy is not Fantasy. It is. And there have always been romance plots included in fantasy. They’ve always existed. 

Oren: But the Sci-fi Mystery, the Fantasy Mystery, those are so basic that you probably don’t even think of them as Genre Mashups. And then Romantasy has clearly become its own sub genre. It has, at least I think it has, specific tropes. Then again, I don’t read a lot of the Classic Romance that romantasy evolved from, so maybe it’s just doing those things, but also elves.

Chris: I’m trying to think of  what Romantasy would’ve evolved from. There are some early Fantasy Romance that probably influenced, and we’ve looked at some of those.

Oren: We’ve talked about how a number of romantic authors have made the jump from Non-speculative Romance. My thought was that probably there was some cross-pollinization at some point. For all I know, some of the tropes that I’m familiar with – like the love interest, having to be eight feet tall and three refrigerators wide – maybe that’s a Classic Romance thing that I just don’t know about because I don’t read a lot of those books.

Chris: I don’t read Non-Speculative Romance typically either, so I wouldn’t be able to answer that question.

Oren: Did Bully Romance originate in Romantasy or did it migrate to Romantasy from Non-Fantasy Romance? I have no idea.

Chris: But like for instance, Uprooted. That came before the big Romantasy, I believe.

Oren: That’s definitely before the Romantasy term came around

Chris: It’s not as turned up to 11. It’s not as intense as a lot of the current Romantasy, but it has a lot of things in common with the kind of type of romance it is. There’s some other ones like the – I can’t remember – the inspiration for Court of Thorns and Roses… That Dragon series.

Oren: Oh, The Lord of the Fading Lands.

Chris: There’s that one, but there’s also the other one where people get magic based on dragon scales.

Oren: Huh

Chris: Yeah, they have Dragon magic. That one is also very melodramatic and intense like a lot of current Romantasies are. But yeah, that’s another one that the Court of Thorn and Roses, I think is known for – you know – copying from.

Oren: It is interesting to trace how each new iteration of a very popular genre often gets more and more intense. I remember the same thing happening with YA Dystopias. The Hunger Games, when I first read it, I was like “wow, this is pretty intense. The bad guys seem almost cartoonish.” And then by the time that particular genre wave crested, I was like, “oh no, please give me back the Hunger Games. Those villains were so grounded.” They seem so realistic compared to what came afterwards.

Chris: If I were to guess. I would say that a lot of the tropes from Romantasy actually come from early Fantasy Romance. And that got popular enough that Contemporary Romance readers started to jump on board. And then from there it attracted Contemporary Romance authors, if I were to guess. But again, I don’t know for sure. It’s hard.

Oren: An interesting one that I have seen slightly more of these days is Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy. So you’ve got the most literal interpretation, which is like the Shannara Chronicles, where you have the real world and an apocalypse happened, and now there’s elves. Which- like if you look at the funniest thing about the Shannara Chronicles is that the magical species are all the results of the apocalypse: except elves. Elves were already around, which I can only assume is because the author felt like elves had to be ancient, and the apocalypse was long ago, but not that long ago.

Chris: This one definitely. I’ve seen a number of these, but they definitely still feel like a mashup to me because again, they all feel a little different in how they go about it. Like do we have a typical Post-Apocalyptic with like radiation or a plague, and then somehow that causes fantasy things to exist? Or is there a fantasy!cause of the apocalypse, for instance?

Oren: Well, that’s interesting because you can kind of go the other direction and have it be entirely fantasy, and there was an apocalypse and now you’re in a fantasy world where an apocalypse happened to a different fantasy world. Breath of the Wild, the Zelda game, is like that: it’s pure Fantasy. There’s no modern stuff in there. There’s no tanks or motorcycles or guns, right? But there was a cool fantasy kingdom, and then something happened, and there was a big explosion in an apocalypse, and now there’s ruins everywhere.

Chris: Do people consider that to be Post-Apocalyptic?

Oren: It is literally Post-Apocalyptic. Is it part of the Post-Apocalyptic genre?

Chris: It is technically Post-Apocalyptic, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot of the tropes.

Oren: It has some of the tropes, right? It has the “discovering the lost advanced stuff in the ruins of the previous civilization”. It’s just that it’s a magic sword instead of a gun.

Chris: Yeah. Fantasy does that all the time, even if it’s not Post-Apocalyptic. All the Zelda games: they’re all have their ancient temples and-

Oren: -it does, that’s true-

Chris: -et cetera. I was just wondering about- I was thinking something like-  we have an Urban Fantasy setting and then there’s a fantasy!cause of the apocalypse. Or like what you would often have is a setting that is just, there’s no magic, and then suddenly magic appears and destroys everything.

Oren: I think part of the reason you’re less likely to have, for example, a Dresden file style Urban Fantasy setting that an apocalypse happens to is that you first have to explain how the Urban Fantasy setting worked, and then you have to explain how the apocalypse happened. And that’s just a lot of explanation to put on a setting.

Whereas, you know, Shannara Chronicles, except for the elves, the magic stuff is all a result of the apocalypse. That’s like only one thing you have to explain. And elves.

Chris: You could have something that is magical and causes the apocalypse, but then it sticks around afterwards. So it’s integrated to the story and gives you an opportunity to explain what it is.

Oren: I think the Eberron D&D setting is a Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy…could be wrong about that- There is a D&D setting that is Post-Apocalyptic D&D.

Chris: That’s the Magitech setting.

Oren: I think it is also a Magitech setting.

Chris: Well, that’s quite the mashup then. Magitech Post-Apocalyptic.

Oren: But Magitech in Post-Apocalyptic makes sense. Especially if you wanna replicate a lot of the conventional Post-Apocalyptic tropes.

Chris: Right. Where we’re piecing like scrap together in contraptions.

Oren: We just read The Road to Ruin, which is, it’s got the desert, and it’s got the big lizards, which are pretty common in post-apocalyptic stories.

Chris: I was like, where did these come from? Does every post-apocalyptic story have like dinosaurs and why.

Oren: It’s not “everyone has dinosaurs”, but big lizards are very common trope in desert based, Post-Apocalyptic stories, and so moving from there to dinosaurs is a- I’d say not that big a jump. But in that story, there’s also the Magebike, which is a magical motorcycle so that you can have. Like the post-apocalyptic courier zooming through the wastes…Only motorcycles, though. Whoever made it didn’t make any other magic vehicles. No magical four-wheel-drive for you.

Chris: Look, four-wheel-drive is just not as cool as the motorcycle.

Oren: The motorcycle is cool. I do like, you know, fantasy motorcycles.

Chris: I think one combination that makes genres particularly tricky to combine is if you have a High Realism and a Low Realism genre.

Which is why I’ve encountered some Sci-fi Fairytales…That just don’t seem to work out as well as expected. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it, because you can translate the fairy tale and make it much more grounded if you want to. But I’m still reminded of The Dark Angel series where it seemed like a very Low Realism Fantasy series, but also takes place on the moon, that’s been terraformed, and they came from earth.

Oren: The novel Cinder was like that.

Chris: That’s the other thing I was thinking about is- it’s a Sci-fi Fairytale that I didn’t feel worked very well. Although I think that novel just had a lot of miscellaneous problems. It wasn’t all necessarily “High Realism plus Low Realism issues”.

Oren: I could totally see a Sci-fi story that has the general shape of a fairytale, but this was definitely trying to make it a little more literal. They were trying to do arranged marriages and – I don’t know, man. Like those are hard enough for me to accept in a Space Fantasy setting. This was like a normal, sort of gritty Sci-fi setting. And then also, you gotta marry the king of the moon or whoever she had to marry. I forget.

Chris: I know some people really like Cinder, but that book is still in my mind as the book that somehow managed to punch down at every marginalized group at least once.

Oren: Probably not a direct result of trying to be a scientific fairytale, but you never know.

Chris: That’s all it is in my mind. Yeah, no. Probably not related, but I’m just like, how did you, how did you manage to do this?

Oren: Look, it’s efficiency. Okay. You move on, you punch down at Women. We can get in Disabilities at the same time, if it’s a woman with, like, a broken arm or something, we can get all – we can get it all in at the same time.

Chris: Get it all in.

Oren: Smacks the roof of the book. “This baby can punch down at so many people.”

Chris: The other one besides High and Low Realism, again, if you translate. All of the Low Realism stuff to High Realism. You can make it- but you’re gonna have to give up some things to do that. The other one is things that are distinguished by their tone and have different tones because there’s no way- Like if you meet in the middle…then it’s just nothing.

Oren: Cozy Tragedy.

Chris: No, it’s not

Oren: Just a regular Cozy Fantasy story. And then at the end, one of the characters dies horribly. Cozy Tragedy.

Chris: That’s, no, it’s not….

I have read those manuscripts before and… no. This is the type of thing that a client turns in, and I’m like, “all right,” I sit down, “we need to talk about the tone in this work.”

Oren: Look you, you can do it. I’m not saying you should, but you can.

Chris: We’re not the boss of you, so of course you could do anything. Technically the question is, does it get the results you want from your readers?

So yeah, you can’t really combine two different tones – like atmosphere maybe. Because atmosphere then adds in like the aesthetics. There’s things that are part of atmosphere besides the tone, but two different tones.

Although I do think that you might be able to do something like Gothic Cozy, where we’re taking some of the dark aesthetics, again, of that gothic atmosphere and combining it with the coziness. The little living rituals and the wish fulfillment, you know, of living in like a gothic castle or whatever.

Oren: Not to be a smart ass, but it’s called The Addams Family. The original TV show – what came later wasn’t really cozy. The movies are much more focused on the comedy and, you know, the weird, horrible things this family does to each other.

Chris: But the sitcom, yeah,.

Oren: But the sitcom is very much Gothic Cozy. I’ve noticed that Urban Fantasy is, at least in my mind, harder to mix with other genres than High Fantasy is. And maybe that’s just because I haven’t seen it done enough.

Chris: High Fantasy is so very flexible because it takes place in another world, and so you can do anything that you want with it, whereas Urban Fantasy is already a mashup of two different worlds. Basically, you already have to take the messy reality and then adapt it.

Oren: Right, and that’s part of the draw of Urban Fantasy is seeing either A) “wow, there’s all this secret, magic below the surface of the real world”, or “how does magic affect the real world?” Right? Those are kind of two different draws. So you try to put that into Sci-fi, and now it’s weird. You made it weird. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it though. My experience with it is limited…I was trying to think of, have I read any books that might qualify, and I guess there was Blindsight.

Chris: No, that is the thing, is that once you add Sci-fi, it’s like you’ve got into Superhero settings that really have no theme to them. It’s just like, “yeah, sure. Everything that could possibly exist in a speculative fiction story is in here. That’s what we’re doing now.”

Oren: It’s all here, baby.

Chris: Again, Marvel has a reason for doing that: it’s because we’ve got this huge, complicated comic books and they’re all different, but we also want crossovers to attract fans.

Oren: People do like crossovers, or at least they used to. Maybe they’re not liking them as much anymore. 

Chris: Maybe

Oren: Kind of hard to tell, 

Chris: But because of the crossovers, they have a reason to throw all of those things together, even though it completely destroys any coherency in the setting.

Oren: Which I think is another reason why Superhero novels have really, really struggled. I’m not gonna say it’s the only reason, but I do suspect that people have a certain idea of what Superhero movies are, and with a novel, it’s really hard to deliver that and not have it just look completely absurd.

Chris: I think it’s become pretty clear as we’ve seen the streaming bubble pop and what shows are coming out, that one of the reasons that Superhero film and TV shows are made is because it’s cheaper than High Fantasy…Right?

Oren: To be fair, most things are cheaper than High Fantasy.

Chris: “Most things are cheaper than High Fantasy”. It’s cheaper than a lot of other stuff because it just takes place in a, like a normal urban setting. Again, there’s been a lot more Ghost Shows, there’s been a lot more Urban Fantasy. So I think that its popularity is boosted above what it would normally be in the market because it’s cheaper to make. But we don’t have those restrictions on a book.

Oren: Yeah. That’s possible.

Chris:I don’t know. There’s probably multiple reasons.

Oren: It’s hard to ignore the MCU elephant in the room, right? Like the MCU made a billion jillion dollars, and so there’s, you know, gonna be a lot of properties either directly linked to it or just trying to coast on that.

Chris: That’s true.

Oren: That seems to be ebbing at the moment. Although, again, it’s hard to tell because movies are doing badly across the board, so it’s hard to tell what any specific franchise is up to. 

Chris: Plot. We haven’t talked about plot genres and mixing those together. 

Oren: Mystery Romance. Sure. 

Chris: Mystery Romance. There’s lots of those. They work great together, mostly because a lot of romance stories also wanna have a little more tense throughline. And a mystery story – it’s really easy to just have your love birds work on the mystery together, and that gives them an excuse to be together and, you know, gives them something to do, or makes them suspect each other. It’s just very useful. So those ones are very compatible. You know, I think at some point if you add enough stuff like that, you could potentially get into questions like, okay, do we actually have room?

Oren: Genres aside, at some point you have too many plots.

Chris: I think a Romance and a Thriller is still possible, but could be a little trickier because a lot of Romance writers wanna have a little bit more downtime to have their lovebirds get cuddly or whatever. And so keeping a really high tension, constantly moving thumping plot might interfere a little more. Not that you couldn’t do it. I think you probably could, but I think that would probably be a little trickier.

Oren: Is it the everpresent I can make this “Literary” crossover, which is, you know, what does that mean?

Chris: Anything can have an author self insert and a bunch of experimental word craft, okay? It does have, High Realism is one of the conventions, but I think a Literary work doesn’t have to be High Realism. That’s only one of many conventions.

Oren: Certainly a lot of the fantasy I’ve read that is described as Literary has not been any Higher Realism than anything else. Like The Sleeping Giant is, if anything very Low Realism,

Chris: Probably more Surrealist, right?

Oren: Yeah, it’s, it’s super Surrealist.

Chris: That’s also common Literary work. You could probably throw Literary genre conventions on top of most other things. I do think that if you had, again, something that was really high tension, that might be a little harder. Because Literary, I mean, Literary writers, they have different writing styles, but as I mentioned, a lot of times they like to put a lot of summary and exposition. Or no summary in exposition, sometimes they like to take their time and the work craft pacing is really slow and that could get in the way of something like a thriller. I think a Literary Thriller, again, not impossible, probably a little less compatible.

Oren: I’ve occasionally gotten a book that’s really good and has tension and is also described as Literary because it’s so good you can’t deny it anymore. Piranesi comes to mind.

Chris: Not Literary. It’s not,

Oren: it’s de- it’s described as Literary that’s-.

Chris: No. you’re wrong. How dare they?

Oren: Certainly, most books that I have read that get described as Literary do not have anything close to High Tension. They seem to be set up to reject that concept, so a Literary Thriller. I don’t know what you’d be doing to make that happen

Chris: Is House of Leaves thriller-ish?

Oren: I have no idea.  I only know what people say about House of Leaves, which is basically controlling, because you know,  reading House of Leaves is basically a hazing ritual you do to yourself, so you can’t actually describe House of Leaves to anybody because then they wouldn’t have to read it. It’s be like telling them your secret Freemason signs.

Chris: It’s maybe it’s a Thriller for like the reader who has to go through all of these trials.

Oren: You have to like read the book upside down in public. That’s pretty thrilling.

Chris: Yeah. Maybe it’s worth, before we go, mentioning a few, you know, popular stories that are pretty big mashups. -, we mentioned some things that are have Western one that I watched. I didn’t realize what a big mashup it was until I had to describe it to my mother. Which is Bon Appetit, Your Majesty. It’s a time-travel, romance cooking show.

Oren: Hell yeah. 10 out of 10, no notes.

Chris: So the protagonist goes back in time and romances a real historical figure who is like a tyrant, who killed people who did some purges and, but she charms him with her cooking. And so every episode she cooks a new dish.

Oren: This is why it’s really cool to live in a country that’s very old and has a lot of old history. You can’t do that in the US. You can’t have someone go back and romance – one of our really tyrant-y presidents – because they’re too recent. It’s like you can’t have someone go back and romance Andrew Jackson because of all the murders he did are still affecting us today. That wouldn’t be cool. We need like. A 2000 year history and then we can go pick some historical tyrant who no one cares about anymore.

Chris: There is a Ministry of Time.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a book for sure.

Chris: That is a book. I don’t think that mashup works particularly.

Oren: No, I wouldn’t say so.

Chris: Particularly since you know, again, I read through it to about the two thirds mark and I was like, this isn’t really a Romance. There’s no chemistry building at all. But apparently after the two thirds mark, they have tons of sex.

Oren: They do a lot.

Chris: It’s like that in itself just feels very uneven. Right? Which you don’t want, right? You want the same group of people to be interested from the beginning to the end. Also, I think the Science Fiction elements are pretty uneven, and the parts I read were just a very slow kind of Literary slice of life.

Oren: Yeah. Stuff just kind of happens.

Chris: Stuff just kind of happens.

Oren: You know, it’s sad because the initial premise sounds interesting of “Hey, the main character’s job is to help time travelers settle into the present. That sounds neat. What’s that about?” It turns out nothing. She basically never does that. She’s just around to hear them talk, is basically the premise she’s around to show us real life guy Gram Gore and how cool he is.

Chris: Uh, so what did you think about the genre for Revenger? Because when I looked at the beginning of that one, it looked like Retro/Cyberpunk/Space Opera.

Oren: Retro Cyberpunk, Victorian Space Opera Pirates.

Chris: Yeah. It’s got a lot going on.

Oren: It’s got a lot going on it… it makes some choices for sure.

Chris: And then the last one I can think of, which I, again, this is one that I do not think worked so well is Sweet Tooth, although I suspect that worked better when it was not in live action because that comes from a comic, I believe, or a graphic novel. I think again, that makes it Lower Realism. It’s a Post-Apocalyptic setting that has like cutesy animal-people, but then it does terrible things to them.

Oren: There’s a horrible plague and somehow the horrible plague created a deer person. Sure Why not?

Chris: It’s definitely Cognitive Dissonance World. But I suspect that wouldn’t have been quite as hard to swallow if it was, again, drawn, right? Instead of Live- Action.

Oren: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve watched Sweet Tooth. I barely remember what exactly the issues were with that show, but I do remember that we-

I have to end the show. We are already somewhat over time.

Chris: Mm-hmm. All right. Well, if you would like to hear more about fascinating and very viable sub genres like Gothic Cozy. Support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Schaber: 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.

In an unusual twist for the Mythcreants podcast, we’re talking about current events (gasp)! Don’t worry, we won’t make a habit of it. But when we heard that a Big Five novel had been pulled over accusations of LLM generated text, we had to look into it. Honestly, the story is way weirder than much of the coverage suggested.

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

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

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

Oren: …and I’m Oren.

Chris: [pretentiously lofty voice] On this podcast, we give advice. Not business advice, not process advice, just craft advice. Advice that lifts you up like hope, that lulls you like peace. That pulls you forward like ambition. It’s not words, it’s education.

Oren: God, I took psychic damage hearing that. Oof! [Chris laughs] Oof, Chris, you gotta warn me next time!

Chris: I’ve now learned too much about what AI-generated prose sounds like, or AI-generated text.

Oren: You’re absolutely right. What a great idea!

Chris: Sorry about giving you that psychic damage. I’ll be sure not to do it again.

Oren: Three seconds later… [both laugh]

Chris: Three seconds later, on this podcast…

Oren: So we’re doing something that’s almost current events on the podcast today. Kind of unusual. We’ll see how quickly we can actually get this out.

Chris: Current events, and I also wanna kind of broaden this into talking about, what does AI-generated fiction look like? What patterns are we seeing? What are some potential ways to recognize it, knowing that there’s still a lot of uncertainty here, and it could totally change with every new version or between different LLMs. But a little bit more useful stuff too.

Oren: Since we’re gonna be referencing the novel Shy Girl a lot, can I give a brief timeline of events?

Chris: Yeah. Let’s give you the timeline of events around this Shy Girl controversy.

Oren: I don’t have exact dates for most of these events. I’m just gonna give you the rough order they happened in, and they happened over the course of the last few months. So, the novel Shy Girl is self-published by an author who at the time went by Mia Ballard. It gets a little bit of traction online. It eventually reaches about 4,900 Goodreads ratings, which is not bad, not a runaway success, but better than a lot of authors do. People start to wonder if it’s LLM generated. There are Reddit threads. The YouTuber frankie’s shelf makes a nearly three hour video dissecting it.

This guy named Thaddeus Mackleroy – I believe that is how it’s pronounced – I’ve seen some MickIllroy, but Mackleroy appears to be the more common version. [Transcriber’s note: The name is spelled “McIlroy”; this is a discussion about pronunciation.] He hears about this, and he decides to investigate. As you will see later, he is not our friend, but for now, he knows people who run an AI detection company, which he sends the manuscript to, that he has acquired through ~means~, and they come back claiming that 78.4% of it is AI generated. Not that they have a 78.4% certainty, but that 78.4% of the document is AI generated. That is how he phrases it.

So he goes to the New York Times with the story. They then go to Hachette and Ballard for comment – Hachette being the company that is publishing it through their imprint Orbit – and Hachette/Orbit decides to pull the book. They make some vague statements about doing their own investigation. Very unclear what that means.

Ballard makes like one statement in an email to the New York Times claiming that she’s innocent, she didn’t do this, but also makes a vague allusion that her editor is responsible, with the exact quote being, “All I’m going to say is please do your research on editors before trusting them with your work.” She then claims she can’t say any more because she is pursuing unspecified legal action. Her minimal online presence vanishes, and then McIlroy publishes a blog post explaining all of this on LinkedIn, which is partly how I was able to put together this timeline. I also looked at, of course, the New York Times article and what Hachette said. And I wanna talk about that blog post later, but it’s probably not the most important thing in this story.

Chris: [laughing] To be clear, we don’t have access to any more information than the stuff we’re telling you that is freely available online, and by looking at the text of the book, and nothing is 100% for certain unless we traveled back in time and transported ourselves to see Mia Ballard and what she did to put this book together.

Oren: I realized, I think in that timeline that I put together, I forgot to mention the most important part, which is that Hachette/Orbit decided to pick up the book after it achieved its modest self-publishing success.

Chris: She got indie publishing success, and then was picked up by a trad publisher that did publish her in the UK, I believe, right before pulling it. But it had not been published in the US yet.

Oren: Most important part of the timeline, I obviously forgot it.

Chris: [laughs] But then completely pulled the book after the New York Times started investigating. Again, what I said is, we don’t know anything for 100% certain. At the same time, that said, I personally think that we can be all but certain that large portions of it were AI generated.

Ballard kind of admitted it when she said, “Oh, you ought to be careful who your editor is.” Look, it is not normal for an editor to contribute that much text to your book, and when I say that much text, I’m not even talking about the 78%, and we’ll talk more about what its narration looks like. It is very uniform. There are some places that are perhaps a little bit more quirky and human, which might reflect places where Ballard actually did some work herself. But this is not a situation where the AI style is isolated to little bits here and there, or in a few places that an editor might have done something.

All of us who are writers who care about our stories, I cannot imagine sending my work to an editor and then getting back something that was changed enough… That would be ghost writing, not editing.

Oren: Here’s the thing, I was talking to some other editors about it, and they were like, “well, surely she would’ve reviewed the changes that any editor made.” And from the way that I was looking at this book and how many just like incredibly obvious formatting mistakes it has, I wouldn’t be surprised if the author reviewed no changes. I still don’t believe this “the editor did it” story.

Chris: That’s what they all say. Every single time an author is caught using AI to generate text, they all claim it was somebody that helped them or they hired or something. It’s not very believable. At the very best, it would mean horrible negligence on their part, and also that they don’t really care about writing their own work anyway, because somebody else would be writing their work for them. That’s kind of the only way that this works, because this work, it’s very kind of monotonous and repetitive in the way that it’s narrated, so it’s everywhere. It’s the entire thing.

That’s just not how editing works. Generally, editors, if you get them to do heavy editing, they will supply more suggestions. Changes are tracked. They are making an effort to adhere to your voice and keep things consistent with the way that you normally narrate. If you had sort of AI software that was making constant suggestions, that would basically rewrite every single paragraph…but it’s just not feasible. Not if you’re the type of writer who actually writes your own work.

Oren: I have seen accounts from authors who claim that they hired an editor, quote, unquote, off of some race-to-the-bottom website, and what they got back was just their manuscript had been fed through an LLM.

Chris: You get what you pay for, folks.

Oren: It’s not impossible that that happened. It does strain credulity that the author would then go on to publish that. And even if that is what happened, I’d say they are equally culpable at that point. They had a responsibility to check their work.

Chris: Just wanna say what I think the biggest tell of Shy Girl is, because even things that seem nonsensical or inhuman can just be bad writing. We see unpublished manuscripts, and writers do a lot of weird things, a lot of nonsensical things. When people are trying to pound out thousands of words at a time some weird stuff ends up in there by accident. Some awkward phrasing ends up there, and you could look at any of that and call that inhuman if you wanted to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s AI generated just because it doesn’t seem to quite make sense.

However, the thing that is really the big tell for this one is the contrast between the fact that for most of the narration, the spelling and grammar is just fine, but the formatting and production quality is incredibly sloppy. Because the cover image of the original indie book was stolen, and it was like blown up, so it’s poor quality, but also the formatting of the book is just extremely sloppy. There are breaks in the middle of paragraphs.

I’ve seen indie authors, they don’t have a lot of money, they’re trying to put their book out. So they don’t necessarily know what good design is. They could try to do something themselves, and it might not turn out right. But a normal writer, even a really bad writer, who has actually spent all of that time writing, loves their book. That is the difference. This book is their baby. If they got a paperback copy, they would wanna open it up. They would wanna be really proud of it. If they see things like that, they would fix them, almost certainly. And if they’re so neglectful, then it’s weird that there aren’t any spelling errors.

Oren: Yep. That is very strange.

Chris: Because if they’re not neglectful, they’re not gonna be polishing…because it takes polish to get the spelling and grammar everywhere to be that smooth. And if they’re so sloppy in the formatting, they’re probably not hiring a professional copy editor to look at it. So how did it get that smooth, if they’re that neglectful?

Oren: You would expect way more typos that a basic spell check wouldn’t pick up, like incorrect words that are spelled correctly, but are the wrong word. That’s the sort of thing I would expect. The manuscripts that I edit are often extremely rough, and they can be rough in weird ways. So I am super hesitant to say that a certain thing is AI. I’m gonna be honest, if the author had not basically acknowledged that it was true, I would still be hesitant to say this was AI, just because I’ve seen so many weird things that human writers do, but there is a lot. There is a lot here.

Chris: But I think it is worth knowing… We also have some personal experience with plagiarizers who have taken our material from our blog and done various stuff with it. And one of the things that you get to learn, if this is done to you, [laughing] is that plagiarizers are just super, super lazy. Because that’s why they’re plagiarizing. And they don’t cut those big corners just to spend their time carefully formatting things, and carefully marketing things and packaging things, typically. So this kind of sloppiness of the production is what I would expect with a plagiarized work. They’re plagiarizing in order to not spend time, so they’re not gonna spend time. So that’s pretty par for the course with them too. And that’s something to be aware of.

The spelling and grammar being pretty good really suggests some automation happening there. That sort of is a little helpful because it gets out of some of the subjectivity that can be true, because a bad writer can create anything, or it will cover a lot of things that are characteristic of AI-generated fiction. It got that from actually good works. It got that from strong written works, and the most notable one being the em dash, which a lot of people came forth to defend. And the reason it’s so attached to em dashes is because professional writers are a lot more likely to use em dashes. And so the AI associates em dashes with strong writing. So if you would tell it to give you strong writing, it’s like, oh, well that means em dashes.

Oren: Obviously, that’s what everyone else is doing.

Chris: [laughing] Right? It’s a funny thing, because people seem to not even be able to tell it to get rid of the em dashes. It keeps using them. It can’t not use them.

Oren: So what are the specific signs in Shy Girl that we were looking at?

Chris: We did watch the three hour video by frankie’s shelf. And it was a good video. I’m gonna give Frankie credit for that. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t wanna watch three hours, but I would like to just come in at the end of the video and watch some of it,” you can do that, but it’s not gonna have the same effect. And the reason is because Frankie spends those three hours just showing you the patterns, because this is about the repetition, the thing that really kind of emphasizes it. It’s the frequency of repeating the same things over and over again through the entire narration that really makes it stand out as possibly generated work. 

And if you don’t read the book, or watch three hours of Frankie describing this repetition, it can be hard to understand what’s so unnatural about it. But basically it uses some words with strange frequency, like in particular “sharp,” and “heavy,” and “humming.” It has a lot of similes that are either slightly awkward, or just overly dramatic. It uses tons of adjectives to tell readers what to feel. And some of those adjectives are just like similes that are literally true, [laughing] which I have also seen authors do. I have seen authors write similes that are literally true, and therefore not similes, before. This is all something an actual writer could do.

Then I think personally, the thing that can really stand out as an editor is just the fact that the narration never changes to suit the moment. It feels melodramatic, because it has just exactly the same amount of drama throughout the entire thing.

Oren: Which is funny, because this is supposed to be a super dark book about torture and abuse.

Chris: But it never gets more dramatic. Or less dramatic. Everything is equally dramatic. It has like one little backstory summary near the beginning, but it doesn’t seem to pause to do a deeper dive to set up later events where it can be faster, for instance. It’s just the same amount. And when the character has what should be a serious emotional blow, it never stops to do more internalization, to explore the effect that it has on her in a deeper way. So even though there is internalization, even though there are emotional reactions, it ends up feeling shallow, because it never stops to lay more groundwork, give more background, dive deeper into her head. It just continues forward at the same kind of not-very-fast, kind of melodramatic, pace.

And that kind of monotony of the narration kind of reminds me of, honestly, AI-generated voice narration that I heard recently. It was like somebody had picked a setting where they wanted the voice to sound kind of bizarrely dramatic, and then that sort of dramatic style was applied uniformly to the narration, even in situations where it just did not fit. Like the intro to the audio book that was just saying here’s what the title is was in the dramatic voice. And the opening had a character who was bewildered and found themselves a new world and was saying casual modern day phrases in what I imagine Phantom of the Opera voice would be [laughing] – not actually being that familiar with that story – just like uniformly everywhere. It’s not what – it’s not normal.  A new writer could totally do that. And then Frankie brings up some places where people just don’t talk like that, like an eviction notice that says, “pay rent or quit,” even if that’s technically accurate.

When I did the intro to this podcast, that was an imitation of AI style, like a little section. When I hear it, it starts to have a very distinctive voice that you could recognize. It has a lot of short, succinct fragments that are meant to add drama. And the pacing could almost feel stilted, and I can kind of recognize it because I automatically start reading it in that voice that I used at the beginning of the podcast – this sort of stilted, overly dramatic… So in this case, here’s just like one paragraph:

Again, it’s very dramatic. Those kind of one-word sentences throughout the paragraph, the em dash… The other thing about the em dash, it is a very dramatic punctuation mark. It adds a lot of drama to a phrase, so it also can make things feel melodramatic. But that kind of slightly stilted, overly-dramatic phrasing with a lot of repetition – which is not normally bad – in the way things are phrased, is kind of what it sounds like.

Oren: The first really interesting feeling that I had, looking at this whole thing, this whole scandal, was relief? Because if this is representative of where the AI slop book makers are, then the solution is don’t read really crappy books, like even if you can’t recognize that it’s AI or not. And I was already doing that.

We should point out that we don’t know that. This could just be a particularly bad example, and that’s why it got caught. But my first thought was, okay, I think who this really indicts is Hachette, who was willing to publish this because it got a modest amount of social media traction. And it’s like, I don’t know, Hachette, try not publishing crappy books. I’m not a businessperson. Maybe publishing crappy books is where the money is now. It just seems like maybe that’s the solution to this.

Chris: It’s interesting, because certainly LLMs by themselves cannot write a good novel. I feel like somebody who tried to put more of their own legwork in mixed with LLM-generated text might be able to go further, but at the same time, we kind of know that the nature of this is A, people are more likely to choose generative text if they are lazy and don’t wanna do the work themselves, and that people tend to quickly become dependent on LLMs in many cases, and over time are likely to cede more ground to them, and also let their guard down. Because AI makes mistakes. Unfortunately, it makes them just infrequently enough that people can’t maintain their vigilance when it comes to checking it.

Oren: And that’s sort of what I’ve been bracing for, because my experience with LLM-generated text is primarily nonfiction, as far as I know, because I run into it a lot on blog posts and social media. And the way I know this is that often the person who does it will admit that they did that. They’ll either brag about it, or they will admit it under pressure. Which I’ve always wondered why they don’t lie, but often they don’t. And the characteristic of these are that it has grammatically correct sentences, each of which is a proper sentence, but that it doesn’t add up to anything. And that they tend to be very long, and they tend to have a lot of organizational formatting that doesn’t mean anything.

But of course all of that is things that a person could do. A person could write a really long Reddit post with a bunch of bolded headings for no reason that never gets to a point. So that makes it kind of impossible to tell. It’s just that it’s bad, and that’s the more useful metric at this point. So that’s why I was expecting that to be the big scandal, and I suspect we will probably still get there. There will probably be someone who is willing to put in the work to make an AI-generated book not so obviously terrible, and then they’ll eventually get caught out, and that’ll be a big scandal. I’m sure that’s gonna happen eventually.

Chris: I’m sure that an actual human working with an LLM could go farther than just the LLM. But I do think that would mean very bad things for that writer long-term. Because we’ve seen people’s skills degrade, have a hard time remembering the story if you don’t write it yourself, all sorts of things. I think it would just be very easy to become dependent. And also a lot of the things that Frankie felt that were bad about this novel was just the fact that the similes weren’t there. And they either were too literal, or, just, I don’t know what that’s supposed to convey.

If you’re a person who is going over and has to check all of that LLM text, the idea of not letting any of that through seems unlikely to me. Eventually, you’re gonna start kind of accepting more of it and just letting it… And, as I see more about what AI-generated text looks like, there are more commonalities. I also think that if there are becoming more books that are written this way, people are more and more gonna recognize its voice, because it has its own voice. Even if we can’t identify – because other people might start copying it inadvertently, because there is style pollution. If you read a book with a certain style, you’re more likely to sort of subconsciously start copying that style. That’s how it goes. But at best that’s gonna be the general background style against which if anybody wants their style to stand out, and they’re writing to stand out, they’re gonna have to deviate from that.

A really funny anecdote – there’s an NYT article by Sam Kriss on what AI writing looks like that is quite informative – that apparently if you ask AI to write science fiction, it has an uncanny habit of naming the protagonist Elara Voss, specifically, and male characters are usually named Kael.

Oren: God dammit, Kale!

Chris: [laughing] Like K-A-E-L. And so, according to Sam Kriss, there are now hundreds of self-published books on Amazon featuring Elara Voss or Elena Voss.

Oren: Yeah, of course there are. That cannot be a surprise. That’s just exactly what we all knew was going to happen.

Chris: [laughing] I just find that very funny. So if you read sci-fi and the main character’s name is Elara Voss, or Kael, just run in the other direction.

Oren: And I do think it’s important to emphasize that there are no good guys in this story. It’s been pointed out that Hachette either knew or should have known that there was something fishy going on with this book. Because presumably they would’ve looked into its social media history, since that was in theory the reason they got it. And they would’ve noticed that there were a whole bunch of people asking, “Is this book AI generated? And also it’s really, really bad.” They at the very least were negligent. And I mean that in the colloquial sense. I’m not suggesting they were legally negligent, not a lawyer.

But also I wanna take this moment to talk about our good friend Thaddeus McIlroy, who is the one who brought this all to light. Because his blog post about all this is bizarre. First, he mostly wrote this blog post to complain that the New York Times didn’t give him enough credit. And if he was anyone else, I would agree with him, because the New York Times barely mentions him. But you then start to wonder, okay, Mr. McIlroy, why did you launch this investigation in the first place? Because he is actually very upset at what happened, that Ballard lost her book contract and had to give up this pen name. Like, he thinks that was an unjust result.

Chris: Was he thinking, like, “see this book is AI, glory to the AI”? Is that what he was doing?

Oren: I don’t know. He’s really unclear why he decided to do this. He has a section where he says, “Trade publishers are (somewhat) quietly adopting AI tools themselves, dancing delicately around whether this conflicts with their public-facing ‘principles.’ I was more than happy to use this story to highlight the conundrum.” So maybe he thought he was gonna pull a gotcha on Hachette, and they were gonna be like, “oh yeah, actually LLMs are fine”? Surely he didn’t think that was going to happen. If so, he’s extremely deluded. There is no way, especially not with a book this bad.

So then he’s upset that this is what happened. This obviously predictable result of his actions is what happened. This is a bit like a cop bemoaning that after catching someone for assault, that person went to jail. It was like, “Well, I didn’t want them to go to jail. All they did was beat up a bunch of people.” Well, okay, why did you catch them then? [Chris laughs] Remember, he’s claiming that these AI detectors, they work really well according to him, and this idea that they don’t work is like an outdated idea from when they were bad. And he lists some studies that claim that the AI detector he’s using has an error rate of 0.5%. That’s how accurate he thinks these things are, but he also thinks that we just have to accept that books are gonna be made with LLMs now, because there’s nothing to do about it.

What are you doing here? He is both bemoaning witch hunts, selling witch detectors, and also telling us it’s impossible to do anything about witches. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen accusations that his blog post is AI generated by people who ran it through AI detectors, and maybe it is. Maybe he’s just bad at writing. I cannot believe what I read. As I was reading this, I was like, what was the purpose of this thing you did?

Chris: That sounds like somebody who thought that “here, if I reveal this book as AI, then Hachette will be forced to defend it and forced to defend its use of AI,” and thought it would go the other way. “If I bring AI out into the open, then it will cause AI to be acknowledged and lauded instead of canned.”

Oren: Instead of the obvious thing that was going to happen. We do know that a lot of AI boosters are completely disconnected from reality, so maybe that’s what’s going on.

Chris: Or just surrounded by other AI boosters, so they don’t seem to know how many AI haters there are. We hear again and again from so many people that they’re surprised when they do an AI thing and it’s controversial, and it’s like, who are you hanging out with that you didn’t know that?

Oren: It’s just so weird that the people who are selling us the product which is supposed to be the solution to the problem, do not want us to use their product to solve the problem.

Chris: Well, maybe that could be one reason, if they’re not reliable.

Oren: I don’t think they’re reliable. And he doesn’t think they’re reliable, because he’s like, well, you gotta presume innocence. And it’s like, do you? With an error rate of 0.5%? I don’t know, man. That’s your study, not mine. I’m just saying you seem to think it is.

Chris: Before we go, I’d love to talk about, just go over quickly, some patterns of AI writing in general. It tends to have very specific tells that you can learn. Again, these things will be found in writing, especially strong writing, because that’s where they come from, unfortunately, and it could vary with different versions.

We talked about the em dash. Professional writers love it, but LLMs like to use it a lot. Sets of three. That’s another thing that culturally we just find pleasing. If there’s a set of three, that’s another thing a strong writer is likely to use, but LLMs use them a lot. Repeating similar phrasing, using the same phrase is a way – that’s actually a lyrical technique that makes the words, you know, the style more rhythmic. But of course LLMs have picked up on that, so they have a lot of repeating phrasing. And then there’s specific imagery and words that LLMs tend to like, like “quiet” and “silence” and “humming,” and apparently they love ghosts, and phantoms, and the word “delve.”

Oren: Okay. [laughs]

Chris: The other thing that really stands out, that is very present in Shy Girl, and I think that there is a name for this, but I cannot find it anywhere. It’s a specific literary technique of basically pairing a tangible thing with an intangible concept, a concept that is often kind of emotionally loaded. For instance, in this case, when we say the main character’s mother is about to abandon her, we say that her suitcase is big enough to hold forever. So the forever would be like the intangible concept in the suitcase holding forever, and it kind of creates contrast, and can be kind of evocative, which is why this is a well-liked literary technique.

A lot of the writing tends to feel very, like, kind of flowery, and it gives it the illusion of having emotional depth. Even though it doesn’t really, if you actually keep reading it and look deeper, try to put it together after it’s done a paragraph of this. But the interesting thing about this is it’s a replacement for something LLMs seemed to be having trouble doing, which is sensory description. If we were to describe the suitcase physically, or like how it smelled or felt, that would basically put more burden on accuracy. It would really require knowing what a suitcase looks like, or feels like, or smells like in order to do that. Whereas if we just say it’s big enough to hold forever, you could associate forever with all kinds of tangible things as an artistic strategy, and so it gives the LLM more leeway. But eventually you’ll see that these intangible concepts are kind of nonsensically paired with things, or they’ll be mixed metaphors, or they’re just not used in as thoughtful a way as a human would do it. So that’s another thing that’s very common.

Oren: With that list, I think we’re going to have to finally call this extra-long episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to support some actual human writers, [laughs] you can always become our patrons. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

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

Look at your main characters, such good friends! Be a shame if anything made them turn on each other in a conflict that’s as full of angst as it is cool action moves. Who are we kidding, that sounds awesome. But how to go about it? We need disagreements that are big enough to turn heroes against each other while not seeming like they’ve suddenly turned evil (unless they’ve suddenly turned evil). And you probably want to leave room for a reconciliation at the end. We’ve got some thoughts!

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Oren, I know you wanna keep using Audacity to record the podcast, but I have this gut feeling that it’s evil and will destroy us. And no, I can’t give you evidence, but I’m really mad that you don’t believe me about this.

Oren: Well, I think that the obvious solution is for us to spend the next eight episodes repeating conversations in which I tell you this isn’t real, you insisted it is real, and we don’t go anywhere.

Chris: So we’ve watched hundreds of episodes of the soap opera, “Dark Shadows”. 

Oren: Yeah, we have done that.

Chris: And how do you write a show that’s like, a thousand episodes long? Not by moving the plot forward. 

Oren: Yeah, don’t do that. 

Chris: Well, obviously, since you don’t believe me, I’ve gotta go behind your back and maybe kidnap some Audacity developers to prove that I’m right.

Oren: It just makes sense. 

Chris: It’s just a very constructive action that will cause no further disagreements. 

Oren: Yeah. Afterwards, I’ll be like, “oh, I guess you were right the whole time. My bad.” 

Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about when protagonists fight. 

Oren: First thing to do is get some popcorn, I guess. 

Chris: Yeah, get some popcorn. So let’s just start with why make protagonists fight? 

Oren: Because it’s fun. I like to use the Let Them Fight GIF over and over again. 

Chris: Because we like drama. Or sometimes you gotta romance and you gotta keep the lovebirds apart for a little longer. You know? You gotta come up with something and the fight is a way to do that. Or in a suspenseful story, maybe it’s ‘no one could be trusted’ and so you wanna create separation between people so that you don’t know who is a friend and who’s an enemy; trust no one. Or you just really like great conflicts with nuance.

Oren: Right. The characters fighting could be a number of different things, right? It could be characters who start off on the same team and have a temporary disagreement. It could be characters that start off from the same team, and then one of them, you know, decides they can’t work together anymore and becomes an antagonist. Or maybe they are opposed to each other from the start and you’re following both sides of a conflict. There’s several different ways this could work. 

Chris: Yeah. And of course we also have situations where people are at odds at first, and they solely come together, and then there’ll be some relapses when additional differences surface they break up again or whatever. So, certainly a variety of situations when we have these kinds of relationship arcs where people have to, you know, encounter problems in their relationship and work things out. But there are lots of issues. I’ve seen many, many storytellers struggle with this one. 

Oren: Right. Well, at the core of it is if you want characters to disagree about something strongly enough to oppose each other, not necessarily in a physical fight, they could just be arguing a lot. Something that goes beyond just a mild, oh, maybe you should do something else. It needs to be something that is important but also something where in most cases, you want to be able to see both sides of it, because if one character just seems unreasonable, that character is gonna get a lot of hate. 

Chris: And again, there’s just a lot of people who just have trouble coming up with great conflicts. That’s just something that storytellers struggle with a lot. And what can happen here is that the writer just doesn’t come up with a reasonable fight, so maybe the fight feels overly petty over something that is not a big deal, or people could be talking it out and instead they’re fighting instead of just reasoning with each other, or, this happens a lot in long running shows, where the characters change personalities. Like, in order for this fight to happen, a character manifests a new flaw we’ve never seen before and is just overly dramatic. And often a character comes off like an asshole maybe ’cause we need them to be an asshole for this divide to occur in the first place.

Oren: Yeah, you know, we need these two characters to be in opposition or the plot won’t go forward, but we don’t really know why, so I guess one of them is just mean today. 

Chris: Yeah. This reminds me, we were just watching the show, Tide Landers or Tidelands. We also referred to it as Violent Women because it’s about like these half-sirens and sirens, you know, gotta be sexy ladies. So there’s just a lot women who do violence in the show, which is kind of fun, but this main character, Cal, which is short for Calliope, man, she is just very angry with people because while they’re in like emergency situations they won’t stop and take her to the place she wants to go.

Oren: Yeah, I liked that show way more before we had clearly jelled around Cal as our viewpoint audience insert character. 

Chris: I thought she was the main character from the beginning. 

Oren: She was supposed to be, but early in the show there was a lot more focus on the different factions in the town and what they’re doing. And Cal’s story doesn’t really heat up until a few episodes in and before that it’s just a lot more like a mafia drama where everyone’s kind of bad and you’re just waiting to see what types of extreme violence they inflict on each other. 

Chris: Because the half-sirens in the show are dealing drugs. 

Oren: Right.

Chris: They’re supplying drugs. We’re not actually sure where they get the drugs from, but they supply the drugs. 

Oren: They never explain where the drugs come from. Don’t worry about it. 

Chris: They manifest drugs from the ocean, I guess, but we also don’t know what the drugs are. I think that if they named what the drugs were, then it would feel more real and the viewers would be more likely to be like, “uh, I don’t know. Do we like these people? They’re dealing cocaine.” Right? Whereas if we don’t know what the drug is, it’s like, “I dunno, maybe it’s a fantasy mystical drug that’s not so bad, but that people kill each other dealing ’cause it’s illegal.” 

Oren: Yeah. Who knows what it is. 

Chris: Any case. So the conflicts in there are just her not understanding that somebody else is in an emergency situation and like, yeah, she’s going through some stuff. She just found out she’s not entirely human and that would affect a person, but the other person is [in] a very understandable situation and she just doesn’t see that. It’s like, yeah, somebody just tried to kill your brother and he’s being hunted right now, so this is not really the time to complain about the fact that he won’t drive you where you want to go.

Oren: Yeah. That whole show is full of characters just not having great motivations for things they do. As you go, you’re wondering, “okay, why are the sirens and the drug dealers at odds with each other? And why does anyone care which siren is in charge? It doesn’t seem like it makes that much of a difference.” There’s a bunch of stuff like that going around. 

Chris: And I do think it’s one of those situations where we have a set list of characters and we have to fill the show with scenes with those characters at odds with each other. And sometimes the writers might be struggling to be like, “okay, so why did these characters hate each other? I don’t know. I just need them to draw their guns.”

Oren: Yeah, they need to point guns at each other. It’s very dramatic. 

Chris: So anyway, not having a natural reason for characters to fight and then making them come off as really petty, that’s a very, very common one. Another one that I see is a character – this is the “Voyager” problem – a character getting too much candy.

Oren: Mm-hmm

Chris: Because sometimes what happens in these protagonist fights, is that one character who is the writer’s darling, the whole point is that everybody doubts them so that they can later be proven right. Jane Way has some of these arcs on “Voyager”, and usually to make that work, you know, if you have this one beleaguered character who just, nobody believes in, but they’re right, well, okay, why doesn’t anybody believe them? So all of the other protagonists have to disagree with them, which probably means that they don’t have a very good reason for doing what they’re doing, and then they’re proven right, usually by luck. 

Oren: Yeah. The whole “everyone’s against me and I have to prove them all wrong” is, it’s not that it can never work, but man, that is a steep hill to climb. “Babylon Five” does the same thing with Sheridan and I find it just as annoying there. 

Chris: Yep! Korra has it once in Legend of Korra too. So there’s a number of characters where we’ve seen this arc. 

Oren: Yeah. It’s just like, look, if everyone disagrees with your protagonist, what is it your protagonist sees that none of them can?

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Why is your protagonist the only one who is correct? 

Chris: Which is one of the reasons I brought up this like, oh, it’s just my gut, which we have seen on Star Trek before. I don’t think that one was Janeway, I think that one was a different character. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But again, why have people doubted you? It was like, “well, look, I just know this to be true, but I can’t give you any evidence.” It’s like, okay, well this doesn’t feel like a hill to die on then if you don’t have any evidence, this would be more interesting and more realistic, but take some more thought where there’s evidence that can be interpreted in different ways. And then you have to establish, okay, why is each person heavily invested in their own interpretation?

Oren: Yeah, and you can make this easier on yourself by introducing a time limit. If the characters have to make a decision quickly and they have limited information, then they can’t just be like, “all right, everyone, hold up. Let’s calm down. Let’s reorient and see what we’ve got.” You know, there’s no time for that. You gotta make a decision now. And so the characters are gonna come down on the sides that they are, you know, predisposed to for various reasons. 

Chris: And you can also have a situation where characters disagree but you’re not endorsing a particular person as necessarily being right. One of them might succeed in getting their way and the other won’t or maybe they’ll compromise, but you’re not trying to be like “this person was right all along”. But if you do have a person who’s like, “this person was right all along,” that’s a lot of candy. And so if the character is already candied, really feels like too much. Whereas if you had like a really downtrodden main character who was marginalized, and that’s why nobody takes them seriously, then that would be seem a lot more reasonable. We know why people aren’t taking them seriously, they already have lots of spinach, they could use a chance to show everybody what they’re made of. That’s very different than a character who is kind of insufferable and then gets to be the one person who’s right when everybody else is wrong.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Another really common issue that I see in a lot of these protagonist versus protagonist kind of fights is things that feel morally twisted. Sometimes that’s to vindicate the character who looks wrong. We need a character who looks wrong. If we had a situation where it’s like, “no, I swear in my gut these people are evil,” and then I break in and kidnap them, and then it turns out that I’m right, there’s something still wrong with that! I didn’t have any evidence, I still broke in, kidnapped somebody without evidence. Even if I’m right by luck, that’s still kinda like, ugh. Or another one, because storytellers have so much trouble coming up with gray conflicts, gray washing a black and white conflict. 

Oren: Oh God, that’s such a problem.

Chris: This is where you’re like, okay, you present a situation, oh, these are the oppressors and these are oppressed. But what if the oppressed people also did crimes or something? 

Oren: Right. It’s like, so there are two sides out here, and one side murders, crucifies and enslaves people, and the other side is vaguely problematic. So they’re basically equal. 

Chris: Or “The Librarians” did an episode where they were talking about this American Civil War. It’s like, okay, no, no, no, no, that was not a black and white conflict. One side was a bunch of rich slave holders that wanted to continue enslaving people. 

Oren: Yeah, or specifically it was a black and white conflict. Which is not to say that the North were like perfect good guys, but there was obviously a bad guy side in that conflict. It was good that the Confederates lost. 

Chris: Ironically, the thing about this is that if the Confederacy had not withdrawn, there’s a good chance the North would’ve never, at least not soon, pushed the slavery issue. What happened is that these rich slavers were sure that Lincoln would try to abolish slavery, and so they preemptively wanted to withdraw from the Union.

Oren: It’s a little more complicated than that. What they also wanted to do was expand slavery because they thought, or at least this is what I’ve read, they thought that the institution of slavery would die out if it stayed contained to the current states that it was in and so they wanted to expand it. And some of ’em had these wacky plans of like, conquering Mexico and instituting slavery there. And that was also part of why they decided to secede ’cause they knew that Lincoln, while he was unfortunately not an abolitionist, would not countenance the expansion of slavery and would try to curtail it slowly over time. And that was just not acceptable to them. 

Chris: But the North previously had done a whole bunch of appeasement of slavers, so not showing a lot of moral bravery there, not– [chuckle] when the war started. That was definitely the correct side. So when “The Librarians” comes and it wants to do this whole brother versus brother framing, where they go to a historical town where they’re doing civil war reenactments and they have two of the characters get possessed by civil war ghosts or something like that. And it, it definitely is trying to basically reframe it as a gray conflict where both of them learned they were wrong. And it’s like, no, no, don’t do that. 

Oren: Which is funny. They could have just used the Revolutionary War if they wanted to do that. Like yeah, absolutely, have a story about a patriot and a loyalist who realized they were both wrong. Works for me.

Chris: So basically trying to take a black and white conflict and then be like, okay, but it’s too simplistic. It’s black and white, and then adding something to try to make it, that really ends up creating some very morally twisted storylines. You wanna take an issue that is inherently gray and you’ll know it’s gray enough when you talk to different readers and they all have different opinions about which side is right. I did an article on doing moral dilemmas a while back and had some examples of moral dilemmas that you could have in your story. And it was really funny that commenters would come in and be like, “how dare you say that that’s a moral dilemma, this is obviously the right side.” And then another commenter would be like, “how dare you?” And then pick the other one. And it’s like, “yep. That’s why we call it a moral dilemma, folks.” 

Oren: Yeah, it was funny reading that ’cause on the one hand, the fact that some people are willing to take up for one side and other people will take up for another side doesn’t inherently make something morally gray, but in this case it obviously was if you just reasoned through it a little bit. And so you just seeing people like both confidently take different sides in the same comment thread was very funny. 

Chris: Yeah. Those are some things to look out for. I do think that it really just helps storytellers a lot to just have ideas because I think a lot of these problems, maybe not the candy issue, but a lot of these problems are just rooted in struggling to come up with something that works. I think offering some ideas and templates for how you can have a big disagreement that turns into a fight and gives people somewhere to start with is helpful. And I have a couple articles. I have one that’s specifically “Seven Ways to Create Rifts Between Close Characters”. That one is for what I think is the trickiest situation where your characters are already getting along well and you need to add a new issue that can put them at odds with each other. I also have one on personality clashes, which is generally from characters that don’t have that much exposure to each other. They’re not already friends and writers also have a lot of trouble with personality clashes and tend to make characters come off as very unreasonable. Now, a lot of times you don’t need to do a personality clash ’cause that’s a particularly tricky one. You can do something that’s a little bit more significant than just they rub each other the wrong way. But there are ways to do that productively. 

Oren: Yeah, and one aspect of this that is I think, useful to think about that isn’t just setting up the argument itself is making sure that you have room in the plot for this kind of split, because this is something I have encountered occasionally with client manuscripts, thankfully not that often in published stories, where you’ll have two good guys, right? You’ll have two characters on team good, and then a villain that they’re both opposing. Then there’s a split between those characters and now one of those characters is opposing the protagonist, but there’s still this villain, so now you’ve got two villains and what are you doing with both of those?

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: So depending on how long the split is going to last and how serious it is, you usually want to make sure that it is tied into whatever opposition you already had as opposed to just, well now a new challenger has arrived and, and now what am I doing with him? 

Chris: Right. Or have the story have somewhere to go with it.

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: If a protagonist is going to split off and just even become an antagonist, where does it take the story that it wouldn’t have gone before in interesting ways? So we’re not just, “Okay, well characters caught in a fight, but we still need to like go in this direction. So I guess they make up now.” Now granted, a fight can matter for multiple reasons. It can change the way the external plot goes, but also it can just be part of a character’s arc. If they have some issue that they need to resolve, the fight can be part of that and show them overcoming that, just part of their relationship arc, whatever. But you know, you do want somewhere to go instead of just, being like, “okay, well I counted on the protagonist doing this and now their head lieutenant is against them. How is that gonna work?” So should we go over some ideas for types of disagreements? 

Oren: Yeah. I have found that a very good one is, who should we be helping with whatever it is we’re doing? If you have two characters who have found a bunch of money, how should we spend this? You got maybe one character who’s like, “we should spend this on ourselves and our friends and our family,” and the other characters like, “we should spend that to buy a building that we can use to help people who don’t have housing.” And that’s a sort of conflict where you can sympathize more with the second character, but you can see where the first one’s coming from.

Chris: So they have different priorities that kind of separates them, I think that also works really well. Something similar is risks. What risk are we willing to tolerate? And we can combine that, “okay, we wanna help somebody, but that person is also a fugitive, but we know that they’re innocent, but they’re still being hunted and we can get in trouble. Do we wanna prioritize helping this person or not getting in trouble?” 

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: “Do we wanna make sure we protect what we have or are we gonna decide we’re gonna go and proactively attack the enemy even though that’s a risk because we’re just getting weaker if we stay here?” So that kinda like risk tolerance can definitely be a dividing point for characters.

Oren: Yeah. The uh, “are we willing to face danger on someone else’s behalf” is [a] good thing that can drive otherwise reasonable characters apart. 

Chris: Another one, we had a recent episode talking about questionable allies, trust and loyalty I find are really useful for dividing people. If they have some kind of authority figure, can be useful for authority figure to show up who’s just kind of questionable. Which brings up the question of like, okay, even though this person is doing some things that don’t seem quite right, are we going to trust them and still follow their orders? And if one character does a lot more rules following than the other, that one works really well. You have an ally, right? And if you have somebody questionable, you do want them to provide some benefits. So we’re again, talking a lot about priorities and risk here, we have a questionable ally, that person might not be trustworthy, but they can bring us really valuable information. I think the nice thing about loyalty and trust is we can get a lot of emotion in there and a lot of drama, if that’s what we’re looking for. Sometimes the questionable ally might be somebody’s childhood best friend or something suddenly shows up, then you have one character who’s really attached to this person already and might take offense if somebody else doesn’t trust them. 

Oren: You can, she can use that to show that this character trusts the new ally because they have a history. This other character doesn’t have a history and is just looking by what we know this person to have done. And that’s a great way to build conflict between characters. 

Chris: It can be fun if the characters are not already close. This one kind of requires, if it’s clear that there is a spy somewhere, there is a mole. That can be great fun because all the characters can suddenly start following each other, spying on each other, trying to find out who the spy is. But that behavior may also make them suspicious, and everybody can suspect everybody else. 

Oren: Yeah. The fear of a spy is also the perfect way to establish why characters aren’t sharing information.

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Which is very useful and writers really struggle with that. I’m still baffled to this day that they didn’t use that in the Last Jedi just to explain why Poe and Admiral, what’s her name? Holdo. 

Chris: That was just an easy one. That was a really easy solution right there! 

Oren: Especially since they had this question of like, how is the Imperial fleet following us? It’s like, well, I just assumed they had a spy on board. But no, they have a new techno what’s-it. I mean, hell, they might not even have been a spy. Sometimes all it matters is that they think there’s a spy. We could have had a reveal where there is no spy, they have a techno what’s-it, but everyone’s been acting like there was a spy ’cause that’s what they assumed.

Chris: Yeah, that would’ve been perfect.

Oren: I just assumed that’s where they were going. But no, apparently not. 

Chris: There’s a number of conflicts that happened with protagonists where if everybody just talked it out, they would be fine. And that is really hard to deal with. But suspicion is one of the best solutions to that if they actually suspect each other. Sometimes otherwise making characters just like less knowledgeable. I actually have a list, I have another list of how to try to sabotage communication. It’s still pretty tough. Another solution is to have a malicious go between who, you know, you need a reason why people are talking to this person instead of to each other directly. But if they both trust somebody and that person is malicious, they can distort messages. 

Oren: Right, and if they are clever about it, they can insert themselves into the communication line and then the protagonists who are getting their messages garbled, increasingly distrust each other and only wanna communicate through this new person who is totally trustworthy. Don’t worry about it. 

Chris: Another big source of protagonist disagreements is just prior secrets. So this is something where when they first met, somebody had kind of a dark secret and they were like, okay, well you know, obviously I’ll tell this person when I get to know them a little bit better and they trust me. But then the closer they become, the harder and harder it is to tell the secret, leading it to just be held onto for years, which the other person considers a betrayal. And you do want something that’s kind of personal. 

Oren: That one is tricky because it can absolutely work, but you need this balance where the secret is significant enough that we can believe the character wouldn’t have wanted to share it, but also not so significant that it becomes impossible for the characters to reconcile after it’s shared. Assuming reconciliation is what you want, maybe you don’t. Sometimes writers don’t want their characters to reconcile, but that’s, you know, sort of the default assumption. 

Chris: Yeah. Involvement in an organization that’s antagonistic, for instance, is a good one because that person could have come to regret their involvement and left. We don’t know exactly what they did necessarily as part of their organization. So there’s like a variety of things that kind of can create a level of distance between them and some of the horrible acts the organization was doing. But it’s also very implicating when the other person could have been, for instance, personally harmed by this evil organization. So that’s one that I think works pretty well. 

Oren: Yeah, I would agree. 

Chris: And then probably one of the most robust ones, just giving them conflicting goals. So they actively want different things. And sometimes that can occur with people who are already, for instance, best friends, but sometimes that’s a good one for characters who meet each other and form a temporary alliance based on their needs right now. But then just at some point in time have to turn against each other because they have mutually exclusive missions, for instance. 

Oren: But they have shared needs early or they need each other, and so they need to cooperate, but they also have something pulling ’em apart because if they know they’re going to different places at the end of this.

Chris: Maybe they’re both danger-ing through dangerous terrain and they need each other to survive. But then when they get to the temple at the end, one of them wants to take the artifact, the other wants to destroy it. Something like that works really well, and then they can be allied for much of the story and then get to like each other and then, oops! Now we can’t be friends anymore. That’s just a nice, easy one. Of course, you do have to come up with a reason if you want them to make up again, often you would come up with a reason why one of them would change their mind. 

Oren: Right. It needs to be something that’s not so far apart that they couldn’t ever reconcile over it. Assuming that you want them to reconcile, it might be that one of ’em changes their mind, they might have a compromise, or it might be something that one of them gets their way and then eventually enough time passes that the other one is willing to put it behind them, something like that. All right. Well, now that we are finished having our conflict, we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Now if you want to hear about us actually fighting with people, not each other, but people we were attempting to get along with, we do have some juicy stories in our collection on Patreon. I’m not gonna name any names. I’m not even gonna mention the blog nemesis, but it’s in there. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

Do you like spooky nights spent sneaking through dusty old libraries? Of course, literally everyone in the world likes that. Fortunately, now there’s a whole subgenre for all your creepy academic needs. Kinda. Maybe. We’re actually a little unclear what dark academia even is. On the bright side, everyone else seems confused, too, so maybe we can figure it out together. 

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: I’m Chris.

Oren: So, I’ve been hearing a lot about the dark academia subgenre, which makes sense, because what’s spookier than student loans?

Chris: Hmm. They are pretty spooky.

Oren: I assume that’s what it’s about.

Chris: They follow you forever, wherever you go. And just when you thought you got rid of them because they were canceled, it turns out they were un- canceled.

Oren: Yeah. It’s actually illegal to cancel your student loans, apparently. Great job. I love this country.

Chris: Perfect bureaucracy horror.

Oren: First of all, you might wonder what is dark academia? The answer is that it’s a social media aesthetic with a little sidehustle.

Chris: Another meme genre. Those never go wrong.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just a little sidehustle as a fiction genre. The actual origins of the social media aesthetic are highly debated and I don’t know much about them, so I can’t really comment on that. I tried to research more of it and I immediately was hit with videos about how “dark academia doesn’t mean anything anymore, it’s changed so much.” It’s like this is a three-hour video. Um, okay, I don’t think I actually need to know about this part. I only need to know about the fiction genre.

Chris: Um, this is why all the serious scholars are on TikTok, Oren.

Oren: Yeah, obviously. So, it’s a marketing term. Nowadays things get labeled dark academia if they involve vaguely higher education and anything spooky.

Chris: Yeah, I mean I guess it’s pretty self-explanatory. There’s dark and it’s academia seems to be all it is. As far as I can tell.

Oren: The label is applied retroactively quite a lot. Donna Tart’s The Secret History is from 1992. It absolutely was not advertised as dark academia, because that term didn’t exist yet. But now it’s often considered a foundational work in the genre.

Chris: And that book is not speculative, right?

Oren: No, it has occult elements, but it’s not actually magic.

Chris: Right. I mean that does kind of make sense because I feel like if we have a speculative subgenre, we usually have something with more novelty than a college or university in it.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Otherwise, there would probably be something else to remark upon. Other than that it’s academia.

Oren: That is interesting to me, right? Because supposedly the social media genre is all driven by nostalgia. I have not read a single dark academia book that I would consider nostalgic. Some of them are willing to acknowledge that some parts of college are fun, but each and every one of them—except for the one that like barely had any college in it at all, and I don’t even know why it’s called dark academia— was deeply critical of the institution of higher learning. So maybe there are some nostalgic novels out there somewhere with the label dark academia. But of the eight that I read semi-recently, none of them were like that.

Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure dark works are known for being nostalgic.

Oren: Right.

Chris: I’m trying to think of where have I seen a work that is dark but also nostalgic? Yeah, that’s a hard one.

Oren: I can only assume it just makes more sense in the social media aesthetic because in the books it’s like, hey, it’s a dark story and it takes place in college. So, chances are the college is not going be the greatest place to be, otherwise we wouldn’t call it dark, it would just be a campus novel.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that if this is in a very visual medium, then what we’ve got are lots of really pretty pictures of gorgeous university architecture, that kind of thing, and even if it technically looks kind of creepy somehow, I could still see how that would be perceived as glorifying because we’re showing pretty pictures of these institutions.

Oren: Ninth House is kind of like that (the novel by Leigh Bardugo). It makes a big deal of the aesthetics of Yale and how cool it is to be in a dusty room full of old books. We love that, but it’s still deeply critical of Yale’s student societies, sometimes called “secret” societies, which exaggerates how secret they really are. But they do get up to some pretty, uh, not great shenanigans. As a book, it’s very critical of all that, which feels definitely like something someone wrote before 2025. Back before our own government just declared war on higher education. Now that would seem kind of weird because we’re trying to save higher education over here, but before then, yeah, it made total sense.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s always been a little bit of that dynamic when it comes to universities and the fact that they have done lots of bad things, but they also have done lots of good things, including sometimes being very inclusive, even though they did a lot of harm.

Oren: Right. Well, and the people who are most likely to critique and dissect institutions also all went to university. You have these institutions whose job it is to train people who critique institutions. So yeah, they’re going to get critiqued a lot. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Chris: Although I’m sure, like any other institutions, they’re not that inclusive, too.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: They probably all have old, white, privileged people who don’t want to let others in.

Oren: You know, we all live in a society.

Chris: We all live in a society. I have obviously been critical of universities many times in our field, but they still do good work and we need them to not be destroyed, please.

Oren: Much more fun to critique universities back when that wasn’t a thing that could actually happen. But onto the more fictional side of darkness that is happening, I do find dark academia a little interesting because I have had a number of clients who have told me that they want to write dark academia. Then the question becomes, is there anything different about dark academia compared to other novels that you have to think about when you’re writing it? No. Call that done.

Chris: The thing I find interesting about it is it’s like the Magic School genre generally. Especially if you’re writing speculative, generally that means that university’s teaching magic things. It’s not impossible to get away from that, but it would be a little hard to get away from that. Gosh, I still remember when I ran that role playing campaign for you folks in a university and you were all expecting the classes to be magic classes. And I was like, no, no, the afterschool clubs are magic. And you kept wanting to go to class. And I’m like, oh no, I’ll have to come up for something for you to do in your normal computer class.

Oren: I have to create content for English 101 over here.

Chris: Yeah. Eventually you figured it out that the action was in the outside of your regular daily classes, but that was a little bit of an uphill battle at first.

Oren: Well, that is the first thing to think about: are you writing a dark Magic School story? Because that is pretty specific. A dark Magic School story does have a lot of requirements because magic schools in themselves are a very tricky genre to write.

Chris: But I do think that if we are willing to make the school dark, we have made it easier.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Because the trickiest problem with magic schools is you have to ask the question: why are loving parents sending their young kids to such a dangerous place? Because if it’s not dangerous, then there’s no story to be had there. And you have to figure out, okay, well if it’s safe, how do I get excitement into this tale? And one option is just, well, no, the school’s totally evil. But that takes away from the wish fulfillment part of it, usually, but if we’re just going for creepy, that’s fine.

Oren: And also, because dark academia by default is assumed to be college, your characters are adults. So it’s much easier to create a motivation.

Chris: Yes.

Oren: Parents are not sending them to a dangerous school. They are going there of their own volition, and they can have their own reasons for doing that.

Chris: Right. And it could be risky, but they think the payoff is worth it and they are not in immediate danger as soon as they step at the door. It’s just a lot easier. I published a post recently talking about how to keep your characters in the danger zone.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And the thing about the stories I was talking about is if you have a haunted house story, for instance, there’s usually a point at which just being in the house is clearly an immediately life-threatening situation. And you have to figure out, okay, why don’t they leave the house at that point? But if we don’t have a serial killer sitting on the other side of the entrance who’s going to immediately “ax” you a question, then we have a lot more flexibility when it comes to why is the character there in this dangerous situation? And people at college age are fairly reckless anyway. Not haunted house reckless, but still somewhat reckless. And so being like, okay, well I’m going to be one of the people who makes it through this situation unscathed and then makes a million bucks. Yeah, that’ll do it.

Oren: And you also have a lot more flexibility when your setting is a college campus, because those are generally pretty sizable as opposed to a haunted house, which is a single structure and, short of some pretty intensive conceits you might add, not that hard to just leave. Whereas with a college campus, sure you could also leave the college campus, but you have a lot more room to build reasons why they don’t want to leave, why there’s something there that they need to do.

Chris: So it is like magic school, but easier.

Oren: Of course, you don’t necessarily have to go the full magic school route. I do think that you usually would want to incorporate the fact that this story is related to higher learning. Otherwise, why are you using that label? But you don’t necessarily have to be as straightforward as we go to class to learn magic. This could just be a normal college, but have some magic around the edges. Have some spookiness in specific electives or hidden in a certain textbook or something.

Chris: Yeah. Usually has to be involved somehow. Would you consider Magic For Liars to be possibly dark academia?.

Oren: To the extent that it’s a very flexible genre term, sure.

Chris: Magic for Liars is basically a noir, but it was a magic school.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: The non-magic main character is investigating a murder at a magic school.

Oren: I, personally, wouldn’t have called it dark academia because it’s high school. And I just associate that term with college. But as we’ve seen, people will label almost anything dark academia as long as it has someone wearing tweed, like Peranesi.

Chris: Like Peranesi. I guess he is studying the house? He is taking notes in his notebooks. There’s not really an institution, I guess we could call the house an institution. Maybe the house is his university and he’s a student.

Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s one of the biggest stretches I’ve ever seen as far as genre-categorizing goes. But Magic for Liars is an interesting example because it isn’t about going to class and learning magic, which is what typically takes up a lot of your time in a magic school story, but it is still about being a school, because it’s a murder investigation where the dynamics of high school are very important to solving it. Because we’re looking into who is this kid friends with? Or they may have been bullied. What’s the teacher relationship here? There’s a lot of that sort of thing.

Chris: The other one that we see a lot besides the school just teaching magic is they’re being a cult at the school. So, I don’t know if you consider The Order to be dark academia. This is an urban fantasy TV show, but there’s a secret society at the university that the main character joins called The Order of the Blue Rose. And they do magic, and they’re clearly supposed to be kind of menacing.

Oren: I mean, I would call that show pretty bad, but you know, if it was written as a book, sure someone would absolutely slap the dark academia logo on it. I would be kind of disappointed because it does take place at a college, but it could take place basically anywhere and very little of it would change. Probably the most college aspect of it is the fact that the werewolves are all written like frat bros. To a pretty extreme degree, right? Where they all make difficult decisions by playing rounds of beer pong. Otherwise, it’s just like, yeah, there’s a secret society and it happens to be on a college campus. The characters almost never go to class, and the classes they go to don’t matter, and there’s the fact that there is no interesting use of the academic organization. I keep coming back to Ninth House because I think it did a really cool job with this. We don’t really go to class much in Ninth House either, but the way the school functions is still important. The student societies play a really big role and the way that they operate and the way that they really don’t want to be regulated, and it’s the protagonist’s job to regulate them, that plays a very big role in the story and really makes the most of its setting as a college campus.

Chris: So, a book I know that was praised for its dark academia atmosphere is the indie queer romantasy Love Immortal. What that one does is it has a New England university and it has a special vault with like super rare books, and Dracula’s diary is in there but has been stolen, so it’s part of the plot. And then the main character’s internship is working at this rare book collection. And then he also attends a gothic literature class, so then we have discussions. It’s kind of like a love letter to gothic literature honestly, this book, which is one thing I enjoyed about it. So then being in that class gets you discussion of gothic literature, and then there’s a rare book collection, but the actual external plot is frat bros sacrificing people in order to make themselves vampires.

Oren: Like one does.

Chris: But at first people are disappearing and there’s a murderer about, so it manages to do enough with those different aspects and kind of weaving them together that people liked the atmosphere and felt that it was dark academia.

Oren: An interesting example was the Joe Hill novel, King Sorrow. So, some spoilers for that since this is a pretty recent book, which starts off having all the dark academia that I crave because the protagonist is at an elite liberal arts college on a scholarship, but he’s kind of precarious. He doesn’t come from money the way that all of his classmates do, and so he is kind of in a risky situation. And so then he ends up getting blackmailed to steal spooky rare books from the cool rare books collection he works in. Rare books are common theme in a lot of these, and I really liked that concept. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. Sadly, that’s only about the first fifth of the book, and the rest of it kind of goes off and does something else, but that was a really neat idea. I also thought it was very funny that he goes to a place called Rackham College, which is a real place, but the real one is in Michigan and this one is in Maine for some reason. It’s not exactly the same. The one in Michigan is a grad school, and this one seems like it’s both an undergrad and a grad school, but it’s odd that you picked that name for it. It feels like you could have done a Google search on that one.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like what dark academia maybe needs is more bureaucracy horror. And that’s something that I think a lot of writers just aren’t prepared to write.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because it’s complicated. But that also allows you to have creepy stuff, but like thoroughly grounded in academia as opposed to, gosh, I just don’t feel like I can do anything fun while hanging around at the university. Okay, well, let’s just put the plot over there then.

Oren: A number of these books that I’ve read that are tagged with that label start that way. Oh, we’re on a college campus and the protagonist finds a spooky book. All right, cool. Tell me more. It’s like, well, he immediately leaves the campus and we never go back. Oh, okay.

Chris: I would guess that the storytellers are just having trouble putting plots at the institution.

Oren: I also suspect that the storytellers probably never had this particular sub genre in mind when they were writing and their publisher was like, Hey, this, eh, there’s enough university in here. We can call this dark academia. That’s a hot genre right now. Or at least it was when these books were being published. Who knows if it’s still a hot genre?

Chris: Who knows. What also can happen with this kind of things is that sometimes publishers are like, Hey, look, this is really popular on BookTok, and then start labeling books with it. And if they don’t actually see sales bumps from that after a while, they might be like, okay, that doesn’t work, and they move on or something. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell just because something is being passed around or talked a lot about on social media that doesn’t necessarily translate to a lot of sales.

Oren: I have read a couple of books that did have the academic part down, but not the plot part, which is interesting. It’s usually the other way around.

Chris: So instead of starting in a university and being like, oh, look over there and going, running off to some other plot, they just stayed at the university and there’s no plot?

Oren: Yeah. So in this case it wasn’t technically a university. It’s technically a magic library, but close enough. And it’s called The Atlas Six, and these six mages get hired to work at a cool magic library. And it’s very cool. We love this library. It’s great. And then they’re told, oh, but at the end of your trial period, one of you must be sacrificed.

Chris: Oh, no.

Oren: This place is cool, but it’s not that cool. But then again, we twist it where it turns out that actually that just means one of you is going to be fired and doesn’t get to stay.

Chris: Really?

Oren: .Oh, well, why does that mean anything? What is even the point? You find out early enough that it just completely kills the plot. And so these characters are just hanging around at this library.

Chris: So is that like grimdark Librarians then? Anybody’s who’s not familiar, there’s a cute kind of campy show called The Librarians that was filmed in Portland. But that one actually has plots in it. But, of course, in this case by “librarian” they mean the keeper of a huge magic archive who also basically has magic.

Oren: Yeah. They don’t really do much book collecting in The Librarians.

Chris: They don’t do much library work. Unfortunately.

Oren: It’s almost all artifact hunting. It’s basically Warehouse 13, but instead of working for the government, they’re five randos. What made The Atlas Six interesting to me was that this was clearly an example of an author who was very passionate about books and about reading and about libraries, but just hadn’t quite been able to translate that into a compelling story. It’s not like it didn’t work for anybody. I found some reviews that really raved about it, but it was clear you had to be in exactly the same headspace as the author, or it’s just six characters hanging out at a library for 10 hours.

Chris: Yeah. It sounds like that really needed some stakes that were actually linked to doing academic research, et cetera.

Oren: Yeah. What it needed was more stakes and some urgency.

Chris: Solving a mystery in a library by doing book research, if you really want to get into like the books or looking through documents could be a thing. Definitely in a lot of mystery stories we go out and we fight danger. But if somebody knew enough about books and was passionate about it, I think they could make a compelling story with somebody examining documents and books in a library, especially if you have weird visitors come in so you get some interactions with people.

Oren:  And if your characters are already magic, they can have cool magic duels in between serious book reading sessions. That’s kind of what I expected The Atlas Six to be at first. I thought what the book was going to be was going to be these characters all maneuvering to get advantages over each other to make sure they’re not the one that gets sacrificed, which wouldn’t have been perfect, but would’ve at least provided them things to do and some tension. But they find out way too early that they don’t have to do any of that, and so they occasionally still flare their ruffs at each other, is the best way I can describe it. It doesn’t really matter.

Chris: I just love that.

Oren: It’s like, yeah, okay, sure.

Chris: They’re all in this dark library wearing regency costumes with ruffs and lacy frills.

Oren: They kind of come up to each other and try to out alpha nerd each other and, okay, look, this could be interesting if it mattered. If the outcome of this had any effect on anything, I could potentially care about it.

Chris: Yeah we could do library intrigue if we did have a really compelling competition between them. But, again, all of this stuff takes more thought and work to plot than your average plot and plotting is already pretty hard, so a lot of storytellers are just not going to feel up to doing something like that.

Oren: It’s also worth thinking about how evil do you want the institution to be? Assuming that an institution is actually going to play a big role in your story. And I would say that by default, you probably want to go with the idea of it being more like an amoral place where bad things happen sometimes, as opposed to like an active force for destruction. Because even though I wouldn’t say any of this glorifies college, there are still usually some things about it that people like, and most people writing this have been to college, and our memories of it are not usually wholly negative, but that can be kind of weird if you make the whole college evil and then at the end you’re like, no, wait, we have to save the college. Like, do you have to save the college?

Chris: That’s so funny.

Oren: With the book, An Academy For Liars—not to be confused with Magic for Liars, different book, also some spoilers—when we first go there that whole school is evil. It’s a school that teaches nothing but mind control, which is traumatic for both the person using it and their victim. So ,everyone is messed up. And just completely in it for themselves and love hurting other people. The students and the faculty are all like that. All right, well, I guess we’re going to have to end this story by the protagonist either turning evil and that’s going to be the big sad ending, or we’re going to have to burn the school to the ground. No, neither of those things happen. Instead, the big climax is about how we have to heroically save the school. Um, do you?

Chris: Did we find some reveal where they were secretly appeasing the elder gods or something? Is it a load-bearing school?

Oren: No. Instead, what happened is that out of nowhere, the student body turned good and helped the protagonist fight the evil professors, which was wild to me because the students were just as evil as the professors until that point. They did a hazing ritual where you have to mind control the other person into stabbing themself in the hand.

Chris: Because you could do something like Cabin in the Woods, where we have an evil organization that does sacrificial rituals.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And then we find out they’re doing it to appease the elder gods.

Oren: Right. And they have some reason for it.

Chris: Or we could just not do that and have everybody change their character. That’s another option.

Oren: That’s an ending where if you wanted an ending like that, you can definitely show that this college, to the extent that it is magic or not, has some good things and some bad things, much like real colleges do. It was just that this book went a little too far into the school is evil and irredeemable side of things.

Chris: Yep. That would be a problem. Doesn’t make for very good stakes anymore.

Oren: Another thing to consider is how much magic your character has. Because again, you know, this is speculative fiction and this is as much a problem in any darker or horror themed genre because the more magic your character has, the harder it is for it to be spooky.

Chris: Yeah, that is a problem.

Oren: Because if your character’s just a normal person, a ghost can be spooky. But if they’re a level 12 mage and they can cast teleport and see astral plane and all that stuff, well okay. A ghost is just another manifestation of magic that you know how to deal with.  In general, you want to limit how much magic they have just because otherwise the story’s not going to be very scary.

Chris: Yeah, certainly. I mean, if we want that spooky atmosphere, a human protagonist who does not have magic is very helpful so that magic can stay mysterious.

Oren: In Ninth House—this is going to be both praise and critique—I really liked that the protagonist’s power was that she could see ghosts, and we did a lot with that. She’s not a powerhouse. She doesn’t cast lightning bolts, but she can see ghosts and that does matter in some circumstances. And then eventually we reveal that she can also become super strong by absorbing ghost powers.

Chris: Wow.

Oren: And at that point I was like, why? Why did you give her that ability? It trivializes a lot of her problems.

Chris: That definitely takes away, because the more empowered the character is, the less scary things come off.

Oren: There are just so many issues that she has that as she’s trying to deal with, I’m like, you know, you could solve this by just hulking out? Right? Ghost style.

Chris: I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for characters that like power up during the course of the story, but I definitely like less powers end up being cooler in the long run. Just simpler, smaller powers that are used in creative ways.

Oren: Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and say that class is dismissed on this spooky episode of the podcast.

Chris: Well, since we know that Piranesi is definitely dark academia because the narrator is very intellectual and writes notes, and we’re very intellectual and our Patreon is just full of our notes. So, when you really think about it, is our Patreon, not dark academia?

Oren: Hashtag makes you think.

Chris: Yeah. So, if you want to read some of these dark and mysterious notes, you can sign up at patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: 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’ll talk to you next week.

Your novel (a book over 50,000 words) needs a premise that is novel (new, fresh, exciting). Also, words are hard! But how are you supposed to find a novel premise when so many other writers have already put their own ideas out there? Are you doomed to keep repeating what has come before? Fortunately, no! The answer isn’t as simple as adding a wizard, but adding a wizard probably wouldn’t hurt.

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 [opening theme]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: It is getting harder and harder to find unique podcast topics, because we’re nearing 600 episodes and we’ve done everything. Usually we’ve done things twice, I swear.

Oren: Yeah. We have a lot of episodes that are X topic again, because it’s been six years. 

Chris: What if we just do an episode about putting googly eyes on your computer mouse, and using that as a substitute for human companionship? That would be unique. That would be original. Can we just do that?

Oren: Would it be novel or would it be bizarre? Hmm

Chris: Hmm. This time we’re talking about finding a novel premise. Sometimes words intersect in weird ways, so we don’t mean novel as in a long story that’s 40,000 words or more. We mean novel as in fresh and interesting, and feeling relatively new, so that it still has entertainment value.

Oren: You do need one of those for your novel, usually though.

Chris: Yep. Yep.

Oren: Just to be clear, those two words are used a lot together and it’s horrible. We don’t like that.

Chris: It’s a lot clearer when we talk about novelty if it’s not an adjective, if it’s in a noun form, which we’ve talked about a lot before. But just in case anybody’s new and hasn’t heard us for five years or something, basically novelty entertains people, part of what we refer to as ANTS, which are four engagement factors that almost all stories try to cultivate at some level. Some will use some more than others, but whereas there can be other ways that engage audiences that are pretty unique to specific types of novels, these ones are usually found everywhere, and novelty is one of them. It just means that it’s different in a way that’s entertaining, and that’s why we like to use it. It also is really useful because it gets people excited pretty quickly before they read, which means it is particularly handy for marketing.

Oren: Often a high novelty concept is what people will use to sell the book, like vampires, but instead of drinking blood, they drink knowledge from books. Wooh. That’s cool. Right? That’s neat. Right?

Chris: That’s what they refer to as a quote unquote high concept. And so that’s very useful, and you can do it without a premise. It’s easier to make your novel novel – it’s easier to make your book novel if you start with your big picture choices. It’s easier to do anything if you start with your big picture choices and plan it from the beginning, surprise, surprise.

Oren: Whoa. So shocking.

Chris: So shocking. So you can do it a smaller scale way, but it’s a lot harder, like how witty are you? Because a lot of books that have a lot of novelty, that’s not obvious from just the premise or concept of the novel, is because they write really entertaining narration, for instance.

Oren: Or they have funny characters or unusual characters. There can be novelty bonuses from those things too.

Chris: Yeah, so it’s not that you can’t add novelty without thinking of a novel premise. It’s just certainly an easier way to see that it’s taken care of and that your story stands out a little bit and can attract readers.

Oren: I noticed something interesting as I was looking at some of the work I’ve done as an editor, which is that this is an aspect of storytelling I don’t have that much experience with, and the reason is that by the time someone gets to me with their manuscript, they’ve already picked a premise. Usually what I’m trying to do is help them fulfill that premise to the best extent that it can be. It’s very rare that I’m telling someone to completely change premises. The premise has to be, in most cases, deeply flawed for that to be a thing. And in that situation, I’m usually trying to help them create a premise that isn’t just completely broken. The one time I can remember recommending a more novel premise was with a client who had a somewhat anonymized story where it was a fantasy world, but everything was weirdly modern in a way that did not fit. It wasn’t just an urban fantasy setting. It was a second world high fantasy, but the world was strangely modern. And so I had recommended making it into more of like a crystal-punk setting since magic crystals were already a big part of the plot and clearly interested the author. So that’s the closest I can think of to helping an author find a more novel premise. Because usually they’ve already picked that by the time they hire me.

Chris: I did work with an an author who wanted to find more ways to distinguish her setting. I remember that happening. In many cases, when people come to us, of course, they already know what they want to do. And so we may be helping them iron out things in their setting that are kind of working against each other, which does help novelty, because you want a unified impression. We’ve talked about with world theming, if your world feels like a random assortment of stuff that has nothing to do with each other, that does take away from the novelty. We kind of help people straighten that out. We’ve had a few instances… also in your own stories. I know this is something that you’ve worked on.

Oren: Well, that was interesting, because in my book that’s actually published, that premise is not very novel. I was doing a lot of research on the Byzantine Empire and playing a lot of Crusader Kings. So that’s where that concept came from. And it doesn’t have a magic system, which probably is its biggest drawback to fantasy fans, but I decided that was worth it because any magic system I could have come up with would’ve just been kind of tacked on and I think would not have really been good. But I can tell people read it and they’re like, oh, it’s very tense, and I kind of like the characters, but the world’s a little uninteresting. And it’s like, yeah, I get it. I get it. It’s just a medieval-ish setting. There’s no wizards or stuff. I’ve been trying to work on that more with my short stories, I sometimes have more luck, because with a short story, you could have a much more idea focused narrative, like a familiar who has to fight the physical manifestation of her witch’s depression. That’s cool. That isn’t something you see very often. I’m sure it’s not never seen, but it’s not normal. And that would be hard to make a novel out of, but a short story – heck yeah. Get in there.

Chris: The thing about novelty is that it creates lots of excitement, but it does tend to fade somewhat quickly, and so short stories can actually rely on it a lot more. This is where we see those little meme stories that get spread around social media. Those things are always very novelty focused because it has to generate attention and excitement very quickly so that somebody actually reads it and then quickly shares it, and then if they lose interest in it after that, it doesn’t matter. Whereas in a novel, usually what happens is it draws people in, it gets them entertained while the plot is booting up, which is very valuable. But then as the novel progresses, it usually starts to take a backseat to things that take a lot higher investment.

Oren: And that’s one of the key things here, is that premises that are novel often do it by being very strange in such a way that it would be difficult to support a long story using that premise. Part of the reason is that if that premise could support a long novel, we would see more people using it.

Chris: That is definitely the biggest issue, or one of the biggest issues right now is we have a very crowded field with mass media. You see stories from so many different people in so many different places, and it becomes difficult to find something that will set your novel apart. You know, there are different levels, right? It’s not an all or nothing thing. In this case we’re talking about a story in a Byzantine setting and, you know, that one is a little niche. It’s not that there aren’t people who are fascinated by Byzantine history. Of course, we discussed that and you told me that wouldn’t work because anybody who loves Byzantine history that much will wanna see characters get blinded.

Oren: No, absolutely. This book is not for huge Byzantine history nerds. They’ll read it and be like, what is this? This is not what the Byzantines did. Yeah. It’s not. Because I didn’t wanna write that. I was inspired by Byzantine history, but I did not want to write that level of brutality, and to a certain extent impenetrability. There’s a reason why we use the word Byzantine to mean complicated and confusing. That was just not within my capacity to write. So no, it’s not really for big Byzantine history fans either, which is my own fault.

Chris: Yeah. But sometimes just having something that is interesting to some people is a benefit. And even genres that are a little bit tired right now might still have a few fans. The one that that I think everybody thinks is overplayed right now is a lot of superheroes and Marvel stuff, because so many Marvel stories have come out that people have been oversaturated. When something has been a big trend and now it’s on the receding end of the wave, that’s a really bad time, unfortunately, to have your story be about those things.

Oren: Although it’s also kind of irrelevant to authors in this particular case because superhero novels have just never really been a thing. They exist, you find occasional superhero novels, but they’re very rare and most of them aren’t very good. And very few of them attain any success, and I think there are some reasons for that.

Chris: Yeah, I think we’ve discussed that before a little bit.

Oren: And this was true before Marvel, it was true during the height of Marvel, and it’s true now. But in terms of books, those same trends happen. For a while you couldn’t go anywhere without hitting YA dystopia. Then people got tired of that. Right now it’s romantasy. People will eventually get tired of that. Things will continue.

Chris: Fairytale stories… I had a fairytale novella that hit the wrong place in the wave. And I was not thinking about trying to write to trend at all. It’s just that’s how it worked out. And it also just, you know, I don’t think it had enough of a concept that distinguished it, that set it apart. Whereas usually when you see like a fairy tale story, it’s all, oh, from this character’s perspective, or we’re gonna twist it in this way, or what if Cinderella died?

Oren: Well, it was also based on the Snow Queen, right? Which is a cool fairy tale, but not one very many people are familiar with, like how most people know about Frozen.

Chris: Probably still more popular than the Goose Girl though.

Oren: Well, I mean that’s the trick with Kingfisher’s Goose Girl retelling is that it’s not a Goose Girl retelling.

Chris: Not a Goose Girl. And the only way they can get away with saying that is because nobody has read the Goose Girl.

Oren: I have no idea why it’s marketed as a Goose Girl retelling. Is there someone in the publisher’s marketing department who’s like, yeah, Goose Girl, there’s a big market for Goose Girl retellings out there? Because I don’t think there is. Nor is that an accurate description of it. So why? Someone tell me.

Chris: But any case, generally, you know, your subgenre often determines are, is your audience interested in, and you’re trying to do for a little bit broader audience than something that’s super niche. But then you also wanna do it in your own way, right? Which is kind of where you get to the real novelty of your book. Should we talk more about what is the difference between something that’s novel and something that’s bizarre? Because the most obvious thing about novelty is that you do want it to be different. But again, when something hasn’t been covered yet, there is often a reason why it hasn’t been covered yet, and not everything that’s different will really be novel. It has to make sense to a certain degree, have a little bit of plausibility or a little bit of realism. If it feels completely off the wall, it’s more likely to be interpreted as absurdist. An example I could come up with is a world where the letter H is paramount or something, and everything is shaped like an H. It’s too off the wall. And some people like absurdist stories, but I think they’re not really novel for most people. As far as I can tell

Oren: There are always gonna be books that are kind of toeing the line, by which I mean pushing boundaries. And some people will see them as like, oh, that’s cool and neat. Other people will be like, that sounds kind of silly.

Chris: That’s too weird for me.

Oren: Right. I saw one recently that was a space opera retelling of Dracula, specifically the part of Dracula where Dracula is on a boat. And in this case it’s a spaceship, and the spaceship is alive, and there’s an evil vampire that has killed its crew and passengers, and it teams up with a bunch of other mythological creatures to go hunt Dracula. And I read that and I was like, eh, no, I don’t think so. That’s a little too weird for me. But from what I can tell, other people seem to have liked it. So that’s a question. It’s gonna depend on personal taste sometimes.

Chris: I do think that once you get into that area, it can also sometimes start to be humorous, even if that’s not what you intended. I guess don’t really like that. I could imagine reading something like that, but not taking it very seriously. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That feels like there is a lack of theming. Right. When we talked about when you have different, clashing things together, right. And it’s like, okay, maybe I could laugh at this team up, but it doesn’t feel like a world that feels real anymore.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Now, granted, I have seen some surprisingly good integration. So the book Bleeding Mars has got vampires in space. It actually does a really good job of blending those two things together. The world feels really colorful and the vampires are the upper classes, right, who have come up with like, rigorous technology to keep themselves live forever. It’s got heavy themes of classism happening in there, but it’s also very colorful and it just works, because it’s been thoroughly thought through, and those different elements that normally feel like they’re clashing have been thoroughly integrated together. And that’s great. That does get harder the more random things you put in there.

Oren: If you’re willing to put in the work, you could probably mesh vampires and aliens. I think you could probably do it and it could be interesting. But if you were then like, also, my setting needs to have unicorns. It’s like, hmm, okay, now that’s a third thing that’s not really related to either of the other two thematically, and that’s gonna make it even harder.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Or the unicorns aren’t really unicorns anymore.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Possibly things have been changed so much that they no longer resemble the original trope.

Oren: It’s always funny when someone will be like, this is my long lived, pointy-eared, beautiful humanoids, and I call them the lendarians, and it’s like, that’s an elf.

Chris: Why? Just call it an elf.

Oren: I know what an elf is. Versus, this is my made of rock, sort of shambling creature that eats dirt and has a five minute lifespan… that’s an elf. No, no it’s not. Why are you calling it that? Don’t call it an elf. Which way, modern author?

Chris: We don’t see that latter one as often, but we do see it sometimes. Another book that for me has lots of novelty, but I get the feeling for other people is a little weird, is Piranesi. Piranesi takes place in a kind of giant, world sized mansion that’s open to the sky and completely filled with statues and water.

Oren: See, we’re getting into Southern Reach territory here, because I thought it was a labyrinth. I know the main character refers to it as a house, but in my head –

Chris: He refers to different areas as different wings of the house.

Oren: He does say that, but in my head, it’s never not going to be the labyrinth. That’s what it looks like to me.

Chris: Well, what we have is presented as some kind of built structure with different hallways and rooms, and it is constantly filled everywhere with all of these statues of everything imaginable. And it is open to the sky and has water in various places, in lots of the places, and tides. I think that’s real cool and neat, but I can see how somebody else would be like, okay, but that’s a little random. And I don’t know, maybe if there were more context, if this was a place in a world and we saw, oh, this is the labyrinth that this god built, or something that gave it context, maybe it would feel a little bit less on the weird side. But I was still good with it. I liked it, thought it was cool. I can see why somebody else, because it’s just a little bit out of the blue and a little bit wait, why and how –

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: – did this happen?

Oren: Although we were hardly alone. Piranesi was quite popular and successful. I get it’s not gonna appeal to everyone.

Chris: I think it’s novel for most people, but I think it’s bizarre for a few. Basically an easier route that definitely avoids getting into bizarre territory and creates lots of novelty, but may have a limited shelf life, is putting two very different things together and contrasting them. This is the whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies thing, and it’s just easy to take an initial concept and say, okay, what haven’t people done yet? This is very similar to when we were talking about putting new twists on classic genres. What if Little Red Riding Hood, but she’s a villain hunting the innocent wolf. Right. Which actually reminds me of a Red Riding Hood story that you had, Oren.

Oren: Yeah, that one was all right.

Chris: But no, this is, there is something interesting about this. So Oren had a story that was based on Red Riding Hood, where Red Riding Hood was a werewolf hunter. Not a big stretch if you wanna take her in a badass direction, have some action in there. But an interesting thing that we found in beta reading was that some of the readers started the story without knowing it was about Red Riding Hood, and then at some point caught on.

Oren: It was like, oh, okay, so the girl in the woods with wolves named Red? Okay, I get it now.

Chris: And it clearly added entertainment value for them. And that’s one of the ways we kind of started to think about novelty. Because then we learned, oh. We should actually put this in the title because this improves the experience. Not that it wasn’t fun to have readers catch on at some point, but you do need to market your story in some way. Usually. part of a collection, Maybe you can get away with not doing that, but usually

Oren: I probably should have just advertised it as a goose girl retelling. [Chris laughs]

Chris: But yeah, reversing the hero and the villain, telling it from the perspective of a new character, switching genres. You could do sci-fi Dracula, that would be fine. Probably less weird than the Dracula and a living ship and then all these other – 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But you could absolutely do a sci-fi Dracula if you wanted to.

Oren: Dracula is a very enduring aspect of storytelling. Dracula has stood the test of time. A lot of the classics have. It’s a lot more risky if you’re gonna be like, I want to do a romantasy version of the novel The Way of Kings. Those are two fairly recent things, we don’t know how much longer this romantasy wave is gonna last, how long are people gonna be talking about The Way of Kings? Now, of course, you’d also run into copyright issues, if you could somehow get past those. 

Chris: I don’t know, people have been copying The Name of the Wind and getting away with it. 

Oren: Yeah, so maybe it’s fine.

Chris: You just don’t call it The Way of Kings and then you can copy the plot and the prose style apparently, and it’s fine.

Oren: Alternatively, just do romantasy version of The Name of the Wind since we know this has been successful twice. [laughter]

Chris: It seems like a good way to go that might help Name of the Wind, because that story needs some more plot. And if you added romantic, so this is, this giving something a twist is also what Blake Snyder refers to as “same but different,” although that’s kind of in a Hollywood context where we want to follow a formula.

Oren: I mean, “same but different” is the most reasonable title that Blake Snyder has ever come up with.

Chris: It is. It’s ’cause it’s not buzzy.

Oren: It’s like, come on, Blake. That just means what it says. You can’t call it “same but different.” You gotta call it “blimp, but plane,” like what does that mean? And then open the section with a five minute anecdote about how one time you saw a blimp and thought it would be more familiar if it was a plane.

Chris: I have to say the “same but different” makes me think of, oh, we’re doing yet another crime serial. Now let’s just give the detective a new, weird profession. Uh, they’re a circus acrobat now, and they use their acrobatic silks to solve crimes somehow.

Oren: Look, I got nothing against crime serials. I have seen a number of crime serials do this in ways that I thought worked really well, and others that I did not think worked particularly well. I watched Lucifer a while back, and we both tried, and –

Chris: I mean, that show is honestly really bad, for reasons that are pretty unrelated to the fact that it’s a crime serial.

Oren: I actually think it is related.

Chris: Oh, you do?

Oren: I do, because he’s Lucifer. Why does he solve crimes? What does that have to do with being Lucifer? Nothing, whereas if it’s like, Harry Dresden, he’s a wizard who solves crimes, and it’s like, okay, he’s got magic you can use to find things. That’s a common wizard concept, but Lucifer is just too specific. And it shows in the TV show, he is like, why are you here, Lucifer? What is the purpose of your presence?

Chris: Okay, so admittedly I was thinking about the misogyny of the show.

Oren: I mean, yeah, it is also very misogynist, but when has that ever stopped a show?

Chris: Well, it’s why I stopped watching it. Some of the stuff does get that dated. I think that show was really too recent to be doing the stuff it was doing.

Oren: When I watched it, I was like, wait, this is from 2016.

Chris: What?

Oren: I know that was a whole decade ago, but really, I would’ve guessed this was an early aughts show with the way that it’s written.

Chris: Yep, not great. So yeah, that’s kind of the easiest way to do novelty. But there are other ways. Make your main character an unusual creature; if your main character is someone who’s really novel, that really helps, and spreads things over the whole book and choose, you know, an unusual environment or setting works, subversions of any kind, of course. Subversions are kind of twisting something that exists. Come up with something that you’ve seen before, and then what is your own spin and your own take on it. And then the last thing to really think about here is, of course, that you need to make use of your premise. It is definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing. It needs to actually matter to the story. Like with Lucifer, we’re trying to make Lucifer solve crimes in a crime serial and God, one of the things I initially did not like about the show is he just did not feel like Lucifer.

Oren: Yeah. He just seems like a guy.

Chris: He’s just some guy, but you know, you need to actually have the plot related to whatever the novelty is. If it doesn’t matter, it’s just not gonna provide the same level of entertainment. It’s gotta be part of the story.

Oren: If you were gonna have Lucifer solve crimes, you would think that they would be, I don’t know, religious in some way, like him being Lucifer would matter to the kind of crimes he’s solving. And I mean, in Dresden Files, he is solving magical crimes. He’s not going around as a wizard just solving insurance scams. That’s one of the things about it that’s so strange, is it’s like, yeah, I guess Lucifer could solve this normal blackmailing case. I suppose. I don’t know, maybe he could investigate a stolen holy relic or something.

Chris: And then you need to go into some detail. The novelty really comes to life when you actually delve into detail about whatever it is that is fresh and unique. Show people how it works, how it runs. For instance, the movie Warm Bodies, which, it was part of the zombie craze, but it was very different at the time because the main character was actually a zombie and has a romance. It opens by going into his life as a zombie from his perspective, and it’s funny, demonstrates why he needs love, that kind of thing. If you have an unusual environment, give some people details about the environment. If [you have] a strange character, tell people what their life is like, and how it is slightly different because they’re a zombie or whatever they are. Just make sure that you actually bring it to life, and that’ll be easier if you like it and you’re not just playing it to be a crowd pleaser.

Oren: If you have some passion, that’ll show through, as opposed to just, [robotic voice] I have been contractually obligated to include this Pride and Prejudice sequence. [Chris laughs] I mean, that is kind of how Pride and Prejudice and Zombies felt. It doesn’t really feel like they put in very much effort to make the dialogue that they weren’t just taking directly from Pride and Prejudice sound like it came from Pride and Prejudice.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: You could tell; the dialogue would audibly change gears when they were quoting Pride and Prejudice dialogue. It just doesn’t sound the same. And I was a little disappointed by that. I was hoping that more of the characters would talk like they were from Pride and Prejudice.

Chris: You also have to decide, okay, how are you gonna manage humor? Because in many cases, when you have a really high novelty premise, especially if you’ve got two contrasting things, it does tend to slant towards humor. It doesn’t necessarily have to be humorous. One of the things that really surprised me about Pride and Prejudice Zombies is how seriously it took itself. I expected that to be a really funny slapstick movie, and it’s not. That really upped the bar for how it had to integrate the zombies and the original Pride and Prejudice characters and all of those other things, and it didn’t really meet that bar. You do have to kind of sometimes work harder if you don’t want something to come off as silly.

Oren: All right. Well with that, I think we will take the fresh twist of calling this episode to a close. We’ve never done that before actually.

Chris: Asking you to support us on Patreon is not very novel. Everyone’s doing it. [evil voice] But what if I asked you to support us with an evil voice? Wa ha ha ha ha. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. It’s all part of my evil plan.

Oren: Well, I’m sold. 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.

Is there anything more terrifying than an argument about canon? Maybe an argument about having several cannons pointed at you. But a messy fight over continuity is the more likely scenario for most of us. This week, it’s time for a discussion on whether canon matters. Yes. Maybe. But also no. Did you really think that was gonna have a firm answer?

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Chris, did you know that we’ve never recorded any episodes that were longer than half an hour?

Chris: Geez. You know, I thought I remembered that, but I think that just never happened. I think somebody told me that that wasn’t real and I just accepted it.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s always been that way. And we’ve never had any other hosts but the two of us.

Chris: No, not at all.

Oren: One day we’ll have, you know, someone named Bunny to co-host and we will never have met her before.

Chris: Nope. Nope. Never happened.

Oren: Yeah. It’s our canon and we can do what we want with it. We’re talking about how much does canon matter, and this isn’t only because there’s a new Star Trek show out, although it’s not not because there’s a new Star Trek show out.

Chris: Did that Star Trek show actually do anything to change canon?

Oren: No, not really.

Chris: I mean, it takes place in like the far future when there is very little canon.

Oren: And anything that does appear to have changed is like, well, it’s been 800 years. Honestly, the weird part is how much is still the same. I was kind of winding up some trolls the other day about—because you know, people love to accuse new Trek of ruining canon in vague nonsense ways.

And I was just kind of winding them up a little bit and saying, Hey, go back to 1226 and just see how much has changed since then. The world is just a very different place in 800 years. But you know, people will still accuse it of breaking canon because canon violations are kind of like what corruption is in politics, where there’s usually some of it around somewhere if you go looking, and so it provides a very convenient cover for whatever unsavory thing you want to do, is that you can just say, well, I’m going after corruption, and like, are you? Maybe. Like, who knows? And so it’s the same thing with people who are like, that breaks canon. It’s like, okay, does it, and if it does, is that really why you’re mad about it?

Are you sure it’s not just that this character is played by a Black woman who’s loud and in your face and you don’t like that?

Chris: Yep. That definitely happens. And also, I mean, some people know better than to say, I don’t like this character because she’s played by a Black woman.

Oren: Yeah. They like to do little stealth bad faith arguments. And this is the thing that’s weird, is that so many people are attacking [Star Trek: Starfleet] Academy over its supposed canon violations when it’s trivially easy to show that that’s not the case. And you wonder, okay, if they’re being sinister already, why not just say something that’s harder to disprove? Like, well, I just, that character’s not well written, or the acting’s bad, which would also not be true, but is harder to demonstrate that it’s false.

And I think the reason is that even regressive Trekkies are still weird nerds, and we like to be able to concretely prove something and there’s this idea that like, well, I could concretely say that this is a canon violation, therefore the show’s bad, even when it’s not true.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I do think that’s like citing facts, even if they’re fake facts, right? Because if we were to say, that character is written badly or the acting is bad, that’s clearly a subjective opinion, right? Whereas if you can claim that it’s [that] the canon is wrong, then that sounds more factual. And also, do you think that some of these nerds talk about canon as a way to kinda like brag or like, Hey, look what a nerd I am. Here’s my nerd credentials.

Oren: Oh yeah, absolutely. They a hundred percent do that.

Chris: This is like the weird fandom gatekeeping thing where like, see, I’m a better fan ’cause I know more than you or something.

Oren: Yeah. I mean it’s especially funny when they do it and they don’t even know that much. Like one guy I was arguing with was being like, oh, this new Jem’Hadar character doesn’t make sense ’cause the Jem’Hadar didn’t evolve to be that way. It’s like, you think the Jem’Hadar evolved to be like anything? All right, I guess someone hasn’t seen Deep Space Nine. I mean, I’m vulnerable to it too, right? Like I was just doing it, I was like, ha, I actually know more about canon than you do. Therefore, I’m a better nerd. So like, I get it. I understand. I just try to use that impulse for good.

Chris: Yeah. It’s funny though, because canon, with these big franchises, is ultimately such a kind of arbitrary line.

Oren: Right. And when you’re talking about a big franchise, there’s almost a hundred percent guarantee going to be some kind of continuity problems, right? It’s almost impossible for them not to be.

Chris: But I do have the answer to whether canon matters. I can just answer the question of this episode.

Oren: Oh, good. Do it.

Chris: When I don’t like the canon, it doesn’t matter at all. And when I do like the canon, it’s everything and it matters a lot.

Oren: Absolutely. That makes sense. Okay. We can call it, wow. Most efficient episode ever.

Chris: Yep.

Oren: And the good news is that this is not as big a problem for most of our audience because we’re typically writing novels and not big giant TV show franchises.

Chris: It will be a problem if you become George R.R. Martin.

Oren: Or if you’re Terry Pratchett or you’re just really prolific, it can become an issue. But most of us are probably not gonna write and publish enough books for it to come up.

Chris: And Sanderson says that all of his books are actually in the same universe.

Oren: Yeah, sure, Brando.

Chris: If he actually makes good on that, he may run into some canon issues, or maybe he won’t, just because it’s like, well, I guess that’s happening in another of the multiverse or planet over there, and so the stories don’t actually interact with each other in any way.

Oren: I’ve been told that he actually has started having them interact, which maybe, right, like I haven’t read far enough into any Brandon Sanderson series to know if that’s true or not.

Chris: The question is, does he pay for a secretary to track all of his canon for him?

Oren: Well, we already know that Brando is obsessively tracking his magic system on a spreadsheet, right? So I could buy that he also—

Chris: From what I understand, he also employs, like, his entire family because he’s got this whole thing going. So he might, he might have an employee who does nothing but keep track of what his canon is. Because, man, that would be so hard.

Oren: I mean, when you’re Brandon Sanderson and you’re that level of prolific, that could make sense, right? Like, that could be a good business expenditure. But mostly this comes up in big TV and movie franchises, right?

Because they not only tend to have more content, but they also tend to have big teams of people working on them. So that’s when it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have a fully consistent continuity, right. Especially when you’re dealing with something like Star Trek where the original, they just didn’t care.

They had absolutely no thoughts to give about whether or not one episode lined up with another episode. They were just not doing that.

Chris: Oof. Yeah. That would become abrasive pretty quickly.

Oren: Yeah. The episodes contradict each other left, right, and sideways.

Chris: Can I share one funny thing from an interview The Hollywood Reporter, I believe did with George R.R. Martin recently.

Oren: Oh, please.

Chris: Because he still feels like he’s gonna finish or he’s still trying. He says he’s still trying to finish his series. And the funny thing about it though, is he’s planning on giving it a different ending than the Game of Thrones show, which of course had a very unpopular ending, and he gave them his notes.

So not clear whether he was like, oops, that’s not popular, and then decided to make changes or not. Or he only gave them a broad picture, right? And so for whatever reason, like, there are characters who are dead in one and not dead in the other. And I think one of the biggest reasons he has not finished his series is because he’s trying to give creative input on a dozen different things that are part of this universe.

Oren: Yeah. He’s got a new show now.

Chris: Right. And so to deal with the canon differences between the end of the novel, end of the show, they were thinking about doing a Jon Snow sequel spinoff because Jon Snow was up by himself in the north, away from the other characters.

So it won’t call attention to canon differences in whether those other characters in the south are dead or alive, which, okay, do what you gotta do, I guess. But then apparently the actor really wanted to do a really sad, depressing story where Jon Snow, you know, drives his wolf away and loses his sword and is just like building huts.

And HBO was like, yeah, so don’t really think this is what we want.

Oren: HBO made the right call there.

Chris: They really made the right call. Yeah, because I mean, the fans who super love Jon Snow, love him as like an empowerment character they identify with. That would not go over well.

Oren: I mean, and maybe this is just the mood right now. Maybe in 20 years this won’t be a big deal, but I, at this point, if I never see another sequel where the character is all beaten down and sad, it will be too soon.

Chris: I feel you so much there. I mean, Picard, oh, can we make Picard not canon, please.

Oren: I mean, Picard is also bad, right. But even the ones that are good at this point, I have seen so many of them and I’m just, I’m tired of it. Please, something else, like, I liked Logan, right? Logan’s a good movie, but I just, I don’t want another one of those.

Chris: Yeah, it’s true. I will complain less if it’s good, but it’s just like, Hey, we had a good feeling and from the happy ending of the last story, why did we have to suddenly make it sad? And you retroactively take away that character’s victory. That’s…

Oren: Actually, everything’s terrible and you’re depressed. I was like, all right, sure.

Chris: So I really do resent when a franchise insists that unpopular and bad material is canon and stick to them, and I get that there’s subjectivity here. For instance, Star Wars with some of the prequels or sequels or, it’s like the idea, all this stuff with Data that happens in the TNG [The Next Generation] movies and then in Picard, it’s like, do we really have to do this? Like this is just a horrible fate for Data.

Oren: Well, okay, here’s the thing. There are instances where you, as the new person brought into helm, a big franchise, have a bunch of constraints created by the last people who helmed the franchise. And if you’re JJ Abrams, sometimes those last people was also you, which is very funny.

But that does happen. But in a lot of these cases, that’s not really what’s going on. Like in Picard. Yeah. Okay. So Data dies in Nemesis. Terrible movie, but nothing in Nemesis required them to do what they did with Data in Picard. That was all them. Nemesis even ends with the implication that actually Data has been brought back to life in his weird clone brother they found. It leaves them that door and they decided not to go with it and instead to go with the idea that Data has been trapped in a box for 20 years, which, there’s nothing in Nemesis that even hints at that. They just made that up.

Chris: It’s like, now that it happened and it’s horrible, I just want it to be not canon and to just forget that ever happened, right. And so then the franchise is like, no, that’s totally canon. Picard is all canon. Then now, there might be references to that or I just, I want it to not be true, basically.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it. Picard was awful and it made me feel bad watching it. And I don’t want that to be—but then of course season three of Picard happens where they try to undo all of that and it’s just as bad.

Chris: I just wanna take an eraser and just be like, this show never happened.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I think in general you have to decide what are you going to reference and what are you not going to reference. Like, it’s weird to me how much of the prequels modern Star Wars seems to be interested in channeling.

George made a mess in the prequels, right. I understand that much. But I’m not sure we had to continue with the idea of the Jedi as child kidnappers. Like, yeah, that is what George said, but I think if we just didn’t talk about that, no one is gonna be wondering, Hey, what about all those children the Jedi kidnapped?

That’s a very strange choice. Especially since they’re not gonna end up by being like, actually the Jedi are terrible. They can’t do that. They still need you to buy Jedi toys.

Chris: Yeah. This is just like, the only solution to the droid slavery problem is to just quietly forget the droids are slaves and never speak of it again. Just quietly make them actual people with rights and just forget all that.

Oren: Yeah, and then of course we should also consider that sometimes canon’s bad and you should just ignore it. The one that always comes to mind for me is there’s a lot of bad Star Trek canon because there are a billion Star Trek episodes and some of them were just bad ideas and it would be weird if you were constraining the franchise with that, like, I don’t think you need to pay attention to the part where they establish women can’t be captains, or the part where they establish that going to warp destroys space. Those are both bad ideas. They should not have been included and we should just ignore them.

Chris: They were remarkably consistent with that warp speed global warming thing, or were they?

Oren: No, they abandoned it after two episodes.

Chris: Really?

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Maybe I was just surprised they remembered it for two episodes.

Oren: Yeah, no, they have like two episodes where they—there’s like one episode where they mention we’ve been given permission to break the warp speed limit, even though that will cause space global warming. And then I think there’s some line, I don’t remember if this is actually in an episode or if it’s in a technical manual somewhere, but there’s a line about how Voyager’s new engines don’t do space global warming. So we fixed it. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: Oh, okay.

Oren: And it’s like, yeah, that was the right choice, because this is a show about exploring things at warp speed. Doing that probably shouldn’t destroy the universe.

Chris: See, it would be better if they talked about how there was now a cap and trade program where they could trade in their licenses to go faster than, you know, warp five.

Oren: No, I don’t like this. This is a bad idea. I hate this.

Chris: Hey, just, you know, be an example of what we need in the world if we’re going there anyway.

Oren: And of course, the place where it gets the most messy is when you’re dealing with franchises that are multimedia franchises. And there’s like, there’s no way to win there.

Like you’ve got—hey, this show has a bunch of tie-in novels. Like, okay, are we expecting the people who watch the show to have read the novels? Because most of them won’t.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, there are some—it’s not impossible to keep those things as canon and work around them and have references that aren’t too noticeable.

I think the problem is that if the novels are about anything important, right, which is what will sell them, then they will put constraints on the movies, which having a much bigger budget, the storyteller of the movie isn’t—you know, director or whoever is not gonna want to have those constraints because that makes it harder for them to tell a good story.

I mean, if all the novels were like, Hey, this is Jon Snow up north, right, then maybe we could avoid that problem.

Oren: Hey, this novel is about when Data went to a violin tournament. It’s like, okay, yeah, that probably fits. That was what was so annoying about the start of the Abrams movies, was there was this weird marketing push, if I remember correctly, where these comics were supposed to be totally canon.

Like everything that happened in these comics, it’s like it happened in the movie, which admittedly, I guess is sort of true because the movies also don’t make sense with each other. So I guess it’s kind of true.

Chris: Mm. Sounds like false advertising to me.

Oren: I mean it absolutely was, right. And that’s always how it’s been.

That’s why, you know, people got upset when Disney was like, the extended universe Star Wars novels aren’t canon and like, they never were, guys. No matter who owned the rights, if they ever made more Star Wars movies, they were never going to continue the Star Wars universe from where the novels were, that was just not going to happen.

Chris: I mean, I do think the fun of having a vast canon is, of course, when you have something like Lower Decks come and it has tons of references, right? It is definitely fun and very immersive to see them do the references and get them right. But yeah. What is the thing, if you were to take one thing and make it not canon anymore, what would you choose?

Oren: I mean, pfft, you can be really mean with this one, right? It’s like, that movie that other people like, and I don’t, I would get rid of it.

Chris: Enterprise, Star Trek Enterprise.

Oren: I’m not really interested in telling people that I would excise whatever their favorite is. As far as from Star Wars, I would take out the thing about the Jedi being child kidnappers. George obviously didn’t think that through, did not consider the implications and now we have this weird elephant in the room whenever we talk about the Jedi, that no one is willing to really acknowledge. What about you?

Chris: If I had to choose one thing, I could just choose Jar Jar Binks. Just like, the whole character is now non-canon.

Oren: I mean, he definitely doesn’t, you know, have a big impact, right. So it’s not like taking him out is gonna change much.

Chris: Granted, he does appear later and he is much less obnoxious when he appears.

Oren: Yeah. He’s in Clone Wars and he’s fine, right?

Chris: Right. Or I could non-canon Ben killing Han Solo.

Oren: Not a fan of that?

Chris: No, I think it was a really bad move. It was clear that they still wanted people to sympathize with Ben—Kylo Ren, but that was not gonna happen after he killed Han Solo. So I think what happened is, you know, they realized Harrison Ford really wanted his character killed off. The storytellers couldn’t resist doing something dramatic that they would not normally get to do because Harrison Ford was leaving. So they put in that twist, but they didn’t really think very hard about how it would impact a character that they actually wanted to be a likable villain. A sympathetic villain.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And it led to one of the reasons Kylo Ren really doesn’t work very well. So yeah, that should just be zapped.

Oren: Yeah, fair enough. So we’ve been talking a lot about when canon is not really that important or when people overexaggerate it or when it was never gonna be true in the first place. But coming at it from the other side, I do think continuity is not a bad thing.

And if you can have better continuity, I think you should if you don’t have to give up something critical for it. And there are just some choices you could make that will help you have better continuity, and the one that keeps getting me is why prequels? Who is it at Hollywood that is just demanding more prequels?

Like you guys know you can just make sequels, right? You can just keep going forward. Time doesn’t stop.

Chris: I mean, they’re probably desperate to reuse story elements that people will recognize so it still feels like part of the franchise. ‘Cause you can keep making sequels, but at some point it becomes really hard to use existing characters and we have to be like, it’s their children or something.

Oren: Yeah. But a lot of these prequels don’t use existing characters either. I guess when you’re doing a Star Trek prequel, you can use the really long lived characters. Like, you can have Spock show up and maybe that’s the entire reason for doing Discovery as a prequel, but man, does it create weird problems.

Chris: I wonder with Discovery, with Star Trek in particular, there is the fact that TOS [The Original Series] was like in an old timeline, and maybe they’re trying to associate it with classic Trek. And there’s also the fact that the technology in Star Trek is very out of hand, and certainly with Enterprise, at least, right, where they didn’t have transporters—

Oren: Well, until they did.

Chris: Until they did, right? That might have been something that they were trying to do. It’s just very weird with Discovery because then they add all of this technology that seems even more advanced than TNG. There was also a change in creative leadership happening there, right, and other weird things.

Oren: Yeah. I feel like the reason Discovery is a prequel is locked inside Brian Fuller’s head and we’ll never find out until he writes a book about it.

Chris: Yeah. Whereas, I don’t know, the whole young Han Solo, that was the one that everybody was like, why? Why are we doing this, a young Han Solo? What is it about Han Solo that means that we need to see?

And I think maybe that was just, Hey, we wanna do a recognizable character, but we also want an excuse to cast a new actor because Harrison Ford totally defined that character so much. Maybe that was what was going on there.

Oren: Yeah. And then it didn’t work out very well and Disney decided they were just gonna do deepfakes from now on. And it’s like, oh great. Thanks Disney. That’s what we wanted.

Chris: Whereas far past prequels can work better, right? For Star Wars has like, oh, the Old Republic Glory days, right. I can see the attraction of that. And then you don’t have many constraints, so that’s one option. But yeah, I don’t know. I think they’re just looking for something recognizable.

I still, you know, think about Obi-Wan [Kenobi], the midquel.

Oren: Oh man.

Chris: How very well they did considering it was a midquel.

Oren: Yeah. The ratio of terrible premise to pretty good execution is unusual in that show. It’s like, yeah, I mean this is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, but yeah, you know, it’s not bad, you know, you kind of made it work.

As long as I ignore half of the implications. The idea that Leia had an adventure with Obi-Wan and knows him really well, is deeply funny.

Chris: And then got amnesia afterwards, of course.

Oren: Or even Rogue One, right? It’s very funny to watch New Hope and imagine it in the context of, Vader just saw Leia’s ship escape from the big battle and then look at their dialogue with that in mind.

Chris: Yeah, or unfortunately, we decided to have a go at watching Rogue One again after Andor, and gosh, I wish they lined up better.

Oren: Yeah. Not so much.

Chris: But no, they don’t quite line up and that’s too bad. Yeah.

Oren: They mostly, at least from what I could tell, they mostly don’t line up in terms of tone. The biggest continuity thing that I noticed is that for some reason in Andor they made K-2 invincible.

Chris: Yeah. That was really strange, yeah.

Oren: I don’t know why they did that.

Chris: Now you have to find reasons to leave K-2 behind. I think they wanted to leave K-2 behind anyway though, because it’s a very serious show and K-2 is a comedic character.

Oren: Yeah, it’s really funny to see how little K-2 there is and it really feels like the reason is ’cause he makes jokes and we don’t make jokes on Andor. That’s not a thing we do here.

This is a little less flashy, but another thing that just helps that I wish more storytellers in big franchises would consider is to think about the implications of the stuff you’re introducing. If we go all the way back to TOS, they introduced the transporter to save money on landing scenes because the shuttle set and effects were not ready yet.

And Star Trek has been dealing with that choice for more than 50 years now, and it has been a plague on the franchise ever since.

Chris: Why did they add the transporter back [in] Enterprise? 

Oren: I don’t know, for the same reason why they decided to have “polarize the hull plating” fill the same role as “raise shields.”

Chris: Maybe they brought in a bunch of Star Trek writers who just didn’t know how to write episodes without it.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say exactly, like we know that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had a lot of creative control for the first three seasons, and they just, you know, don’t seem to have been great at it.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think the thing with the shields is because, again, the problem with guns, it’s like a gunfight, but at ship scale where usually shooting is gonna become deadly and maneuvering is not that—I mean you can make it interesting in some cases, but if it’s just like a bunch of empty space, right?

Trying to fly around and communicate strategy there is gonna be difficult. So we need a way for fights to last a little while and to build tension. And I feel like the shield is just a very convenient, okay, it’s down to 80%, 60%, 40%, and it’s not very good, but it does something. It shows that the ship is in more and more trouble and it allows the fight to last longer.

And without that, you kind of have to do more work to come up with an actual battle and communicate what the impact of, you know, the shooting is without just letting the ship instantly explode. And so I can see why, you know, that just might become a nightmare and it’s easier to just [be] like, okay, we need shields.

Oren: Yeah. And a lot of continuity problems are introduced because the writers added something as a way to get out of a problem they didn’t otherwise know how to get out of, like the Avatar State in the Avatar setting is like this. The Avatar State causes a ton of problems in [Legend of] Korra because it’s way OP and Korra can use it for most of the series, and so they just have to keep coming up with excuses why she doesn’t use it.

But in the original show, the Avatar State was clearly a way to put the characters in a situation where they couldn’t possibly survive and then give them a way to survive it. That’s the main purpose that the Avatar State serves, and as a result, it causes all these problems later and it’s like, well, maybe you could have just not done that, you know, just a thought.

Chris: Yep. Yeah, I mean it’s that oneupmanship I talk about with plotting, right, where you make a problem for your character, don’t know how to get them outta that problem, so you give them a new ability, new gun, new weapon, whatever. They use that to solve the problem, and then somehow you have to create a problem that’s even harder because they have the new thing, and then you keep building the problems and the character’s capabilities until it just becomes impossible.

Oren: Yeah, the power creep is real. All right, well, with that, I think we’ll bring the canon of this episode to a close. It’s over. Nothing that happened in this episode is actually canon, so if you get mad at it, you can’t ’cause it’s not real.

Chris: But if you would like to see more actually canonical material in the Mythcreants Universe, you can become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants

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

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We’ve all seen this moment in TV and movies: a character we thought we knew is revealed to have a completely different history than we imagined. The soft cinnamon roll protagonist has actually been an assassin this whole time. The grizzled mercenary hero is using a glamor to disguise the fact that they’re actually a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed adventurer. This kind of backstory reveal is often exciting and memorable, but is it a good idea? Listen and we’ll try to figure that out.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: And I’m… Chris? Or am I? 

Oren: Are you? Who knows? We just don’t know. 

Chris: Who knows? Have you seen the scene where I was born and named by my parents? Because unless you’ve seen that scene, maybe I’m not Chris. 

Oren: I haven’t seen that scene. And for all I know, maybe you actually fell into a seam in reality, in a scene I haven’t seen. 

Chris: So this is obviously an episode about tongue twisters. 

Oren: Just as much alliteration and as many… homophones? The ones that sound the same, but is different. I forget which one that is. [Chuckles]

Chris: We’ll just say it’s homophones because I’m not gonna look it up. Maybe we need some online real-time fact-checking.

Oren: Someone could point out what the actual one was. So this episode we’re talking about secret protagonist backstories. And the reason is that we’ve been watching Castle Rock, which is a fairly old show by now, but still some spoilers. And as I’m watching it, our protagonist is Annie and she’s got some problems. It’s based on various Stephen King stories, so of course she has problems. 

And then, boom, huge reveal halfway through the show—or at least through the season, ‘cause it’s sort of an anthology show—that her entire backstory is not what we thought. Her daughter isn’t really her daughter. Also, she accidentally killed someone and then attempted to kill somebody else. It’s a whole thing. And the moment I saw it, I was like, “Oh boy, so many authors are gonna want to do this.” Maybe not this one specifically ’cause I don’t know if this show is popular enough for that. But I see this sort of thing a lot and I work with authors who see it and they wanna do it too.

Chris: Flashy stuff of course is always gonna be attractive. And reveals and twists are very flashy. And that’s why we rarely encourage a lot of reveals except for when they’re absolutely needed. For instance, the end of the mystery or something like that. Just because we’ve seen so many people go for the flash and not realizing what they’re wrecking.

And we generally just… tell a good story. Get people emotionally invested. Keep them entertained. You don’t need the shocking reveal. And this has, “Oh, I just wanted to shock people,” written all over it. I wanna talk more about that. But first perhaps, this might be a good time to, when we’re talking about protagonist backstories, I feel like we need to go over the meta mystery issue again.

Oren: I was gonna say, “But Oren, isn’t this just meta mysteries again?” Well, yes, but also no. 

Chris: It depends. What a surprising answer. It depends. In many cases, yes. And most of the time when I’m talking about meta mysteries, I just tell people they shouldn’t hide anything a viewpoint character knows. But I think it’s a good time to get a little bit more nuanced into exactly how this works, because I want people to be able to use their own judgment and also do edge cases.

That’s where a lot of the fun is, in these little edge cases, and how far can I push this, and et cetera. So there’s multiple reasons, like execution. “How do we pull this off?” is one thing. But for me, the biggest thing is the emotion of the situation. So the base problem that we run into here is that a character’s feelings and motivation just don’t resonate unless we understand the full reasoning behind those things. 

Basically, storytellers, particularly writers tend to think that emotion will kind of rub off directly from the character to the audience. So if the character is sad, then the audience will feel sad with them. And if you have a good actor and a visual medium, on film, there might be some empathy there. But especially in a written work that doesn’t really work.

Instead what you need to see, you need to give the audience the stimulus that caused that emotion so they can react to that stimulus along with the character. And feel some of that too. So if you hide that stimulus, ’cause it’s a secret backstory. Basically, there’s no emotion and the story ends up feeling surprisingly emotionally flat and kind of dead. And if you’re not trained to look out for it, a lot of times that is more subtle than the reveal. Which is why meta mysteries are so attractive, because they’re easy to pull off. The reveal is very flashy, and if you’re not trained, you won’t realize how much you’re missing. 

Like one example is in the novel Boneshaker, there’s two POVs. One POV character is Briar and she’s the mother, and her son has run off into this really dangerous area full of steampunk zombies to find his father. And she goes after him and we are told that she is full of regret. She’s like, “Oh, I should have told him everything and I didn’t, and therefore this is my fault.” But we can’t feel it with her because we’re like, “Well, why do you feel so guilty about this?” It feels flat. It doesn’t resonate. 

And then only at the very end of the book, spoilers for this book, we’re revealed that Briar actually killed his father years ago. And so by not telling her son—’cause her son wants to believe that his father is alive—because she didn’t tell her son the truth, now he has put his life in danger because she was not upfront with him. And so if we had that information, we would have a lot more feeling in her POV for most of the novel. And it both gives the novel more emotional power and intensity and makes it more compelling, which is often really important to the story. But it also really helps audience connect with the character to feel what they’re feeling. 

Oren: And what’s interesting is that there’s several different varieties of this kind of missing context. There’s the Boneshaker one where we are told something is missing and we just spend the book waiting to find out what it is. Then there’s something like, Carnival Row is our go-to example where a critical part of the character’s backstory that informs all of his actions and is really important is withheld. And as a result, the character is really boring until we find out what his deal is. 

Chris: I have a whole article going over this issue in Carnival Row, but the central thing is that Philo is really supposed to be the main character. And again, he falls emotionally flat. And this is a visual story. We can see Orlando Bloom plays Philo, great actor. But it’s weird because he doesn’t seem to have anything personal at stake in the situation. His problems seem to be smaller than the other characters, and we don’t know why he does what he does. He’s feeling things, but we’re not sure what or why exactly. So the reveal that happens in episode three is really instrumental in illuminating his character and it makes him a much better protagonist. But we needed that earlier. It wasn’t worth it.  

Oren: And the example in Castle Rock is a little different because it’s really not either of those things because we did get hints that she had a secret backstory, but it turns out her secret backstory is completely different than what all the hints were. The hints were all just lies. [Chuckles]

Chris: I think in some ways. So, one of the nuances of this meta mystery thing is judging how important is this information to the way the character feels, and the story at hand. And the less it’s actually relevant to what’s happening in the story—you can’t just dump the protagonist’s entire life. You can’t tell the audience absolutely everything. It becomes a meta mystery when it matters, when you hide it. Which unfortunately is also what makes it a good reveal. 

But in the case of Castle Rock, we have Annie. There are some things like, she has a daughter. If something happens to her daughter, she gets really worried. We can understand and empathize with her wanting to protect her daughter without knowing what her backstory is, for instance. Those things are fine. 

Oren: And the hinting at her secret backstory is that Joy, the daughter’s father is somehow sinister. And then it turns out that the backstory is completely different. Really had nothing to do with that. And it’s weird because before that reveal, I wasn’t really thinking, “Oh, well I need a backstory reveal to help me understand Annie.” I felt like I understood her pretty well, and so that was a little strange where it was like, “Oh, actually everything’s different than you thought it was.” Okay, sure. I guess. 

Chris: I think with Annie, the thing where we are missing out on is, we don’t know exactly what she’s running from. We can conclude that she’s kind of on the run from the law or from a person, but we don’t know that she stabbed Joy’s biological mother and then stole Joy as a baby. [Chuckles] And ran off with her. And without that information, the tension between Annie and Joy, where Joy wants to know more information, and Annie’s trying to put her off. That would certainly be a lot more riveting, with the knowledge of the backstory. Or you don’t understand her fear of discovery, that her daughter will find out what happened, for instance. So there are emotional elements that would play out very differently. 

Part of the weird thing here is, of course we have to look at, “Is Annie a good protagonist?” Because it does feel like we decided to make this shocking at the cost of Annie’s character. I’m not completely objecting to a character who did something bad in their past and is now just trying to deal with it, but I was expecting an explanation for why Annie was so violent.

Oren: There really isn’t one. The explanation is that she has a mental illness. That’s the explanation, which is a little bit unsavory at this point, I would say. 

Chris: Annie’s not violent all the time, but when she’s actually threatened by a guy, she turns on. She actually knows how to be violent when necessary and does it on the drop of the hat and very effectively, which is actually a cool thing about her. And she’s very scrappy. She’s a very good liar. I actually am impressed. I am kind of tired, I realized, of all of these protagonists that struggle to lie all the time because the storyteller wants the character to lie, but also wants them to be seen through instantly by another character. 

So it’s refreshing to have a protagonist who’s really good at lying. And that doesn’t mean she gets away with it every time, but she always has a good lie at hand and sometimes she pulls off some very impressive talking her way out of situations. But in this case, expecting some backstory to explain how she ended up sort of being used to violence and this, “Oh, she’s just always been that way. She just sometimes gets violent when something happens.” 

Oren: Also, she apparently spontaneously picked up nurse skills somewhere? 

Chris: That was the other thing, is that she’s a registered nurse. And it’s like, okay, even if we say she’s not really a nurse, she still knows enough to fake it well. ‘Cause nobody’s caught on that she doesn’t know what to do. So how did she get those skills? 

Oren: Just trained herself on the job. 

Chris: It has all the hallmarks as, “We did this to be shocking.” You thought Annie was on the run from some terrible man who terrorized her, but actually she’s the killer. And it doesn’t really fit all the pieces very well, unfortunately. 

Oren: And if this was a written story, there’s a whole extra layer to it. Because at least in television, there isn’t an an expectation that you’re always gonna know what the character is thinking, and all those things. Whereas in most narrative premises, you are expecting to know that stuff and it will also be way more obvious that you don’t know them. It will be harder to drop some hints and then move past it, because you’re in the character’s head the whole time. You can’t just cut the scene. 

Chris: Don’t think about it. “Don’t think about your backstory,” character tells himself repeatedly. 

Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh gosh. Okay. I can’t believe people would say that sometimes. People would be like, “No, you can’t say that’s a meta mystery. They said not to think about it.” Have you ever tried not thinking about something?

Chris, Oren: [Laugh] 

Chris: Even if that were possible, it doesn’t change—first of all, it’s very heavy handed. It doesn’t feel natural. It definitely feels like the author is doing that on purpose—but also it doesn’t change the basic dynamics of, the information is missing so the audience doesn’t have that stimulus to emotionally respond to. Therefore, the book just falls emotionally flat. We still have that same problem. It doesn’t change anything. 

Oren: Now the obvious solution here, if you want to have a big startling backstory reveal like this for an important character, is to make that your most important secondary character. So in this scenario, Joy would be the protagonist and would find out this terrifying thing about the woman she thought was her mother. That would work perfectly well. 

Chris: We talk about viewpoint characters a lot. Or I talk about who should be a viewpoint character and who shouldn’t, based on who are we supposed to sympathize with and relate to and get familiar with, versus who should be mysterious. And some types of characters would be better off mysterious, depending on their role. 

So in this case of Castle Rock, if we were in Joy’s perspective, Annie might come off as pretty menacing. And that would be interesting in itself. That would be a slightly different story than we have, but it would still be a very interesting story if Annie was mysterious. She would probably be more threatening. 

But then, what often happens with non-viewpoint characters is at some point, the storyteller decides, “Okay, I would like the audience to sympathize with this character more now and get to know them more now.” And then we reveal the backstory. So we could have, Annie seems super menacing, and we could have even a positive reveal like, “Oh, actually Annie is better than we thought.” Or we could have the negative reveal. But then Joy still realizes that Annie loves her like a mother anyway, decides to forgive her. So that would’ve been an interesting story. 

Oren: Hilariously, I actually felt the same thing about the show Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale where we were finding out weird reveals about Sarah, the main character, that actually make her a bad person. And I thought those would’ve been more interesting if the show was focused on her daughter Harper, who is kind of a cipher for most of the show. But it turns out the reason she’s a cipher for most of the show is that she also has big reveals to make. So we would’ve had to pick one. [Chuckles]

Chris: “I have the magical ability to take care of the situation anytime,” like that.

Oren: That’s a problem. No matter if it’s secret or not. 

Chris: The thing I really liked about the show is that it was really good at setting up all of these… I shouldn’t say great conflicts, because they’re essentially—the antagonists are bigots in the story. But at the same time, you can see this stuff happening. One thing leads to another and how the situation escalates. Nobody thinks of themself as pure evil. They’re reacting emotionally and they have their problems. And how the situation kind of naturally builds up and gets worse with all of these different actors who do something that escalate and inflames the situation, and that’s really neat to watch.

But as you go on, you increasingly realize that the protagonists are not allowed to actually do anything, because—again, this has happened before. I think we talked about this in our agency episode. I’ve seen this many times, where the storyteller wants a situation to go worse and doesn’t know how to give the protagonist agency while still having things get worse. And so the characters just don’t make a difference ever. And finally at the end, they actually just use their magic to fix it. It’s like, okay, well. [Laughs] 

Oren: Well that’s nice.

Chris: That’s nice. And we didn’t know that character had all this powerful magic, but apparently she does. And I guess if she was the main character and we understood her, we would know that she has these powers.

Oren: Back over to the Castle Rock example. If you’re gonna make Joy your protagonist instead of Anne, that is totally viable. But you do have to refigure who is the main actor in the story. ‘Cause in the show as it exists, Anne has a lot of storylines where she goes off and does something that not only is Joy not there for, but that Joy never really interacts with at all.

And so that would be weird. If Joy was your protagonist, it would be very strange to have huge chunks of the story take place in ways that Joy’s not involved in. And then you either never find out about them or you have to be info dumped later. That’s not ideal. But it wouldn’t take that big a change. Joy would have to be looking into, “How did this guy get murdered?” And then find out, “Oh, my mom murdered him. What.” [Laughs] That could be really cool. But you would have to make some changes. 

Chris: I have a blog post that came up recently on Warrior Princess Assassin, which is a throuple romance, MMF. And so it has three protagonists that all get a viewpoint and cycles between them. And it’s kind of interesting because each protagonist is kind of handled a little differently when it comes to what we know and what we don’t know. 

So the character that is supposed to be the audience insert, we just know what her deal is immediately. She’s the first viewpoint we’re in and she has a secret that she’s in a political marriage. And the benefit the other party is supposed to get is access to her father’s magic. But she learns her father is dying. [Chuckles] And now she’s gonna have to keep this from her fiancé and that’s gonna be a problem.

And then, we know that. And so we know how she feels, and that adds tension to the romance. Whereas we have another character, Asher, who gets less of a viewpoint in the beginning. So that he can seem kind of like a danger boy and seem menacing when he’s first introduced. And that’s kind of an interesting effect, especially since he’s the best-friend, love-interest character. And that’s usually a safe boy. 

So we put emphasis on, “Oh, he’s changed and somehow he acts different and the protagonist doesn’t know why or how.” And then when there’s actually a chance to move to his viewpoint, you’ll get all of his traumatic backstory. He becomes a very sympathetic character instead, even though he can still be inclined towards violence.

So sometimes with a certain amount of viewpoint shifting, you can cast a character as mysterious, sometimes. Granted, once you start to reveal a character’s backstory and get to know them, it’s hard to go back again. You can do a little bit of stuff. And then of course there’s a third character, Ky. And he kind of has a meta mystery where we know something is going on at home and he feels responsible for his people being afraid of him, but we don’t really know why. And so that kind of doesn’t feel like he has a character arc, or really has emotional issues like the other two characters. 

Oren: I guess it would be less annoying if you only had to spend one third of the story in his viewpoint. Don’t have to deal with it as much. 

Chris: And it’s not always relevant because it becomes more relevant when they head to his country and then we reveal it. And so if it’s not very relevant in the story, usually the character can just not think about it. I think the problem that’s happening here, is that the author wants, just like with the other character who—“Oops, my father is dying and now I’m in this arranged marriage”—that can be used to create tension.

But if he’s vaguely worried that they’ll learn something bad about him. If the character is, and we don’t know what that bad thing is, it’s kind of hard for us to feel that tension or feel that concern. You can’t just tell the audience, “Oh, that thing is very dangerous.” You have to show them and give them the deets. So it doesn’t really work to just tell. Which is why hiding a backstory can become such a problem. 

Oren: So what about the option that we get asked about a lot, which is getting weird with your POV. You’ve got either omniscient or the… *Spooky Voice* …unreliable narrator. Wooo. 

Chris: [Chuckles] I think that’s an execution difference. There’s nothing that really changes the motion difference. Well, okay. There is one thing I’ll mention in a second. But with omniscience, if you have an omniscient narrator, if your character isn’t narrating, it is way easier to leave stuff out. So if you want your character to know something and don’t want your audience to know it, an omniscient narrator definitely has the leeway to just not say things.

And so that definitely smooths over the execution problems of having that awkward, “Oh, don’t think about it. Don’t think about your backstory.” Have the character tell themselves not to think about it. We don’t have to do that with omniscient. We’re already outside the character’s head. The narrator doesn’t have to tell us if they don’t want to. That’s how omniscience works. 

So we have that, but that’s never gonna get rid of the issue with emotions not being there. Now, granted with omniscient narration, a lot of times the goal is to be less emotional and more jokey and snarky and lighthearted. So maybe if the narrator is entertaining that would be less damaging, but it doesn’t take care of that problem.

There is one thing though, we talk about the hidden plan reveals sometimes. So if you have a character that has a secret plan for besting the villain, and you wanna hide that plan, and then they get in a conflict with the villain, and then you find out, “Oh, everything has gone according to the secret plan.” So this actually follows all the same principles. It does work as a turning point, technically. Does make it feel like the protagonist earned that victory. 

But remember what I just said about tension where you can’t just say something is threatening. And what can happen there, is now you kind of have to lie to the audience about how threatening—’cause this is a protagonist who walks into a dangerous situation already knowing that they’ve got a plan for success. That’s not a situation that creates lots of tension. 

Oren: Your hidden plan has to be very carefully calculated so that it’s something that is credible and can explain how they win, but also once they find out about it, the reader’s like, “Oh yeah, there was still a chance you could have failed that.” So that it justifies why your character is worried and why the scenario seems dangerous.

Chris: So you can do things like that, but generally the briefer the time period is when the character has some kind of plan you don’t know about, is better. Because during that time you’re trying to kind of play it both ways. Often make the audience think that they don’t have a plan, but also have them act believably, and it’s gonna be harder to create tension during that sequence. So I think those work best for more minor conflicts and not the climax, for instance, because it’s gonna be harder to create tension. But if for a short period of time, that can be worth it sometimes. 

Oren: And it’s similar if you are using an unreliable narrator, and I mean an actual unreliable narrator. Not a narrator who has opinions, which is how people sometimes define it. But one who you can’t trust what they’re saying. If you’re actually doing that, actually establishing it, you can use that to hide the protagonist backstory. But that still raises the question of, should you? You could still end up in a situation where the readers don’t know what they need to know to feel emotionally connected. Or, you could end up with a backstory that doesn’t match the character you’ve created. Those things can all still happen. 

Chris: Although, sometimes unreliable narrators, I think, was it House on Haunted Hill? The old one. In this case, the character is an unreliable—wass that an omniscient? I think it gets into her head anyway. 

Oren: It sort of zooms in and out.

Chris: So when it zooms into her head and she’s unreliable, she still believes what she falsely perceives. So she thinks, for instance, that characters are scheming against her. We might have doubts, but we still see her experience that and we see kind of what evidence she uses to conclude that they’re scheming against her.

And in that case, the goal is, “Okay, maybe that isn’t convincing to us.” Maybe we don’t think they’re really scheming against her, so maybe we don’t feel that tension. But we do feel tension of seeing that she is not perceiving the situation correctly. And so it’s just a different effect and in that case, you still get an authentic experience of what the character is perceiving and thinking. Because the character believes their own lies in that case. 

Oren: And in both scenarios, it’s something where I wouldn’t recommend that you make as heavy impact a choice as going omniscient or going with an unreliable narrator, just to have a smoother secret backstory reveal. I think you would want to be getting more out of those choices.

But if you are already doing that kind of story. If you are writing in omniscient and you are writing your story closer to what we would see in a television show, you have more options. And similarly, if your story benefits from an unreliable narrator and you’re actually using it for something, then hiding things about your protagonist is a more open option. But still not necessarily the right one. You still have to think about if you’re hiding something the story needs or not. 

Chris: Of course, the ultimate way to hide protagonist backstory is amnesia. 

Oren: Yeah. [Laughs]

Chris: It’s something we haven’t even brought up yet. But this is why amnesia is so popular in stories, is because it totally gets around this problem. You’re just trying to get the audience on the same page as your character. If your character can’t remember their own backstory, it’s not causing any feels in them right now. And so, no, the audience doesn’t need to know it. 

The audience should be on the same page as them and find out about their memories when the character does, which is why it’s so popular. It doesn’t mean that it’s never weird. In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, the main character, uncover a lot of memories. That makes sense. And then later he covers a memory that, doesn’t make as much sense. [Chuckles] 

Oren: And admittedly I have grown a little tired of amnesia, just as I have learned more about how amnesia actually works.

Chris: Shh. Shh. We don’t want anybody to know that. 

Oren: No, don’t tell ’em. 

Chris: It’s so useful for us storytellers. We don’t want people to know that it’s not realistic. 

Oren: It’s easier for me to accept a magical brain fog than, a character bonked their head, and now doesn’t remember anything about their life, but still has all the skills they learned during their life.

Chris: Okay. But what you can do, I’m pretty sure this is realistic. If your character still knows who they are, but they don’t remember the last five years, for instance. That you can totally do, they’ll also have lost any random facts or knowledge they’ve gained in those five years. 

Oren: Another thing that I think is a underused option, which is another way of hiding the information from your protagonist that doesn’t require amnesia, is for them to learn that a thing they thought about their backstory was not correct. And in this case, Joy finds out that she was actually kidnapped as a baby by her half-sister and not from her actual mother. So, she’s a baby. We don’t expect babies to remember that part. 

But you could also have this be like, “Your protagonist thinks that they worked at a lab creating vaccines or creating medicines of some kind.” And then the evil bad guy is like, “Actually, you were helping me create the genetically modified super soldiers that I’m using. Your work was invaluable.” And they didn’t know that. That is a big backstory reveal. And if what you’re going for is a shocking twist, that can do it and not have all the temptations of hiding the emotional context that people need.

Chris: That could definitely work. I can say some situations where authors would try to do something like, “Oh, the character thought they saw one thing, but actually it was a different thing.” And then we try to describe it to audiences being like, hmm. It’s like character death. “Oh, that character totally died.” Okay, but have I seen the character’s broken body? And then has it been set on fire? And also chopped into lots of bits. 

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: There’s a lot of times if you’re trying to have a situation where your character misperceives something, that’s going to be somewhat easy to catch on. But in that case maybe they have no way of telling that they weren’t working on—well, they would know something about the work that they’re doing in that lab. But still you could have, “Okay. No, this was just beyond their knowledge.” Or something like that. 

Oren: Well, with that, since that was the last thing I wanted to cover, we can reveal that secretly this podcast has been going for over half an hour and therefore, part of our backstory is that we have to end it right now.

Chris: And did you know if you become a patron, you can see extensive backstory of our Patreon rambles? You can. Going back many, many years. It’s very, very secret. Only patrons know about it. So check us out on patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: It’s very exclusive. But before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

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