The Mythcreant Podcast

We all know that, despite sayings to the contrary, books are guaranteed to be judged by their covers. However, there’s another important component in getting readers to hand over their hard-earned cash: sales blurbs. Whether on the back of a physical book or the top of a web page, these blocks of text must be both short and appealing. They can’t describe the entire book, so they must describe the idea of a book instead. Or maybe they could just tell you the book’s great and leave it at that. Is it true? No one knows!

• Lessons Posts 

Generously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is–

Chris: Chris–

Bunny: and–

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: Ah, it takes three to make a podcast. Life was normal for struggling high school student Bunny until the day she discovered Mythcreants, a website after her own heart. From that day forward, her life felt pretty normal except she had something more to read on Fridays and weekends.

Analytical and irreverent blogger Chris had run Mythcreants for years doing website things and writing articles about stuff alongside her opinionated and wisecracking co blogger, dad pun Oren. That is until a mysterious new reader going by Bunny appeared in the comments raising their SEO ever so slightly by a macron or two and not really changing much else.

What these three don’t know is that the Great Goddess Podcastia had sent their lives on a very slow, very gradual collision course towards joining forces. Will Bunny depose Wes or will Wes depart on his own? Will the ever vengeful fan ragers simmering on Reddit take Oren out? Will Chris ever launch the new version of the website?

Most importantly, will the Mythcats ever get the scritches they deserve? Listen to this podcast. Or die. Eh? Eh?

Oren: Yeah, I’d buy that for a dollar.

Chris: Honestly, my favorite part is the fact that Oren is opinionated and I’m not. I just state the facts. I just state the facts.

Oren: Just the facts. Nothing but facts.

Bunny: I never said it was a good blurb. I am very bad at writing blurbs. Maybe it was a little misleading, which is a commentary on blurbs.

Chris: No, I think that’s the general reputation that Oren has. He’s the opinionated one. I’m just factual. All of my opinions become fact because I said them.

Bunny: I thought about mentioning a lessons post, the one place in which people will probably agree that you’re quite opinionated. I also thought about calling Oren provocative, but that didn’t seem like the right word.

Chris: We are provocative sometimes. The difference is that we aren’t actually provocative for the sake of being provocative like you would think. We’re just–take our opinions and put them out there without being shy.

Oren: I’m just a very naturally abrasive person, okay. I don’t have to work at it.

Bunny: Oren is just a jerk!

Chris: Also, that was my experience. I’m always a person who is critical of everything and piss people off. That’s just my natural personality.

Bunny: And you do it so well. So that’s why we’ve got a blog going here. And you know, I did actually notice, so we don’t have a sales blurb. The podcast page just says “for fantasy and science fiction storytellers” and not a single mention of the holistic cup of depression, I gotta say.

Oren: Very sad. We really need to update our lore.

Chris: No, here we go. In a world ruled by the Iowa workshop.  One podcast offers a holistic cup of depression.

Bunny: One podcast stands against the storm.  One podcast speaks out in workshop. But yes, today we’re talking about what makes a good sales blurb. I’m not very good at these, which is why it’s gonna be interesting to discuss, but I have been reading a lot of them lately and have noticed some trends and themes and good things and bad things, and Discord discourse.

Chris: Our specialty is craft, not marketing. So we’ll talk about them, but again, this is not an area where I claim to be an expert.

Oren: I have feelings, okay, and what is a podcast for, if not feelings?

Bunny: Feeeeeelings.  Strong feelings.

Oren: It’s like legitimately really hard to measure what effect the blurb has on sales of a book.

Like even though the blurb is a really important part of marketing, it’s like, if the blurb is bad, how much did that affect whether the book was a success or not?

Chris: I think it’s safe to say that the cover is more important than the blurb.

Oren: Probably.

Bunny: The cover is the thing that gets you to read the blurb. At least in my experience. If I think the cover is silly, I probably won’t pick it up.

Oren: Sorry. There are so many books. I have to judge them at least a little bit by their cover. There’s too many.

Bunny: That’s what the cover is for.

Chris: Covers are also actually surprisingly good and most of the time at conveying the general genre of the book, people like a pretty cover. I think speculative fiction fans especially and fantasy fans, especially like a pretty cover.

Bunny: And pretty deckled edges.

Chris: But also if I see a book, it’ll often tell me whether something is speculative fiction or not, and if it’s not, probably not interested, probably not gonna look at that blurb.

Bunny: But looking at the things that I’ve noticed on most sales blurbs, whether they’re done poorly or not, the characteristics that they usually have are the story background or the setup.

So, answering the question of where we are when the story starts, the major characters, so who are we following, what’s their relationship? The setting, where does this take place? This is definitely more important in spec fic than it is in other genres. And then the conflict. So. The throughline in Mythcreants parlance, and then the stakes.

Chris: I’d be willing to bet that a lot of times the back blurb does not actually clarify what the throughline is because it’s just supposed to be intriguing enough to get people to read it, and sometimes the throughline requires some explaining. Again, looking at what you need to engage. A lot of them start with a protagonist and their general starting position, but we’re looking at, what details make you interested in reading about this character or this world?

And then there’s usually going to be a tense plot twist in the blurb somewhere, and sometimes it tells you what the throughline is, but I don’t think it necessarily has to.

Bunny: I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is common. And I think most blurbs are trying to point towards that, at least.

Chris: I think the big question is, does this give you a good idea of what the book is gonna be like? ‘Cause sometimes if it’s misleading and we don’t know that this is a big political intrigue instead of just a thriller, for instance. Like, that might be an important distinction.

Oren: One thing that some blurbs do that I just can’t stand, and so I hope that means it’s less effective–like, sometimes that’s not the same thing. Sometimes things you hate are effective at marketing. What I hope is ineffective is when it tells me what a good book this is.

Bunny: Usually does that in the quotes.

Oren: If they wanna put quotes. Sure. Sometimes the quotes themselves make me go, that can’t possibly be real, even if it is real. Sometimes the blurb itself will be like, “In this heartwarming tale,” it’s like, don’t tell me it’s heartwarming.

That’s, like, a qualitative assessment. I’m the decider around here. That’s my decision.

Bunny: That’s for me to decide. That’s my heart being warmed.

Chris: Obviously those are very telling and flattering. At the same time, I do think that they do play a role in telling somebody what kind of book this is, because heartwarming does indicate tone.

Oren: Yeah, I suppose.

Bunny: It does feel like you should be able to get that from other parts of it though. I don’t know. I kind of feel like that the same way I feel when movie trailers do that, when the narrator comes in and is like, “In this heartwarming tale of friendship and bravery.” It’s also one of those things that’s just quite vague.

Chris: A lot of these sales [blurbs], they start with a bolded line at the top. And I think that’s a good idea because that tells people, okay, if you’re only gonna read one sentence, this is the sentence I want you to read. And they tend to be less descriptive because there’s not much space, a lot more buzzy. And sometimes it is a description of what’s in the book.

Here’s one of the ones that Oren was talking about, and this is for Wintersong: “Dark, romantic, and unforgettable. This riveting debut for fans of Labyrinth and Naomi Novik tells a fantastical story of a young woman’s journey towards love and acceptance.”

Bunny: That’s so vague.

Oren: At least there’s some comps in there, or some comparables, I should say. Like at least Dark Romance is a genre, right?

Chris: Yes. And that is part of it, is we have a lot of these, if they’re not that descriptive, they have, “here’s the other bestselling books that we think you’re reading, that if you read Labyrinth or you like Naomi Novik, just in general, I guess, we didn’t wanna name one of Naomi Novik’s works.”

Oren: They need some help, okay.

Chris: This is for fans of the Temeraire book, of course.

Oren: When I look at a blurb, what I’m looking for is something that will give me at least some idea what kind of story it is and something that will make the case for me, something that will set the story apart, and I tend to judge anything where it just tells me that this is a heartwarming or a pulse pounding story, I immediately discount that because that is just a thing they can say.

They have no shame against putting that on the cover of a book that is actually very boring or not at all romantic.

Chris: [At] the same time, dark, romantic. We have some–we know this is probably romantasy. Naomi Novik has a couple romantasies. Of course, “tells a fantastical story,” it’s like, oh really? I thought this was not fantasy. Is it fantastical?

Bunny: I thought this was going to be Dunkirk.

Chris: But I mean, I don’t know. Somebody might not know it’s fantasy and neither were fantastical there. We don’t know that Labyrinth is a fantasy work.

Bunny: I think the distinction here is not necessarily whether it’s accurate or not, it’s whether you, the reader, find that it would be something you’d want to read. And for Oren, that’s, “you’re preaching to me, you’re just saying things,” but at the same time it is getting at something.

Chris: At the same time, they’re still telling whether or not the book is particularly tense. Like, if they’re advertising an edgy book, they’re not gonna put heartwarming on it. And if it’s like Legends and Lattes, they’re not gonna put “pulse pounding” on it.

Like they could. They could be lying. I can understand the logic if you have your one sentence teaser of putting descriptors in there to identify the type of book as opposed to the longer blurb, which has more room to actually give you details about the story and show rather than tell things like that.

Make it sound heartwarming. Make it sound pulse pounding. But if you’re doing one little line, I can see how that would be harder to do.

Bunny: I also think that one little line is much harder to just do well in general. Like, I was grabbing books on my shelf to see how they did their blurbs. And one of my favorite books, The Girl From the Sea, [the] one liner is, “One summer can change everything,” which is extremely vague and not what I would highlight about the book.

Chris: Is that a speculative fiction? That doesn’t sound like–to me, that does not sound like speculative fiction.

Bunny: It is. So The Girl from the Sea, and this is a graphic novel, so you’d know kind of from the cover, it’s a selkie romance essentially, and it happens at a whirlwind over the summer, which is what they’re getting at.

But you can’t really tell anything about the book from that phrase. Like, I guess that phrase is supposed to be, I guess, a theme of the book, but it’s not very helpful for someone trying to decide to read the book. The rest of the description on the back for that one is fine. It’s nothing special, but it never mentions anything about the fact that this has fantasy elements.

We know that Morgan, the main character, is queer, and that Keltie, who turns out to be a selkie, is mysterious. But the fact that she’s a selkie, which is a big selling point for me, is not mentioned.

Oren: Sometimes there is, of course, the fear of spoilers in the blurb. So if her being a selkie was a mystery, I can see why they wouldn’t put it in there. If it was revealed right away, yeah, I get it. I could see.

Bunny: For this one, so you can kind of tell from the cover that there is something mystical about Keltie, and from her first appearance, it’s pretty clear that she’s not just an average person, but when Keltie shows up, she’s like, I’m a selkie. And of course Morgan is like, no, you aren’t. But you as the reader are like, oh, she’s a selkie.

Chris: Sometimes they don’t specify things like that because they don’t think it’s competitive. They don’t think that selkies are drawing in readers, and so they wanna leave it vague and be like, oh, maybe people will think she might be a mermaid, ’cause mermaids are more popular.

Bunny: They’re wrong. They’re wrong! They’re wrong! Selkies are in.

Oren: In with the bunny demographic specifically.

Bunny: Yes. Demographic of one. Selkies are very in.

Oren: One thing that I guess we should have mentioned earlier is that the nice thing about blurbs is that if you’re traditionally published, you almost certainly don’t need to care about them because your publisher will probably make it for you, or at least that is my understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works.

Chris: I wouldn’t be surprised if you, especially if you have a small press, if somebody runs ’em by you. That also means if somebody does a bad job, it’s gonna be hard to get it changed

Oren: And that’s a problem. But at least you don’t have to come up with this.

Chris: Although, honestly, I do think that there’s a significant overlap between the way that you need to write for your back blurb and how, if you wanna query. So if you are interested in querying, I feel like it has some of the same, you need to write a teaser version of your story and figure out how to condense it down into something that sounds interesting. And I think you could probably reuse some of the same stuff in your query, and not everybody’s querying either.

Bunny: Definitely the Novik comparison feels like something out of a query letter. Back in the day I was trying to query, and in hindsight a book that would never have been picked up by a publisher. I was just optimistic about it. So I had written a couple of query letters and read some of the literature and how you’re supposed to write them.

And one thing you are supposed to do is situate it in the genre, like, “what are its peers?” So saying “this book is like this other book and this third book” is definitely the sort of thing you’d put in a query letter. And so I kind of wonder if that blurb was drawing straight from that query letter.

Chris: Well, I think that’s actually–can be kind of normal to draw from query letters because again, usually a query letter also has a little synopsis, not necessarily a synopsis, so much as a teaser, very similar to what you see in these back blurbs. Because if you’re querying, you’re trying to get the agent intrigued about your book, just like a sales board is trying to get the customer willing to buy the book, right?

You’re still trying to sell the book’s merits, and an agent is going to be primarily concerned with whether they can sell the book to an acquiring editor and how pitchable it is, whether it has a high concept and all those other things. “Do we have an interesting premise?” And so you kind of still want to do very similar things in a query letter.

Oren: What birthed this topic was some discourse over on our Discord server–which you can join by becoming a patron. Plug!–about comparing blurbs that either did tell you a lot of what the throughline was, at least theoretically going to be, versus ones that just hinted at it and built atmosphere.

And my hot take is that those can both be good. Specifically we were comparing Piranesi to Where Peace is Lost. The first one is by Susanna Clarke, and the second one is by Valerie Valdes. Now I’ve actually read Piranesi. I love it. It’s one of my favorite books. And this blurb, it hints at what the plot is, but it doesn’t really say.

What it does is try to build atmosphere about this strange place that this protagonist lives in and this weird other who he talks to. Whereas Where Peace is Lost has a much more detailed like, “and this is what the plot’s about.” And assuming that is accurate and that it’s not a lie, ’cause sometimes these lie, I also love this. This is a great blurb as far as I’m concerned. I would definitely read this book. In fact, I’m planning to.

My hot take is that I think either of those can work. If you’re describing the plot, make it sound exciting. And if you are not doing that and you’re building atmosphere, make the atmosphere sound intriguing. That’s the best advice I can give.

Chris: Well, this is also where comparables come in handy. Look at books similar to yours and see what their blurbs sound like. And I feel like that’s gonna be your best guide to what your blurbs should sound like. I still think that even with Piranesi, you see the kind of same rhythm of, we start by setting up an interesting premise and character, and then we set up one plot twist that adds some tension to the blurb, and then we end with like a vague teaser about the future.

We put a little bit more word count into the kind of starting premise because Piranesi has such a kind of unusual and interesting premise. If you have some novelty in your story, you want that in front, but just don’t forget to add the details because it’s the novel details that really matter, not just like the general concept.

So for instance, a good example is Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. So our kind of starting paragraph that adds the novel premise and you know, gets people interested in this character says, “14-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread.  She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.”

Now, some key things about this paragraph, and it’s just the same skills you build as a storyteller in miniature, honestly. First, we have some, a little bit of sympathy and spinach with Ramona, because she doesn’t like the other wizards, she can’t control lightning or speak to water. Giving her some spinach, some sympathy that makes her more likable. Then we have the novelty when we have specific details. A familiar that’s a sourdough starter. Magic that works on bread dancing, gingerbread men.

And if we’re just like, oh, she does baking magic, it would not be the same. We have to give those details. It’s those details that bring out the novelty of the premise.

Oren: Yeah. Without the details, it would’ve been half baked.

Bunny: [groans] I need to delete “wisecracking.” And just put it with “dad puns.”

Oren: We’ll get the audio editors to deal with that.

Chris: And then it proceeds with our tense plot twist of the teaser. “But Mona’s life is [turned] up upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target.” Then we have the tension. It’s funny because on Goodreads, this book had the word “cozy” attached to it, which people seem to be putting on everything.

And yes, it has the baking magic, which does resemble a cozy fantasy, but the assassin, it just– it [does] not qualify.

Bunny: There aren’t usually that many assassins in cozy stories.

Chris: And then we have our vague teaser that’s about what comes next. “And in an embattled city, suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…” Dot dot dot. But that kind of like, I see that same structure in just a lot of them, right. And that also works for querying when you’re giving an idea of what your book is about.

Bunny: And this also still hits those five notes that I identified. We start with a character, so Mona. We get the setting, there’s a city full of wizards. The setup is that she has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery, making gingerbread men dance.

That’s the setup. That’s where we are. And then we have a conflict. Mona’s life gets turned upside down. There’s a dead body, there’s an assassin, and then the stakes, Mona might be the next target. And then also this bigger thing about the embattled city. We have all of those points there.

Chris: I do think that the key here is to just use the same storytelling skills that you normally use to create novelty, to make your protagonist likable, to add tension, do all of those things. Just do them in little miniature bits.

Bunny: That’s our tip. Do the same things in little.

Chris: Little, which is not easy.

Bunny: Little is harder in my experience.

Chris: Admittedly, ’cause trying to explain the story without putting in tons of details that are just logistical, like even Piranesi, the back blurb has some parts of it that just feel like they’re there as logistical details to set up the twist. And sometimes you can’t get away from that. But the idea is to try to simplify that as much as possible.

Oren: Or, and we could address the elephant in the room, which is what I sometimes call black hat blurbing, where you’re just making something that sounds neat.

It just does not reflect the book at all. I don’t like it. I can’t say it doesn’t work. But I hate it. I will be disappointed in you if you do this. An example is on the Amazon sales page of the Three-Body Problem. It makes this big deal about how it’s set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution.

A secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens, and then it talks about the aliens a little bit. And it says different camps start to form on earth about whether to welcome or fight them. And let me tell you, that is not what this book is about. The Cultural Revolution stuff is briefly there in the prologue, and the aliens are there, but they never show up.

We occasionally get some interludes with them, and then the camps they’re talking about is the tiny cult of alien lovers and everyone else. And that’s it. That’s not really what dividing into camps typically means. If there’s 5,000 people in one room and three in another room, you wouldn’t call that two camps.

Bunny: Two camps, Oren. I’ll have you know that the world is divided into two camps. One camp, which is–in which selkies are out, and one camp in which selkies are in, and I am the only one in the second camp. Two!

Oren: Looking at this blurb, you would have no idea that most of the story is an extremely slow mystery trying to uncover why a bunch of scientists are dying by suicide and spending a lot of time in a weird MMO.

You just wouldn’t have any idea that’s what the book’s about by reading this blurb. The blurb does not sound like that kind of book.

Chris: I do think it’s hard for them to advertise a book where people are dying, but it’s still boring. It’s like, what do you say at that point? They probably try to make it sound like it’s a thriller or something because people are dying, but it’s not.

Bunny: It’s a boring book with boring death.

Oren: You can also look–there are some warning signs to look out for in blurbs. Anything that has two different characters who are just described as doing their own thing. Because at that point the book’s just telling you that it has a fractured story. ‘Cause if they couldn’t make the characters feel like part of the same story in the blurb, the book almost certainly isn’t doing that. Unless you are okay with that sort of thing, stay away from that book.

Also, if, if the blurb feels really vague, you read it and you’re like, what does any of that mean? That probably means that the story is really unfocused and whoever was writing the blurb doesn’t know what to do with it. “How am I supposed to tell them what this is?” And they don’t wanna lie, unlike whoever wrote this Three-Body Problem blurb.

Chris: I would take a book that had a back blurb that was like a romance and had a little intro paragraph for each character, and then the next paragraph was like, “oh yeah, and here’s how they end up meeting each other.” Because if it’s a romance, I know that they’re gonna spend their time together. They’re not gonna be on other sides of the world generally.

No, that’s not true. We have seen epistolary letter romances, but that would be unusual.

Bunny: That’s pretty common in romance.

Oren: They’re writing letters to each other, right?

Chris: They’re still interacting.

Bunny: They’re interacting. Romance also shows a case where what counts as a spoiler varies from genre to genre. If there’s a teaser for a romance and it’s like, “X has feelings for Y. Will X and Y start a relationship?”

If this is a romance novel, then yes. It’s romance. So suggesting a “will they, won’t they” isn’t really a spoiler because it’s like, well, we know where this goes, but you can’t reveal a huge source of tension in the story. You can’t reveal a reveal in the teaser. That’s a big one. If part of the tension comes from who’s the villain, and we have a secret villain, you can’t reveal who the villain is in the teaser.

Trailers do this sometimes. One of the recent Mission Impossible trailers, I think for Mission Impossible: Fallout, spoiled that Henry Cavill was the villain because the trailer had a shot of him shooting an AK 47 at Tom Hanks [actually Tom Cruise], and it’s like, “Ooh, he’s a baddie.” But that’s supposed to be a twist in the movie.

Don’t do that. Sorry. Spoilers, I guess, for a several years old movie.

Oren: Oh, no. Rude. Sometimes there’s no option there. Like if we’re talking about trailers now, like the movie Abigail, the trailer gives away the entire twist that the first, at least 40 minutes of the movie is building up to, but on the other hand, without the twist, there is no reason to see this movie.

It’s just a kind of average movie if you don’t have that twist, and I have no idea how you would advertise it without mentioning the twist.

Chris: We have a blog post coming out about this. It talks about the fact that sometimes people wanna make the basic premise of their story a reveal. And that leaves you with nothing to advertise and that’s a big problem.

I think the thing that Abigail should have done was plotted the story like Megan, because Megan, it’s similar in that the thing that’s the big draw–

Bunny: The title that’s a girl’s name?

Chris: Well, Abigail is about a ballerina vampire who kills people, and Megan is about a doll who kills people. I do think that they appeal to a very similar audience.

But, in Megan, the beginning of the story is written with the idea that people will know that Megan is gonna turn into a killer. So it uses that to build suspense, whereas Abigail is trying to hide it and build up to it as though it’s a reveal. So then it’s just an underwhelming reveal and we’re not seeing any of this ballerina vampire ahead of time.

Bunny: There’s a larger issue of blurbs that set up the reader to just wait and wait and wait, wait for the things in the blurb to happen. And this is a peeve of mine. The way I approach blurbs, and maybe this varies from person to person, but the way I approach it is like, this is giving me the general sense of where everyone is when the story starts. Two thirds of the blurb is usually like, “here’s how things are normally.” And then the last third is like, “and here’s what’s changed,” and that’s the story. So I hate it when it takes 150 pages for the story to fulfill the things it promised in the setup.

Chris: I do wonder if some of these books are just under some constraints. Piranesi has a really novel premise that it can spend a bunch of word counts on the back blurb, and then it’s just kind of a contemplative story. Whereas if you had a story that kind of goes places and you couldn’t tell from the beginning moments what kind of story it’s gonna be, I can see the temptation to add more events to give a better idea so that people know that this is a war story, ’cause it doesn’t seem like a war story early on.

Now granted, that’s also a thing the storyteller could proactively address, but sometimes we’ve got the story we’ve got and we’re just trying to advertise it the best we can. I can see there being issues there, but I generally agree that it’s better to not go halfway into the book with your plot twist, if you can avoid it.

Bunny: I’m gripey about this because I’m reading a book called Swamplandia and I’m 150 pages into it, and the blurb promised me four things. One, the main character’s mom dies. Two, her father withdraws. Three, her sister falls in love with a ghost. Four, her brother goes to work at a theme park. And then it says that the main character goes on a mission to save them. And I’m 150 pages in. Those events happen in a different order. The mom’s death happens in the first couple pages and the brother leaves, and then the sister falls in love, and that’s just happened, and I’m still waiting for the mission to save them to start.

Chris: Here’s a question. [Does] the story feel slow?

Bunny: I don’t know. It’s one of those stories that’s definitely trying to be literary, so yes.

Chris: Sounds like yes. This might be less of a complaint if the story wasn’t slow. And again, that might be why the back blurb pulls in so many later events is because actually, the story is kind of slow and doesn’t have enough tension, and we’re trying to make up for that by taking later events and pretending they happened earlier so it seems like a tenser book than it is.

Bunny: It definitely has been like 70% the father withdrawing and then the rest of those other three things.

Chris: But it sounds like a more interesting book if you imagine all of those events happen in the beginning. So the real issue here is that the book is not engaging enough.

A salesperson is always gonna have an incentive to mislead, to get people to buy the book. And some of ’em just want sales. But I think they also hope that if we just trick enough people into buying it, that some of them will become true fans and the book will succeed anyway. Because it’s hard for a book to succeed without word of mouth, I think, or become real big without word of mouth.

Bunny: Wow. I’m gonna have to erase “irreverent,” and replace it with “cynical” in your blurb, just to be more accurate.

Chris: No!

Oren: So we’re definitely out of time. We’re like five minutes over time. It’s time to call this, the blurb has gotten too long.

Bunny: But we were complaining, Oren!

Oren: I do love to do that. There’s more I could complain about, but we don’t have time.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jabar. He is 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.

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

The word “drama” gets used a lot in storytelling, but sometimes we need to stop and ask: What makes a scene dramatic? That may sound like a circular question, but it turns out that dramatization is often the difference between what feels like a laundry list of information and what feels like a story. This week, we’re talking about this elusive concept and what scenes are most likely to suffer from it, along with how to do better. Plus, a reminder that as authors, we are the masters of time and space!

• Malazan 

Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is–

Bunny: Bunny– 

Chris: and–

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Hey, so I heard about this podcast called the Mythcreant Podcast. Apparently they taught someone to swim by making them watch others drown? 

Bunny: Despite how horrible that sounds, that does sound like a pretty cool podcast. 

Chris: And apparently they brought in like a huge holistic cup of depression to do this. But I’m just glad that we’re far away from watching anything dramatic like that happen. 

Oren: Yeah. We wouldn’t wanna actually show anything like that. We can just tell you it happened in the driest manner possible.  

Bunny: [Chuckle]

Chris: Just pass on all the rumors that people somewhere are saying.

Oren:  Maybe we can do it while standing on a wall with a weathervane in the background or something.

Bunny: Maybe we can gaze upon it from afar while sitting on our saddles. 

Chris: Now, let me tell you my entire backstory in detail. It happens over many years.  

Bunny: [Laughter] When Chris was a child — 

Oren: We need a flashback scene to establish that Chris was, in fact, a child at one point. 

Chris: No, no, no. No flashbacks. I have to tell you without any flashbacks.

Oren: Silly me. I forgot. My bad. 

Bunny: We don’t even get photographs from the family album. 

Chris: Yeah, we can have a documentary where we just stare at a photograph for a really long time and maybe zoom in, zoom out.  Use the “oohhh” dramatic voice, trying to make this sound interesting. 

Bunny: There’s a thing you can apply that’s like a camera movement in iMovie that’s called Ken Burns. It shifts the view from one part of your screen to another. It’s just that, bouncing around a single image. 

Chris; So this time we’re talking about dramatization. That’s probably something that you take for granted if you’ve been storytelling for a while, but nonetheless, especially for people who are new or just sometimes people who are not new, it does get messed up from time to time and it’s a good thing to think about because there’s a good chance that you could go further.

Basically it’s the process of creating specific, impactful events to represent your story and your story arcs. If you think “okay, I wanna write a story about two childhood best friends that grow apart and then one becomes a hero and the other a villain”,  that’s a very vague concept. 

There’s no specific moments there. It’s a really long process and very abstract. To dramatize that you need to choose events to represent those concepts. I’m gonna make a scene where they’re best friends in the scene, but then they encounter something that they disagree about. And then maybe I’ll have another scene years later where they’ve now, because of that thing, grown distant and they’re ready to go to blows.

So you have specific moments that you’ve sketched out to represent that general concept. 

Oren: So if I’m understanding this correctly… lemme see if I get this concept ’cause it sounds like it might be a big brain elite concept.  

Bunny and Chris: [Laughing in disbelief]

Chris: What?! 

Oren: I just wanna make sure I understand. So something that might have trouble being dramatized is stuff that happens entirely off screen and that the author does not know how to translate into something in the events as they’re actually unfolding.

So an example that I’m thinking of is the biologist’s relationship with her husband in Annihilation ’cause that’s entirely offscreen. We are just told about it and it doesn’t really seem to affect anything she’s doing in the present until she randomly finds his journal and then reads more offscreen stuff about what he did.

Chris: Yeah, that would be an example of something that isn’t really being dramatized. Basically stories and visual mediums are forced to do this all the time because they have to show you something that you can witness. So they have to turn it into actual scenes, whereas novels can do more or less. They can include just a bunch of summary or exposition instead, but often they shouldn’t.

Yes, we should have exposition. Yes, we should have summary. Using a little bit of those is a great advantage because we can convey all sorts of information that would just be boring or awkward if we stuffed it in a scene or had a character say it as part of their dialogue. There’s a limit to how much you want to do because that’s gonna be less interesting and engaging.

Also, there’s a matter of not just how much you do it, but how you do it. There’s a process of taking that vague concept of “oh, I want two childhood best friends that grow apart and become enemies” and then actually make interesting scenes that create an engaging story out of that. 

Bunny: So the idea here–just to be clear– is to step back and look at the story level, what the scenes are that you have, rather than necessarily revising the scenes you already have because they just might not be serving the drama well enough.

Chris: Exactly. The scenes that you have might not be the best scenes for what you’re writing. You might be able to design your events better to create a better narrative or drama out of the general concepts that you came up with. It can also be a matter of how do you design the scenes so that everything comes together well, and what events do you include in your scenes?

I can give you some examples of stories that kind of struggled with dramatization a little bit, where this became an issue. 

Oren: This feels like trying to explain water to a fish. This is where I’m trying to wrap my head around this. So some examples would be great. 

Chris: For instance, Interview With a Vampire. If you’ve never read the book, it’s a retelling with a first person premise where Louis is just talking about life as a vampire.

A lot of that is just him talking in general about what vampire life was like without talking about specific moments. So he’s doing a lot of summarizing and a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. He has, for instance, a place where he’s in general talking about Lestat preying on victims. “Oh, he liked to have a youth early in the evening, and then for his second pick of the evening, he liked to eat a woman” and then he talks about that.

Whereas then when we look at the movie, which struggled honestly with some of this general narration because the movie is forced to dramatize it and turn it into actually a series of events that we can actually show on a film. It makes a lot of use of voiceover to try to fit some of that in, which is clunky.

Oren: Don’t worry. People famously love voiceovers.  

Bunny: [Laugh]

Chris: So we have a scene where Lestat turns Louis into a vampire, which is a good choice for a scene to show in the movie, but it’s hard to fit all of the interesting descriptions that Louis has about being a vampire. So we use voiceover to be like “oh, and the statues seem to move” and we show him looking at a statue once.

Bunny: [Laugh]

Chris: And then we have a specific scene where Louis and Lestat go hunting together, where we can actually show Lestat picking a youth for his first target of the evening. So we make some actual scenes to show what vampire life is like. But those now can be specific events and not just like general statements about their life.

Oren: Does the TV show handle that differently? 

Chris: Yes. So the TV show doesn’t have such a heavy voiceover. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s nice. 

Chris: The TV show instead has the interview. Occasionally they would cut to the interview and talk in more general terms in that kind of conversation. But I think the thing about the show is it has more time.

If you have more time, then you can show a lot more scenes. If you’re trying to get a general idea of what life was like for a vampire, it’s just gonna be easier in a show where you have a number of episodes to do that. 

Bunny: Yeah, I’ve seen What We Do in the Shadows.  

Chris: I also think that the AMC version is willing to depart more from the book, hence this premise where they acted together for a second interview.

It’s not trying to copy as many specific quotes from the book, like the “Oh, statues seem to move”. That line is probably not in the AMC show whereas they were really trying to capture that in the movie. 

Oren: I’m realizing now that one of the most common places this shows up in client manuscripts that I work on is when the client wants to do a political story. They want some big politics to change in the story somewhere, like for there to be a revolution or for the emperor to liberalize or whatever it is.

But they have also picked a character who isn’t really connected to that plot, at all. And sometimes it’s that they are connected, but they have no agency. But in a surprising number of times, it’s not even that they lack agency, they just aren’t where that stuff is happening. They’ll be in the imperial capital running a bakery and we’ll keep hearing about how there are these rebels fighting the evil empire out in the provinces. And I just desperately wish we were there. 

Chris: That’s exactly what a good narrative design, good scene design, and good event design should be avoiding. And sometimes that happens because, very early in the process, the writer just didn’t consolidate their ideas and created something that was too sprawling and too complex to make a cohesive story.

Bunny: To put it in short, it’s basically that in order for it to be dramatic, you have to see it. 

Chris: But you also wanna see it in a dramatic way. We want that conflict and that tension and all of these other things. 

Bunny: Right, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scene being dramatic. 

Chris: Yeah. So generally, you wanna choose key points of change to show.

So if I were to have those two friends, instead of being like “oh, they just grow apart very, very slowly”, sometimes in that situation, you wanna just change it. What if instead of growing apart slowly, there was one dramatic event that created a huge rift? Because many times that is gonna create a better story because you can show that in one scene and it’s more dramatic, but not always.

It’s not always what you want, in which case you can skip forward through time. But a lot of times it just works better if you have things happen faster. 

Oren: Having a story that takes place over a hundred years is very difficult. I think, at least in my case, the reason this tends to happen is that I feel like the same group of authors who want to tell stories of big political change are also the kind of authors who know that historically the views of regular people tend to get left out.

So they come at the story wanting both of those things, and I think that’s where this divide comes from, at least in the clients that I work with. 

Chris: Problems with dramatizing often happen when the storyteller is trying to fit in far too much complexity because you can stuff in more by telling instead of showing.

And so the first thing you have to do, if you want good scenes to actually bring the story to life, is to pare it down to a reasonable size to actually fit and show everything. If you make it too complex, it becomes a lot harder to actually dramatize appropriately because you just don’t have time.

The thing is one of the issues with Malazan, AKA sunk cost fallacy, the book series. 

Oren: [Laughter]

Bunny: [Teasingly] Ohhh, burn.

Chris: Honestly, the way the fans talk about it really strongly suggests that. [Laughter] They’re already mad at me, so I’m not too worried about making them more mad. 

Bunny: That burn was so strong. It smells like pork or whatever it was. [Laughter]

Chris: I did a critique on the first book of the Malazan series, just the beginning.

I criticized it for a lot of things, but actually the thing that I thought was its weakest point–beyond the characters or even how confusing it was, which is everyone’s big complaint–was just how terrible the scene design is. Because as Oren was joking earlier, it does start with just a kid on a wall being like, “Hey, did you hear about this famous guy and how he died because a god smited him? Are the rumors true?”

And anytime you have a character asking if the rumors are true, there’s a good chance the events have not been consolidated appropriately. We could be here on the wall with this precocious child, or we could be watching this guy get smited by a god. That sounds way more interesting. Why isn’t that the representation of these events that we’re seeing? Why are we just watching people talk about it? 

Oren: That’s my favorite thing about the Malazan fan rage response. They’re always talking about how it starts in medias res, and you just need to be able to handle that. 

This is the least in medias res opening I have ever seen. It’s like the opposite of whatever in medias res is. 

Nothing is happening. We are just here with a kid and he is delivering exposition to us. 

Bunny: Yeah. What isn’t in medias res?  

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: On the wall they have this convo about my gal Laseen. 

Oren:  Yeah, everyone loves Laseen. She’s cool. 

Chris: They’re like “oh no, she’s getting uppity”. 

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: And then we cut after this prologue or what have you, we cut till a year later when she has apparently murdered the emperor and taken his place. And I’m just like, why don’t we see that? I would’ve liked to see my gal stab the emperor. 

Oren: Spoilers for the very end of the Temeraire books, but it just reminds me how we spent all of the second to last book building up to the big battle with Napoleon, and the book ends right before the big battle, and then the last book starts after the battle.

Bunny: [Disbelief] No wait really? 

Oren: Yes. Oh, it was so bad.  

Bunny: Wow. It’s like the author lost confidence or something. 

Oren: I think it was that if she had started the last book with this giant climactic battle, where is the rest of the book going to go after that? She made this attempt to reset and be like, “oh, okay, the last book’s actually going to be about the peace negotiations after the war”. Which, sure but we didn’t get to see the war end. It happened somewhere else. Please go back. I wanted to see that part. 

Bunny: That does seem like bad planning. That seems like a victim of the stuff Chris was talking about. 

Chris: With Malazan, again, the dramatis personae at the beginning of this book has like a hundred people, and some of them probably don’t need to be there, but you just know that there’s tons of viewpoints.

And so this really looks like an example where Steve Erickson, the author, was just trying to fit tons in. A lot of fantasy writers have this really big ambitious vision with all these viewpoints, but there are still limits on how much you can fit. And if you try to stuff too much in, you resort to things like a character giving a big lecture instead of showing your message in the story, which is gonna make it come off as preachy. This is another example where you have to create a narrative out of it. 

Oren: There are some books that show the problem of trying to dramatize everything instead of downsizing your story. The Red Knight is an example of this. I don’t use the Red Knight as an example of why multiple POVs don’t work because it has over 20 of them and they’re really bad. The way that you switch between them is super awkward and hard to track. So it’s like trying to critique cars by critiquing a Pinto.

This book tries to dramatize everything. Every character who might matter, even a little bit, gets their own POV and their own chapters. That doesn’t work either. You need to downsize to something manageable. 

Chris: Definitely simplifying the story is really important for having good scenes. If you try to do something too complex, you’ll end up with too many exposition dumps, too many dialogue dumps, telling instead of showing. 

Or if you were to make those all into scenes again, you could end up with something that’s really slow and fractured. So you have to prioritize. Then make sure you’re not leaning on dialogue too hard ’cause a lot of people just don’t know how to dramatize yet because they’re just getting started. They may just not think about it too hard and just start by like “oh, I know how to do this, I’ll have somebody talk about it!” Because that’s just easier, especially if they’re going “how do people know about events that are happening far away” and they’ve forgotten that they’re the overlord of space and time. You can just move the event closer and create an exciting scene out of that. It just may be a reflex to have people talk about the event instead.

Bunny: It’s certainly the easier path. It’s hard to depict dramatic events, especially dramatic events when they involve a lot of action and you’re working in a written medium rather than a visual one. So you don’t have that flash and bang. So you have two difficult things on your hands: narrating action and making it dramatic. 

Oren: The opposite extreme can also create problems. Game of Thrones, for example. They did wanna show all the important stuff, but because the world is so big and there are so many different places where important things could be happening, and they wanted the major characters to be there for them, the later seasons are often critiqued for it feeling like the characters can just teleport around to be wherever they need to be as if travel time’s not a thing anymore 

Bunny: “Often critiqued”.  We know who’s making that critique.

Oren: [Protesting] It’s not me! I have very little opinions on the later Game of Thrones shows. I have not watched them.  

Bunny: Hmm, okay  [Bemused laughter]

Oren: So for all I know, maybe all those people were wrong and actually it does great at this. That’s a good example of how this could go wrong. From my clients, at least one place where I have seen this happen sometimes is in mysteries when the characters need to find clues. 

Clues are challenging. The clue needs to be something that doesn’t just spell out what’s happening ’cause that’s boring. But it also needs to be indicative enough for the characters to make believable inferences and for the audience to be able to tell what’s happening.

So sometimes that’s hard, and I’ve sometimes had clients who instead just had their characters say that they found clues that indicated a certain direction. That makes the mystery not as satisfying. Did you find clues? Can you tell me what those are? I would like to know please. 

Bunny: Yeah, we wanna see the reasoning. We wanna see the clue, and then what led them to make a conclusion about it. I’ve been writing a mystery story. I get the temptation to be “and then I figured this out.” 

No, we’re in the character’s head as they’re investigating, and we need to see that train of thought. 

Chris: And also, we wanna make a problem out of this. Making that engaging story structure right? Instead of just,  “Here’s the answer. Oh, okay, I thought of it. We’re done.” 

Bunny: I made myself an extra challenge where the character is supposed to be reading some detailed paperwork and finds the clue in there. I have them find the clue without making the reader also read the long dry paperwork. [Laughter]

Chris: That’s where we want a summary. But a lot of times those kinds of junctures are changed, showing the causes of distress or problems directly. Sometimes problems are ongoing when the story starts, and that’s fine. But in many cases, instead of a character saying they feel bad, you wanna show an event that makes them feel bad, and that makes the audience kind of go “oh, I would feel bad too if I were in that circumstance”. 

Actually show events playing out instead of somebody being like “oh, I just feel bad about this. Make them do something that they would feel bad about. 

Oren: I’ve mentioned this problem of what if you have a big story with a big setting and you don’t want your characters to just teleport around. Maybe I should have given a possible solution.

Chris: A teleporter, obviously.  

Bunny: [Laughter]

Oren: Okay, so the real solution is to plan your events so that the important ones take place at places the main character already has a reason to be. That’s the best offer I can give, and I’m afraid it is tinged a bit with processed advice because if you have events scattered around your world at wherever it first feels like they should be, that’s how you’re gonna get into the teleporting hero problem.

Instead, what you do is you look at both the world and the plot as one thing and figure out, okay, there are gonna be big battles at these three cities ’cause they are important for these reasons. I will now craft a plot that credibly gets my hero to the place they need to be for those battles while also being engaging and fun.

That’s how you solve that problem. 

Bunny: And I think it’s also important to stress here that while lack of drama can come from just characters talking about things rather than being involved in the events or witnessing them directly, it’s also important to mention that you can have lots of drama in talking scenes.

It just doesn’t come from talking about events that are more interesting happening in other places. 

Chrisb: Talking can facilitate social conflicts and show the scene play out appropriately. It’s more like social events are happening. We have an encounter with a thief, and then we argue with a thief about whether they should come back and give back the item they stole and something is still happening and the social conversation facilitates that, which is very different from “hey, we’re just sitting around having a coffee and, oh, hey, did you hear about this dramatic thing that happened?”

Oren: What about quiet scenes? Because we talk about these sometimes when we do pacing. A story, even a really high action story, can’t be all tension, all the time. You need some dips, and I often describe those as quiet scenes. I’m just wondering — if the quiet scene feels boring, is it likely that that’s a dramatization problem or is something else going on?

Chris: If you have too much to do…. Again, sometimes this is just management of information and management of complexity. Generally, even in a quiet scene, you would have just lower stake arcs kind of playing out. Like the character is now dealing with the guilt from events, or they’re planning their next move, putting their supplies together, taking care of a friend that was injured. So usually they are still solving problems. They’re just more likely to be emotional problems, personal problems, lower stakes. 

Oren: So there’s still movement on something.

Chris: Right. There’s still movement on something that usually happens. It’s just not as exciting as your high tension scenes. 

Bunny: The relevant thing is still happening, it’s just that the relevant thing is downtime. 

Chris: Let’s say we have a quiet scene. We’re tending to the injured friend. The injured friend reveals their dark backstory. That’s the kind of thing where if this was a movie, the movie would actually dramatize that too by showing scenes of the backstory. You notice in any high budget movie/TV show, when a character’s telling a story, they don’t just show the character telling the story. We don’t just watch a character talk. 

We have flashback scenes to dramatize that. Now the reason that we don’t do that in novels — 

Bunny: I have just seen this in a novel actually, and it was pretty awkward ‘cause it was someone telling someone else’s story too and flashback levels of detail. 

Chris: So I should revise that. It’s not usually advisable to do that in a novel– 

Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: — because we can keep it efficient enough and short enough that it’s better than dramatizing it because this is a segment that is not gonna move the story forward. I would say that sometimes there may be exceptions. But in those cases, I would usually pare that conversation down and make it short. A few dramatic statements. 

Sometimes you also need to question: does this character really need this much backstory? Are there more events that you need? If they are just supposed to have a relationship with an antagonist or one tragic event, do you need to talk about their 10 years at school?

Sometimes you just do more than you need to do, and you need to choose what’s important and pare it down. With that kind of situation in a novel, you would just keep it brief instead of dramatizing it or doing a full flashback.

Oren:  As you know, I was once a child. 

Bunny: [Laughter] 

Chris: My mother died tragically. 

Oren: She was beautiful and kind. I have her eyes.

Bunny: [Laughter] I just had to be raised by my brave swordsman father who was very gruff. 

Chris: That covers most of what I wanted to talk about. There’s a lot of different factors that go into choosing what scenes you have. It’s fine to factor in, I need to give this information and set scenes in places that will provide some context.

It’s usually just not the only factor. So if I have my childhood friends, we might set a scene that creates context that they’re childhood friends, but then we also need to have something interesting happening there. And then you want your key points of change, the instigating events that change what happens in the story with some problems and conflict and tension and all that, and wherever possible to multitask what you’re doing to keep the story kind of tight and consolidated.

If we have a disagreement between my two childhood friends, there are also things that foreshadow them becoming a hero and a villain, because that’s something else I also need to do. Put your character arc in the same scene where something really eventful happens. Don’t trade off between them and then just make it engaging.

And that’s basically what you do when you’re dramatizing your story. 

Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this very well dramatized podcast to a close.

Chris:  If you’ve got any useful tips, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons.

First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. 

 [closing theme]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

A lot of old stories are bad. Even the good ones have elements that don’t hold up anymore. But when those stories are popular, both writers and readers want to revisit them, be that in the form of sequels, prequels, or remakes. This presents a conundrum, where making the story better may damage what people liked about it in the first place. This week, we’re talking about what causes such situations, discussing what to do about them, and also cutting the Gordian Knot that is Star Trek’s transporters.

• Buffy Reboot 

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

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Oren: …and…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: So for today we are going to update episode 15, which is from more than 10 years ago about the Hero’s Journey. And our views are a lot more critical of the Hero’s Journey today than they were in 2014. So that’s a free gotcha for anyone who wants to call us hypocrites. You don’t even have to research that one.

Bunny: We’ve had 10 years of character development.

Chris: Yeah. The important thing though is that we stay true to episode 15, so that nobody who liked episode 15 will dislike anything we say now.

Oren: Right. But we also sort of understand that that is not really tenable anymore given our current opinion. So how about we just put in a quick aside to be like “maybe the Hero’s Journey is bad,” and then continue with episode 15, you know, as normal.

Bunny: We could do the thing where if you play our voices backwards or like play the theme song backwards, it says [distorted] “Hero’s Journey not good,” And then the superfans can spot it.

Oren: [sarcastic] Well, I’m completely sold. I don’t see what could go wrong with that. So today we are talking about updating potentially problematic stories, and by problematic, we can of course mean social justice related, but sometimes it’s just that the story was bad.

Bunny: The most basic kind of problematic. It’s just not good. It’s a problem!

Oren: You know, maybe it got a pass at some point because stories used to be worse, or because there was a convention or something, and now it’s not good anymore. So… tastes change over time. And of course the obvious solution that I’m sure a bunch of people are already saying is to just make new stories. And I agree that’s ideal, but that’s not a real solution because as much as I would love to have more new stories, even if we do get that, there are still going to be attempts to update old stories, partly because of money, but also because people like old stories and want to revisit them. That’s just the facts.

Bunny: Yeah. New stories are hard.

Oren: New stories are hard! You know, I like old stories too, right? I like Star Trek. I would be sad if we never made more Star Trek and we’re, you know, just focused on new sci-fi. I do want new sci-fi, but I also want Star Trek.

Bunny: What can I say to make people feel old? Like, I like old media. I like old literature. I like Toy Story.

Oren: Yeah. Big fan of ancient classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Bunny: I’m a stan of Finding Nemo personally.

Chris: Uh, speaking of a story they have not managed to reboot: Buffy. Every time I’ve tried, it’s just gotten stuck in development.

Oren: Yeah. Now it’s got stuck in the fact that we all know Joss Whedon’s terrible. So that’s the latest hurdle to overcome.

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know whether he has – sometimes, he might have rights or not, depending on various situations.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, last time I checked, it’s not that he has rights, it’s just that he’s so associated with it that they would feel weird doing it without him. They think people wouldn’t watch, and who knows. Maybe that’s true.

Chris: [doubtful] Hmm.

Oren: I don’t know. That’s as I understood it. Granted, sometimes these rights agreements are hard to judge from the outside. They aren’t always clear about them.

Chris: Well, what if we just got somebody else to direct and be really mean to the actors.

Oren: Yeah, that should probably work.

Bunny: I think we can just delete Joss Whedon, personally.

Chris: Pretty sure we can find another jerk in Hollywood.

Bunny: There are plenty.

Oren: Yeah, we can find out about their abuses in 15 years.

Bunny: Can’t wait for the exposé.

Oren: All right, so sometimes you have things that are relatively easy to fix. And these are things that outside of bad faith actors, nobody is really going to notice that you changed them. And they get changed all the time, and in fact, no one notices. It’s only when you know, some right wing YouTuber finds one and makes a three hour rage video about it. Then suddenly it matters. Right? And these are things like, in Star Trek there’s an episode where they say – in the Original Series – women can’t be captains. Who cares? No one. We ignore that. We retcon, it’s over. No one cares about that.

Bunny: Good riddance!

Oren: There’s also a Star Trek episode where they establish you can’t go above Warp 5 without causing space global warming.

Bunny: What?

Chris: It was such a bad decision because they had every reason, like, to know that that would be a thing that would be annoying in future episodes.

Oren: Right? Like, pro tip, don’t make the thing your story is about bad to do. It’d be like if we had an avatar sequel that was like “actually, bending causes cancer.” Well, uh… why? I came here to watch bending. I didn’t come here to watch responsible not-bending to avoid cancer. What on earth?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I understand wanting to do a global warming analogy. They should have just used something else.

Oren: They had many options that were not the thing their show depends on. And then you have stuff that is not even at all related to problematic stuff like in The Dresden Files. The first book has this thing about how people are starting to realize that magic might be real because the government didn’t stop drugs. And uh, yeah, that’s… silly.  Why on earth would you – that’s bad! That’s bad worldbuilding.

Bunny: Like LSD breaks the masquerade!

Oren: Or like, I think it’s just part of a list of things that are going wrong, and that’s why people are thinking about magic more. And one of the things that’s going wrong is drugs, you know? Middle class white author, the fear of drugs is always big on their minds, right? So like… that’s a thing. And obviously that was very silly and it was never mentioned again because it was bad. And I think most Dresden Files fans probably don’t even remember that part. So sometimes these things still don’t get fixed, like. Star Wars. There’s no reason that stormtroopers have to be cannon fodder. They don’t have to, but they always are for some reason.

Bunny: But the memes, Oren. Won’t somebody think of the memes?

Chris: Would we recognize the stormtroopers if they’re not cannon fodder?

Bunny: I don’t know!

Chris: Would they even be stormtroopers at that point?

Oren: I think we’re ready for that. I think we’re ready for stormtroopers who can actually fight well.

Chris: I mean, I think if I saw some stormtroopers who knew how to aim, I would just be like, well, clearly those can’t be stormtroopers. They’re spies wearing stormtrooper uniforms.

Oren: What if we called them like stormtrooper version 2.0 or something?

Chris: Yeah, they’re clones again. We went from clones to like convicts and now we’re back at clones.

Bunny: Storm-two-pers!

Oren: Oh, there we go! Got it! It’s still very funny to me that in the first Star Wars movie, stormtroopers are actually supposed to be like elite badasses and they are! And like, the very first scene where they appear, where they just mow down a bunch of rebels in silly hats and then Obi-Wan is like “only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” It’s not until they get onto the Death Star, and the only way for them to not all die is for stormtroopers to not know how to aim, that suddenly “stormtroopers being bad” as a meme is born.

Chris: Oh, really? Because the protagonists were outmatched.

Oren: Yeah. That’s the reason. It’s, and they just kept going. Empire Strikes Back kind of pushed back on it a little bit. Like if you watch the Cloud City sequences, the stormtroopers are not as incompetent as we’re used to thinking of them as, but by the time…

Chris: Yeah. Well that’s kind of how inverse ninja theory works though, right? Because when you fight more ninjas, there’s no way for the protagonist to survive unless all those ninjas are less competent,

Bunny: Or if you fight them one ninja at a time for some reason. 

Oren: Best webcomic ever is when Dr. McNinja, the bad guy, uses inverse ninja theory against him by making a bunch of Dr. McNinja clones. And so Dr. McNinja turns it on the bad guy by making his outfit look different. So now he’s a heroic lone ninja against the horde of ninjas. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s my favorite webcomic moment I’ve ever seen.

Bunny: Beautiful.

Oren: Speaking of old media that I love. So by the time of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers had been completely memified. Right? They were basically done.

Chris: But also, you have to gimme your opinion on this Oren, but it also seems to me that gunfights in general, it can be kind of tough to choreograph without people just not aiming correctly. At least a lot of films and shows do a very poor job.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say that’s correct. I’m not a film choreographer. Uh, I’ve choreographed some fight scenes on stage a couple of times. We don’t use guns there, mostly because in live theater there’s not enough room. But in general, yes, it is more challenging to choreograph gunfights without everyone just being bad at shooting.

Bunny: I feel like the best gunfights are kind of the cat and mouse type gunfights where there’s more emphasis on sneaking and hiding.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: And less on just aiming the weapons at each other.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think in general, guns are just too lethal.

Oren: Yeah, you wanna avoid the like, “everyone is hiding behind something and every once in a while they pop up to take a shot and then get back down.” Right? Unless you’re doing some kind of First World War trench warfare commentary type stuff, that’s real boring. But there are ways to make that more interesting. You’ll have to watch some movies where they do that because I, you know, again, I’m not a film choreographer, but what makes the stormtroopers special is that it’s not that everyone in Star Wars is bad at shooting, it’s that they are uniquely bad at it. So like if everyone in Star Wars was just kind of equally bad at shooting, it would be less of a problem.

But anyway, those are like the easy mode problems that usually are solved without too much trouble, unless they’re a meme, at which point we’re stuck with stormtroopers. Then we have like medium mode problems where these are a major point of the story, but they’re not what I would call load-bearing. And so this is stuff like the droid problem in Star Wars. Where droids are clearly sapient beings that are all slaves and are, you know, enslaved by good guys as freely as bad guys.

Chris: The bizarre thing about this one is how recent Star Wars has only gotten worse-

Oren: Yes.

Chris: -about this. And it’s like, how, how did you take a problem that was bad and then just make it even more bad?

Bunny: They’ve drawn attention to it, which they really shouldn’t have done.

Chris: Right, by having like a rebellion that the protagonist put down, and by having Mando just have a ridiculous amount of bigotry against droids, only to like, “oh, this is the droid I really care about. Now let me grab his body and turn it into a suit for my child.” I mean, it’s just like… really?  This is what we’re doing?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: First step, stop making the problem worse.

Bunny: Second step, don’t, don’t turn people into bodies for your children.

Oren: Or, I mean, if you’re gonna do it, do it equally. Right? Dig up your organic best friend and make them into a vehicle for your children. Oh, I’m sorry, is that gross?

Bunny: Do it, Star Wars.

Chris: And you know, I would be personally all up for taking Star Wars in a direction where all the protagonists admit that they were wrong and that they were slave owners and… You know, I would be up for that drama, but obviously that’s not gonna happen. Tons of people would get very, very angry if their beautiful protagonists were canonically depicted that way. So there’s really only one way to do that. It was just to basically retcon it but not acknowledge that you retconned it.

Oren: Just a soft retcon.

Chris: What? They’re paid workers and they’ve always been paid workers.

Oren: Yeah. Don’t ask.

Chris: Just no one speaks to the past.

Bunny: People weren’t bigoted. They were just kind of mean. Don’t worry.

Chris: What are you talking about? We’ve always given them credit!

Oren: And like, every once in a while there’s news out of Disney that suggests maybe they’re finally going to move the Star Wars timeline forward, and that would be just a great opportunity to do this and just not even mention it. 

Bunny: I don’t know. Is that just gonna fall in the Disney “first gay character” for the 10th time camp?

Oren: Well, the way that you would avoid that is you just wouldn’t say anything. Like the reason the whole “10th first gay character” thing is a meme is because Disney keeps trying to get credit for things that should be basic decency by now. Right? Like Agatha All Along is a show that’s out that’s very good and has a number of gay characters. But you notice that Disney didn’t be like, “look, it is our first gay witch character.” ‘Cause that would be a real silly look. They just let the story speak for itself, right. So anyway, I think that that could work. There are other things where this is tricky, like the Wheel of Time’s gendered magic system. In some ways that can be fixed without any trouble like we saw in the show, the idea that the Dragon can be anyone, it doesn’t have to just be a guy, and they took out all of the like “to channel man magic, you wrestle it into submission and watch football, but to channel woman magic, you submit to it and perform domestic cleaning tasks.”

Bunny: Although one of their extra features I remember watching did still kind of do that, but it’s not in the show proper. It’s one of the like, “you can optionally watch this if you’d like” content.

Oren: They saved the gender essentialism for the special features?

Bunny: Well, it was a while since I watched this, but it was like, “these are the two types of magic and this one is like a river that you have to flow with and this one is like fire that you have to grapple with” and that sort of thing.

Oren: I do really love, and I don’t know if this was on purpose or not, but in the first Wheel of Time episode, they’re doing an initiation ritual for Egwene, I think is her name. Yeah. Egwene or whatever.

Bunny: Egg Ween.

Oren: Uh, and the initiation ritual is that she has to jump in a river and it’s this really violent, difficult, like strenuous task and I can’t help but feel like that was a reference to the idea of “you submit to the magic of feminine rivers.” Right?

Bunny: I think it was. And in that extra feature I mentioned they do show someone floating on water and stuff like that. I’m pretty sure that was intentional.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It was a very weird initiation ritual though. Jump in a river!

Oren:  But this does leave a few odd aspects of Wheel of Time, like now that we’re playing down the differences between man magic and woman magic, we arrive at this odd place where for some reason, only men can see man magic, and only women can see woman magic. And it just kind of leaves you wondering, why? Why is that? That’s weird.

Chris: There’s still the Red Ajah. The full-on man-haters in the show.

Oren: Right. The Red Ajah are actually much harder to fix. I would put them in hard mode. Now, making them all man-hating lesbians is an unforced error. And I don’t remember if the show, I don’t think the show plays up the idea that they’re all gay, or at least that’s where all the gay characters are, is in the Red Ajah. ’cause the show actually has a fair number of queer characters, which is very cool.

Bunny: They also have a poly triad, which is cool.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I would expand their antagonism. So instead of focusing on them being man-haters, because it’s just so terrible to find guys who are gonna murder people and take away their powers. Just focus on them being the security outfit in general, where they’re also busy hunting spies.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right. So it’s not just man-hating that their job is.

Oren: I mean, it feels like the obvious play is to just show them being corrupt. They’ve gotten, you know, they have an important job, but in the service of doing that job, they’ve gotten more powerful and now they like being powerful. As opposed to what’s in the books, which is that, no, taking magic away from men is bad and evil. If you don’t do it, the man will explode and kill everyone around him. But it’s still bad of you to do.

Bunny: Right.

Oren: And then like, I think if you did that, I think you could even still have all the stuff about being afraid of the Red Ajah because they’ve gotten corrupt and now they are, you know, they don’t care. And I’m sure some Wheel of Time fans will tell me that’s already what’s going on in the books. I could just say, go read the books again. That’s not what it is. The idea is that they are inherently bad for going after men who have magic. That’s just portrayed as an evil act, even though everyone agrees it’s necessary.

Bunny: Yeah. I want them to be more interesting. I liked… I’ve only seen the first season, but I liked the Red Ajah lady and her cheekbones.

Oren: Yeah, and I mean obviously you could also…

Chris: She’s a good actress. And very distinctive looking, yeah.

Oren: And I also think you could probably change the plot a little bit because again, in the books, the Red Ajah are like the evilest Aes Sedai. Now granted all the Aes Sedai, except for a handful of main characters, are kind of evil in the books because the author does not like powerful women. And so powerful women are kind of inherently sinister in the series. But there’s no reason the Red Ajah has to be the most evil of them. Right? Like the plot will work regardless of which Ajah the various bad guys come from. So I think that could have worked just fine. I think the show chose to not make that change to the plot because, I don’t know, maybe the writers liked that part. Maybe they were afraid of backlash. It’s hard to say.

Chris: I think they could have also just snuck in giving the Red Ajah, what are they called? The wardens? You know, so they have… so there’s men basically participating in them too. I mean, that would be a deviation from the book, but basically the only reason that they don’t have wardens in the book is because they’re man-haters. So I feel like you could just slip those back in and it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Oren: Yeah. I agree.

Chris: To anybody, but like the fans that are already mad. Yeah.

Oren: The fans you would lose with that, you have already lost by making choices like “the women aren’t terrible.” And, you know, removing the idea of man magic being inherently more powerful than women magic. And now speaking of hard mode, now we are getting to the areas that are legitimately… I do not know how to solve this problem.

Bunny: New story. Erase it, delete it. Put it in the pit with Joss Whedon.

Oren: I mean, it’s like, I’m sad because I like Lord of the Rings. There is a lot about Lord of the Rings that I enjoy. I have only run one Lord of the Rings one-shot, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed me to do things that I don’t normally get to do. I got to really play up the epic nature of the fantasy in a way that feels cliché or silly in most other settings, but man, them orcs. I don’t know what to do about the orcs.

Chris: Okay, so I have a possible suggestion. Obviously we’ve seen from Rings of Power, the thing that just obviously does not work is humanizing the orcs more because if you humanize them only to shove them into the role of being just 100% cruel enemies people hack down. That doesn’t, that just makes the problem worse. Which is what Rings of Power did, was showing like orc babies and families and kind of being like, oh yeah, well maybe they’re these poor orcs, they have nowhere to go, and also the term orc is offensive. You shouldn’t call them that.

Bunny: Wait, that’s part of the show?

Chris: Yeah, it’s in season 2, and season 1 mentions it too. And then, but then we just turn around like, oh, ha ha, fooled you. They’re gonna kill the leader who loves them and follow Sauron instead.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So, I mean, maybe it’s supposed to be a tragedy where the orcs, you know, Sauron turns them against their leader and they make the wrong choice. But we’re just, again, we’re just doing all of the things Lord of the Rings does, and that’s the pitfall of trying to humanize them. It doesn’t really make anything better. But I do wonder if maybe, again, if you were allowed to deviate a little bit from the source material, but not too much, you could just go in the other direction and just go with the idea that they’re like undead elves.

Bunny: Yeah, I mean, it kind of seems like you have to, if you want them to serve the purpose that they served in the originals, which is cannon fodder largely, you can’t go making like a complex society we’re supposed to understand and empathize with, because then it’s pretty clear that they are victims here as well.

Oren: And I should probably clarify ’cause again, to people who sometimes haven’t tried to do this, on some level it seems like the obvious solution is, well, why don’t you just make the orcs like any other fantasy ancestry? And in a new fantasy setting that would work. But in Lord of the Rings, the orcs being evil is so baked into every element of it that I don’t think you can change that aspect of them without just removing the things that even regular everyday Lord of the Rings fans recognize as being important to that franchise. I believe very hard in my soul that nobody outside of the Griftiverse cares about black elves. I think they were perfect. Like your average Lord of the Rings fan is perfectly fine with that. But if you start taking the orcs as evil out of that, that’s gonna change so much. I think you’re gonna have problems.

Chris: Especially since so many of the villains in Lord of the Rings are like shadowy background figures that kind of rely on the orcs to be cruel and… cannibalistic, honestly, so that they don’t really need a leader who’s forcing them to be cruel because the leader is always some shadowy figure in the background. They’re always roving on their own and just trying to eat hobbits and stuff. It’s just… but I do think maybe they could be pushed in the other direction, so they’re just canonically not an actual race or species, and instead they’re just, you know, elves risen from the dead. Or something like that. Shadowy monster demons. Something that’s just more canonical, these are not people.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, you know, as much as I don’t really love praising Wheel of Time, that is actually something Wheel of Time has, is that the cannon fodder evil monsters are just kind of Frankenstein creatures that the Dark One cooked up. There’s no implication that they have a culture, right? There’s no menus for meat to be back on, that sort of thing.

Bunny: And the thing is, the Lord of the Rings setting already seems to have something like this with those like undead king guys, right? Like it wouldn’t be too far a stretch if you were like, well it’s, you know, thematic resonance. You can make these undead king guys. You can also make this weaker undead-ish version of elves or whatever.

Chris: Isn’t there even lore about the orcs being made from elves that were tortured or something?

Oren: Sometimes, the lore on orcs is kind of inconsistent, and it requires digging into a bunch of secondary source material that I do not have time for. But yes, there is some material about how they were corrupted elves in some places. So if you played that up and you know, played down the idea of them being their own species that is separate but similar to other species, I think you’d probably be at least better than what we have now. The non-social justice related thing, there’s also stuff like Star Trek’s transporters.

Bunny: Famously.

Oren: I just, I wish we could go back and…

Chris: Transporter cancer. Instead of warp cancer, how about transporter cancer? I mean, that would be kind of gloomy in the setting because everybody’s been doing it.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, okay, so if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, the transporter is just a nightmare for trying to plot episodes because it makes it way too easy to get into or out of a place. And a lot of plots depend on it being hard to get into and out of places. And to say nothing of all the different abuses of it, where you can, you know, beam bombs over. And so when writers start to think about this, it’s like the entire episode becomes an exercise in reasons why the transporter won’t work, and that’s just boring. Like, why have this piece of technology if you’re never allowed to use it? And so if it were up to me, I would never have invented transporters.

Chris: Transporter global warming!

Bunny: You can transport, but it turns you into a lizard. 

Chris: It makes you evolve.

Bunny: You evolve into a higher form of humanity.

Oren: Maybe this makes me a toxic fan, but if a new Star Trek series came out and it was like, by the way, we all stopped using transporters because we found out that they give you cancer. Like, I wouldn’t like that. Even though I don’t like transporters. That would seem bad to me. 

Bunny: Oren’s hot take is “transporters bad, cancer worse.”

Chris: Well, I think the problem is that it’s a utopian setting. And so the assumption would be if the technology was unsafe, they would’ve caught that a long time ago.

Oren: Right? Or like we could come up with another reason, right? Like we could say that one of the God-aliens running around has blanketed the entire universe in a transporter stopping field, something. We could do something like that.

Bunny: The very specific God.

Chris: Yeah, it just becomes very arbitrary.

Oren: Right, and I wouldn’t like that if they did that. I would roll my eyes very hard at that, even though I support the goal.

Chris: I know what fits this setting! The Transporter Clone Wars! But what if there was a war? I mean, they’ve already done this a couple times with like, androids and eugenics. Where there’s a big war in the setting, and then as a result something gets banned to an extreme degree. So we could just do it with the transporters. There were, somebody made a transporter clone army. It caused a huge war, and the transporters were banned.

Bunny: Transporters are too much trouble.

Oren: They also did that with time travel stuff in Discovery, which went to the future to explain why they don’t have time travel technology. They were like, oh, yeah, we all banned that after the Temporal Cold War.

Chris: See? See, it’s the perfect solution.

Oren: You know, I gotta admit, I think we’ve cut the Gordian Knot. All right. I’m gonna write to Alex Kurtzman and explain to him that we’ve solved this problem.

Bunny: Have you got transporter issues? Are your transporters gumming up your plots? Call 1-800-Oren.

Oren: No, this is Chris’s idea. I’m not stealing it!

Bunny: Oh, 1-800-Chris.

Oren: Any time there’s a problematic technology in Star Trek, there was a war about it and everyone banned it. Don’t ask questions about why the species who love war banned it. Just go with it on this one. Okay. Well, with that, I think we have hit the end of our time and I mean, we solved transporters. I think we can call it a day on that.

Bunny: It’s been a pretty successful episode.

Chris: Yeah. If you would like us to solve your problematic technology with a war, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

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

What if everyone in this episode was… A GHOST? We’re not, but we could be, and then choices would have to be made about how to portray our audio afterlife. That’s our topic this week: all the different ways writers can depict what happens on the other side. From fun and cartoony town builders to the most serious spookums, we’ll discuss the options authors have at their disposal, plus the pros and cons of each.

• Spirit Fairer 

Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Bunny] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…

[Chris] Chris!

[Bunny] And… 

[Oren] Oren!

[Bunny] And I am speaking to you from beyond the grave because the podcast died in episode 505, very disappointingly. It’s pretty misty where I’m at. 

[Oren] Ooh!

[Bunny] I can see some shapes, but the special effects budget isn’t that large, guys. Don’t expect much.

[Oren] Wait, hang on. So, the podcast died in episode 505. This is 508. Does that mean for the last two podcasts we’ve been dead and didn’t know it? Is that the kind of afterlife story we’re doing? 

[Chris] Yeah, we just had a dramatic twist where we realized we’re dead. 

[Bunny] The twist happened between episodes, but it did happen. Rest assured. 

[Chris] That’s why we haven’t been getting any comments. I’m like, why can’t anybody hear us? 

[Bunny] Oh, oh, oh, okay. That’s why. But now, we’ve breached the barrier between the land of the living and the land of the podcast dead. So, we can upload 506 and 507 just fine now. Don’t worry. I’m going to be super cryptic about whether I’m a ghost, but you know, I am dead and piloting a really cool boat with orchards and fishing off the back, and it’s been a great time.

[Chris] Yeah, but even though we’re already dead, we can still die somehow? 

[Oren] Yeah.

[Chris] There’s still an oblivion that we can go to, maybe through a door or something. That’s very disappointing. 

[Bunny]There’s extra super death. 

[Oren] Yeah. Look, it turns out that the possibility of death underpins a lot of storytelling, and when you take that away, stories get weird. So, most stories will introduce double death because they don’t know how else to do it. 

[Bunny] Extra-super-maxi-extreme-ultra death. 

[Oren] And to be clear, I am most stories in this situation, right? I’m doing that too. I’m currently working on a story that sort of takes place in an afterlife, and I’ve introduced double death because I did not know how to tell this story without it.

[Chris] You have to do something for stakes.

[Bunny] And you can approach double death in different ways depending on the type of story you’re telling. Certainly if you’re like a ghost who’s restless because of a murder or whatever. The double death is moving on to peace.

[Chris] You could have a low-stakes, happiness-based story, like a cozy, that’s in the afterlife where we lose our afterlife coffee shop. 

[Bunny] Oh, we’re going to get the afterlife mob boss to sponsor the rebuilding of our afterlife coffee shop. 

[Chris] We could just say that the afterlife is kind of miserable and everybody in there’s miserable. But if we create this coffee shop, suddenly it’ll make the afterlife less miserable, and that’s a thing that we are invested in. 

[Bunny] Right. 

[Oren] Is the afterlife my neighborhood now? Because a coffee shop would make us all a lot less miserable.  

[Bunny] Oh no, the afterlife is being gentrified. The afterlife has a light rail now. 

[Chris] Oh, no, no, no. Too real. Too real.  

[Bunny] I mean a very cozy afterlife, which I was just referencing because I’ve played 10 hours of it in the past week, is again, a spirit farer where the extra-double death is like, the character has resolved their daddy issues and now they can move on peacefully, and that’s a video game.

[Chris] Move on to where?

[Bunny] It’s just through the door, Chris. Don’t worry. 

[Oren] It’s probably fine. 

[Chris] Death can’t tell you. 

[Bunny] Gwen’s happy. 

[Chris] They still can’t tell you what’s on the other side.

[Bunny] In that game I guess you’re technically, you’re the spirit farer, so you’re ferrying people through a liminal space, and it’s kind of the afterlife, but also kind of not. But I think it counts because definitely the mysterious slash liminal afterlife is one of several different kinds of afterlife that writers tend to use. One is this one. One is the scary, the spooky, frightening kind. And one is the pedestrian kind, where it’s just basically normal life, but with maybe one or two things different. And one is the spunky kind, where everything’s funky and weird, but in a spooky Halloween-y kind of way.

[Chris] I have to admit that every time you say the word “liminal”, something inside me recoils, but I know that you’re actually using it appropriately, that this is an appropriate use of the word “liminal”. It’s just−

[Bunny] Wait, how do people use it? 

[Chris] It’s become a buzzword where people use it to show off their vocabulary or make something seem mysterious and profound. 

[Bunny] Oh no! 

[Chris] Yeah. 

[Bunny] Don’t take my liminal from me! 

[Oren] We get it in angry reactions to our articles sometimes where we’ll criticize something and say, “This didn’t make sense,” or “This character didn’t act according to the way they’ve been previously established to act.” Things like that. And someone will be like, “Oh, well, you see that character or that plot point exists in the liminal space between being good and being bad, presumably.” 

[Bunny] No! Oh my gosh. 

[Chris] Yeah.

[Bunny] That’s too bad. I am justified here, though. 

[Chris] No, it is fair to call limbo liminal.

[Bunny] Limbo. Maybe we can just go with limbo and sidestep this whole issue because that is definitely one of the types. It’s the one where it’s probably misty and hard to make out, and everyone tends to have unfinished business. It’s the place between life and double death.

[Chris] I think that’s particularly useful for stories where the protagonists are still alive, because then we can bring in the afterlife without making it too much like when people die, they’re not really dead, because we could just… go to the next neighborhood over and talk to them like in Crescent City, apparently. 

[Oren] In Crescent City, the fact that there’s just a place where ghosts hang out, and one of the ghosts there knows the answer to the mystery, and we just don’t go talk to them. Ick.

[Bunny] Who killed you? I don’t know. Just go ask. 

[Oren] We could find out, if only Danika could tell us what happened, and then at the end of the book it’s, “Oh yeah, we could have gone and asked her like any time, and we just didn’t.”  

[Chris] But having that temporary space where ghosts go sometimes and then they leave again, allows for some contact with people who are dead without it being plot-breaking or world-breaking in some way. It’s a very different world if every time somebody dies, all I have to do is make a seance phone call and talk to them. 

[Bunny] And you can make the rules more flexible, right? If it’s a mysterious limbo and we don’t know a ton about it, then you have more wiggle room for the connection and the seance being unclear rather than a telephone call.

[Oren] And that kind of afterlife world is also particularly useful if your story is going to focus heavily on the fact that the characters are dead or are maybe dying or are going to die or whatever. Right? That’s a big part of your story because it lends itself pretty well to it because you have to make peace with whatever your issues are or be okay with the way you died or solve your own murder or something in this space as opposed to a story set in Asgard with some Einherjar who did technically die. This is technically the afterlife for them, but we don’t really care how they died that much. Right? It’s probably not that big a deal. 

[Bunny] No, don’t worry about it. One book that does the mysterious afterlife is a book called Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “i” sound], which might be Liesl & Po [pronounced with a long “e” sound]. I think it is actually Liesl & Po [long “e”], because recently I met someone named Liesel, and it wasn’t Liesl [long “i”], and I embarrassed myself.

[Oren] We’ll split the difference and call it Liesl & Po [long “a”]. 

[Bunny] Liesl & Po [long “a”]. 

[Oren] That way we know we’re wrong. 

[Bunny] Yeah, you can annoy both sets of people. 

But Poe is a ghost who has been in the liminal space, which is called the Other Side in this book, long enough that he’s pretty much lost all of his memories, including his body and his gender for most of the book. So, for most of the book, Po is it. And ghosts are able to pass beyond the other side when whatever unfinished business they have is completed− so, Poe remembering who he was. And for Liesl, bringing her father’s ashes to a significant place for him to be buried and also resolving his murder. But she kind of does that on accident. She didn’t know he was murdered.

[Oren] You solve a murder sometimes. It just happens. 

[Bunny] Yeah, oops! 

[Oren] My favorite is, and I’m not just talking about Hazbin Hotel here, but I am talking about Hazbin Hotel, a lot of new stories tend to not really know what to do with hell. It tends to get thematically confused. Is it a place you get sent for actual bad things? Or is it a place you get sent for being cool and rad? 

[Bunny] Yeah.

[Oren] Sometimes it wants them to be both. 

[Chris] I’ve seen the movies that seem to embrace hell being a bad place and are building off of Christianity in some way. The thing that they often do is have the one character who dies by suicide because then they can say, oh, see, that’s a sin, so now they go to hell. But it’s also very sympathetic. Nobody actually wants to believe that people who die that way go to hell. Now there’s somebody that they can go rescue from hell.

[Oren] The problem with that kind of story is that if you think about it for even five seconds, you realize that basically nobody deserves the things that happen to you in most versions of hell−of the Christian hell anyway. Like maybe some of history’s greatest monsters. That’s its philosophical point. But most people, even most bad people, clearly don’t deserve that. 

It came up in The Sandman show where they were able to rescue one of the bullies, the most sympathetic of the bullies. The other bullies all live in hell forever. But I don’t think that what those bullies did was bad enough to be in hell forever. Just seems bad, man. 

[Bunny] Definitely, hell is the most common place that I’ve seen the scary afterlife type of trope. Outside of classical mythology or works drawing on classical mythology, I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of stories with the afterlife as a prominent part where the afterlife is definitely horrible and frightening.

[Oren] It would be depressing, right? It would be hard to have a real story just set in the classical Christian hell, right? You’d have to do something to change that up. 

[Chris] It’s like you need the uncertainty. So just as you need the after-afterlife so that we have stakes, something could go wrong if characters were in hell, they would also need some hope of escape to create tension at that point. We can’t just have everything bad forever. That also is tensionless.

[Bunny] And I think that goes to what, how stories interact with the afterlife and what they use it for. Three of the main ones I could think of are the character is dead and navigating the afterlife, so our main character is figuring out what this thing is all about. There’s a book called Elsewhere where the character is dead, and basically it turns out the afterlife is an island where everyone ages backwards until they’re ready to be reborn as little babies. 

[Chris] Honestly, that’s probably one of the better uses of the aging backwards trope that I’ve heard of. I’ve seen other stories where people age backwards, but that actually gives it a reason to happen. 

[Bunny] Yeah. It’s like, you grow old and then you die, and then you go to this place and you grow young, and then you’re born again. It makes a sort of sense, right? In this case, the tension and the story is about she really wants to get back to earth, and now she’s trying to make peace with the fact that she’s dead and whether she wants to speed up the process and do an early release or something, whatever it’s called, where instead of living out a full afterlife, they’ll age you down really quick and send you back. And it’s about her being like, maybe I don’t want that. Maybe I want to experience this afterlife thing. And I think that’s what she ultimately does, but she makes her peace with it. And then the book ends with her in the future, having aged back down to a little baby and being sent back to earth. 

[Oren] The advantage of making your own kind of abstract afterlife that isn’t obviously modeled off of the one that we’re familiar with, makes it easier to have a wider number of people there. Because if it’s a Christian afterlife, you have to start asking some questions. 

[Bunny] It’s good for a joke. Good Omens jokes about what composers ended up in hell. 

[Oren] It’ll be like, okay, I guess the story either can’t have any Jews in it, or we have some uncomfortable questions to answer. That’s a little weird. Whereas if you make up your own afterlife, it’s less of a problem because it could just be everyone ends up here on the weird town-building boat. This is a non-denominational place. Don’t worry about it. 

[Bunny] And they all happen to be connected to me in some way. 

[Oren] Yeah. 

[Chris] I think that’s the other convenience about the limbo, right? If you say, oh, it’s a temporary space, then you don’t really have to define what happens or ask any of the questions. 

[Oren] Or you could be like The Good Place and say you’ve made up your own, but it’s definitely just heaven and hell. Every religion got it about 5% correct. Mm-hmm..

[Chris] Uh-huh.

[Bunny] The Good Place is definitely the−at least from what I understand, having not seen it−the pedestrian afterlife where it’s pretty much real life, but there’s… a couple things changed. They’re dead, but it’s just a normal neighborhood, right?

[Chris] Uh, kind of.  

[Oren] It’s kind of complicated. There’s a whole in-universe reason why they’re in what looks like a normal neighborhood. The plot is hard to explain, but suffice to say, the actual afterlife is separated into the good place and the bad place. And the good place is heaven. The bad place is clearly hell, even though they claim otherwise. And I love The Good Place. It’s a fantastic show. But I did notice that as they were starting and they were claiming that this was not just Christianity, it is like… I’m not saying there aren’t any other religions that this matches, but I can name several that it clearly does not. 

[Bunny] I think that would count as pretty much earth. More or less, at least in how it looks. That and Elsewhere, except Elsewhere also apparently has talking animals, which I learned from its Wikipedia; I don’t remember that. But it does have the same thing for animals, so you got that fun thing where the character can meet up with their childhood pet or whatever.

[Oren] The Good Place sometimes does the whole, oh yeah, this place is actually a mind-bending alternate reality, but we’re not, we don’t have the budget for that. So, your brain is interpreting it as an office. 

[Bunny] Sure. We’ll go with that.

[Oren] The Good Place is fond of that premise, because it saves on the budget.

[Chris] That is the issue with world building in any TV shows, right? 

[Bunny] It’s the plot equivalent of the misty space because we don’t have special effects. 

[Chris] Honestly, that’s one of the reasons why CHAOS, the show, it has problems as a show, but it’s basically like an alternate world urban fantasy, but where the Greek gods are an active presence in people’s lives, and we do have the whole Greek underworld thing.

[Oren] The premise is what if Zeus was real, and it’s just as terrible as you think.

[Bunny] That’d be pretty terrible. 

[Chris] And we have, when they go into the underworld, there’s another hole that’s like the terrible place that you don’t want to go when you’re in the underworld. Apparently, people can still leave it. So maybe if we went in there, there would be another after-afterlife. After-after-afterlife. 

[Bunny] There’s another classic way that stories engage with the afterlife, with the prime example being Orpheus and Euridice, is trying to rescue someone, right? Bring them back. Don’t look at them. Don’t look over your shoulder. Don’t you dare! 

[Oren] I love Greek mythology for starting the weird type of confusion of, yeah, I’m in the realm of the dead, but I’m not dead, right? I don’t have the ghost type, so I take different damage types as I’m down here.

[Bunny] I do love that trope, though, unabashedly. Just a living person going to the land of the dead or the spirit world or whatever. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes those are different. I guess that’s another thing is whether the spirit world is the same thing as the land of the dead, which makes me think of Avatar, and I’m not sure if they ever answered that.

[Oren] Sort of. In Korra, we do meet some just ghosts hanging out in the spirit world, and that’s a whole thing. It’s unclear if that’s where all of the dead go or if Iroh was just there because he’s particularly cool. Although, man, Avatar, the spirit world is a huge problem if you try to run an Avatar RPG, because canonically, bending doesn’t work there, and players do not want to spend an entire session without their bending. They get ornery. 

[Bunny] This is where your Kyoshi warrior shines. 

[Oren] You have to think of a reason for them to still be able to get their bending. 

[Chris] The fantasy audience does not like it when their magic is taken away. 

[Bunny] No.

[Chris] And, of course, RPG players do not like it when their most powerful abilities are taken away.

[Oren] Right. With Avatar, with the show, it’s like, okay, whatever. The audience can tolerate it for a while, right? Don’t get me wrong, it would be sad to have an entire season in the spirit world and no bending. That’s not what I’m here for. But one episode? Sure. But with a session of an RPG, they’re crawling the walls by the end of it.

[Bunny] Funny enough, I had this problem with a story I had once intended to write where the first book of it was set in an alternate fantasy world, and then it− the twist would be that it’s a portal fantasy, and I think they’re going to a spirit world when they go through the portal, but it’s actually earth. And then I was like, wait but then the second book is set on earth, and nobody wants that. 

[Chris] Yep.

[Oren] I had a slightly different problem. The first time I envisioned a story within an afterlife premise, I realized that this is a problem because it just raises the expectation that there’s going to be a plot about how each character died because they’re in the afterlife, and I realized I didn’t want to do that. That wasn’t what was interesting to me. So, I changed it a bit to have one character who is a dead human. Everyone else is just a magical creature who lives there. So I can have one plot about the human and how they died, and I don’t have to do it for everybody else.

[Bunny] As a treat. 

[Chris] You do want to make it feel like the afterlife somehow, which is a trick. So, it doesn’t seem like we’re just in another world. It would be a little strange if your character dies and then it seems like they just go through a portal into a fantasy dimension. 

[Oren] That is kind of what I want.

[Bunny] But what if I did do that?

[Oren] I want an excuse for a modern character to be in a fantasy world, which I know that’s called portal fantasy. 

[Chris] Well, we just need some kind of theme that accurately reflects that this is an afterlife in some way. 

[Bunny] Oh, stop that, Chris. Don’t be applying your logic and critical thinking to this.

So, I think the last kind of afterlife that− well, there’re lots of different kinds of afterlives. I don’t want to be discriminating here, but the last major genre of afterlife that I could think of was the spunky afterlife, where it’s weird and wild, but in a spooky way. And usually darkly comedic. I feel like this is entirely Tim Burton. 

[Chris] Oh, like Beetlejuice? 

[Bunny] Yeah, exactly. 

[Chris] One of my favorite things about the afterlife and Beetlejuice, again, it’s supposed to be very comedic was−and I have not seen the new Beetlejuice, by the way. I probably should, and it is just the fact that they become ghosts who are haunting their house, which was really cool; we’ve had more of those types of stories since then, but you know, at the time being from the perspective of the ghosts haunting the house had a lot of novelty−was the fact that they when they try to go outside their house, there’s just sand and sandworms that want to eat them.  

[Bunny] They just appear on Dune.

[Chris] It’s like Dune, but way wackier because they are black- and white-striped and much goofier. But yeah, that’s definitely the dark and wacky and goofy. It’s like, nope, you can’t leave your house. Sandworms will eat you. It’s like, okay, that was a little random, but the overall world is just colorful enough−because it’s comedic, especially−that it can handle the low realism, and I think it’s a little bit more disparate.

[Bunny] Everything’s bizarre. The afterlife is a bureaucracy, too. 

[Chris] I have to go and get a number and wait in line, and the number is−

[Bunny] −it’s got caseworkers, and everyone’s wearing funky prostheses. 

[Oren] Yeah, the idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy is very popular. We can’t just send people magically to where they need to be. There needs to be infrastructure for that. 

[Chris] It’s a great contrast between the things that we experience in the real world and the afterlife, which is supposed to be mystical and magical, and so there’s novelty in mixing those two things together. 

[Bunny] Probably the most obvious one in terms of the contrast is Corpse Bride, because the real world is mostly grayscale. And then you get to the afterlife, and it’s bright and it’s colorful and there are big bouncy musical numbers. And there’s literally a bar with a band singing. 

[Chris] Yeah.

[Oren] Which is the opposite of how a lot of purgatory stories are shown because if you have a story that takes place in purgatory, you can basically just shoot anywhere and then put a gray filter over it, and now you’re in purgatory.

[Bunny] It’s like the blue filter for night. Don’t worry about it. 

[Oren] I was just wondering if you’d seen Hazbin Hotel. I was curious where you thought it fell on the spectrum. 

[Bunny] I have not seen it. I haven’t seen most TV. I’m just bad at TV shows. 

[Oren] That’s why you’re so normal. 

[Bunny] Oh, I don’t know.

[Oren] That’s why you’re so well-adjusted.

[Bunny] That means I can’t do the banter. It’s a trade-off. 

[Chris] That one takes place in hell, but it’s definitely a very wacky hell. A lot of very colorful character designs. 

[Oren] Yeah. When you die, you become a fun, animated character, and you might get some animalistic traits if you’re feeling like a furry, or you might just be a weird-looking guy, a weird little guy. So, it allows for a lot of creative freedom. 

[Bunny] Well, this begs the question, do you think you are a furry, a weird little guy, or just having some animalistic characteristics? 

[Oren] I’ll never tell. I liked that show. It is fun, but it does show some of the thematic clashes with the way that it’s trying to portray hell because it−on the one hand, it wants to do the whole “hell is an actual punishment that you get sent for doing real bad things” but also, hell is the cool place where you go for wearing leather jackets and having a healthy sex life. 

[Bunny] Is Satan not the ultimate bad boy? 

[Oren] I mean, they make that joke, but at the same time, the whole story is weird because the protagonist is theoretically trying to help people improve so they can get into heaven. But by the end of the first season−mild spoilers, I guess; the show’s been out for a while now, but still−by the end of the first season, they’ve also basically declared war on heaven and fought off an attempt by heaven to kill them all, and so it’s unclear why they would even want to go to heaven at that point. It seems like the only problem is that hell is an exploited population that hasn’t been able to have a proper representative democracy.

[Chris] Once too many angels are jerks, then heaven’s just the jerky place for privileged people. 

[Oren] And maybe that’s on purpose, I don’t know. Maybe season two is going to start with them being like, actually, trying to go to heaven makes you a class traitor. Let’s try to clean up here in hell, because the only problem with hell is that it’s ruled by a bunch of jerk-ass demon lords. So, we’ll overthrow them, and everything will be great. 

[Bunny] So, Satan’s a bad boy who is also Marx. 

[Oren] In this story, Satan or Lucifer is a disaffected emo kid. The idea is that he tried to do something cool and it failed. So now, he hangs out in his room and is sad most of the time, which is not an uncommon portrayal of Satan. 

[Chris] But also in hell in the show, they have their mercenary hoard of cannibals that they use. 

[Oren] People who did actual bad things, right?

[Chris] It’s kind of ambiguous. 

[Bunny] In addition to the double death, we also have the hell and then the real double hell where the actual bad people are. Is that the shtick? 

[Oren] Well, it’s all the same place. It’s just like how they feel in portraying it in different episodes, right?.

[Chris] There’s double death, I think. In Hazbin Hotel, the angels can permanently kill people that are in hell, I think. And then what? Do they just go to oblivion or something? 

[Oren] Unclear. Question mark. 

[Bunny] I feel like we see hell a whole lot more than we see heaven in stories just because most depictions of heaven seem boring and tensionless just because everything’s pretty good. That’s the selling point of heaven. Right? I don’t- I can’t think of a story set in heaven. 

[Chris] So, What Dreams May Come, again, it uses the kind of surreal approach where we try to make the environment colorful and creative. And they do, again, they have−it’s basically about a family, and so they do have the one person who dies by suicide, who they have to rescue from hell, right? And that’s how they end up escalating the tension in that movie. But in the beginning− this is starring Robin Williams−we have when he first enters, his landscape is a painting literally with paint. So they use a lot of creativity there and build this wondrous atmosphere.

In that case, the novelty−and just obviously death has some tension to it−works okay, but then when they want to actually escalate things, they still end up including hell.

[Bunny] Definitely going with a more…. Taking the spunky afterlife, or just going that more creative route to heaven rather than just your typical Christian heaven or something like it,  makes things a lot more interesting.

[Chris] Utopias are always difficult to write in. You can do kind of personal stories, but if you’re having a utopia, you’re eliminating any world-level source problems, and that just makes it much harder to plot.

[Oren] Oh, I do feel like I should just give a shout out to Hades, one of my favorite games of all time.

[Bunny] Yes! How did we not talk about Hades? 

[Oren] The reason why we didn’t talk about Hades that much is that it’s only technically the afterlife. 

[Bunny] Oh, okay. 

[Oren] Our protagonist is like a god who was born there, right? He didn’t die, and we try not to think too hard about all the minions he’s smashing his way through on his way up to visit Mom.

[Bunny] Don’t worry about it. 

[Oren] That’s a great game, but it’s only kind of an afterlife. With that, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

[Bunny] We’ll kill this episode, if you will. 

[Oren] Let the episode die. Kill it if you have to. 

[Chris] If you would like to resurrect this episode as another episode later…

[Bunny] Ooh!

[Chris] …consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

[Oren] That’s very good. 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 is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro music]

Don’t you just hate it when characters stubbornly refuse to change their views when encountering new evidence? Unless it’s a character we like, then they’re bravely sticking to their guns in the face of adversity. That’s clearly a double standard, but it’s a fairly mild one when looking at all the ways we inconsistently judge characters. Our topic this week is figuring out how and why this happens, plus what we can do about it.

• If Books Could Kill

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

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

This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…

Oren: Oren

Chris: And

Bunny: Bunny

Chris: Now we all know that everybody likes Bunny’s evil laugh since Bunny is the villain

Bunny: [laughs evilly] 

Chris: But somehow people find it weird when Oren and I as protagonists laugh. Isn’t that a little unfair? Shouldn’t all the characters get to do an evil laugh.

Oren: It’s only because my evil laugh sounds like a screaming goat. People are not into it.

Bunny: Maybe my laugh is just inherently better.

Oren:  It seems like it.

Chris:  It’s entirely justified, yeah. OK.

Bunny: You’re not villains, so you don’t get to.

Oren: I’ve also been told my normal laugh sounds like an evil laugh, so when I try to do an evil one, it’s just kind of forced.

Bunny: Maybe you should just lean into it. Maybe you’re destined to become a villain. 

Oren: Maybe. Yeah. I’m just gonna join the bad side. 

Chris: Gosh. That would be so awkward if there was a villain who just had a very forced laugh all time. Gosh, it just would set off my embarrassment fear.

Bunny: Cringing on behalf of the villain.

Chris: Yeah, probably. So more seriously, we’re gonna talk about unfair or character double standards that generally reflect unfairness in the real world. 

Oren: What do you mean unfairness, Chris? I have been told by a number of very reliable internet commentators that discrimination doesn’t exist anymore–if it ever did. I think we’re probably fine. I don’t see what’s the problem.

Bunny: We did it. We solved it. Haven’t you heard about Obama?

Oren: I read an entire book by Stephen Pinker about how discrimination doesn’t exist anymore. [laughs]

 Bunny: Oh, that was Pinker. I didn’t realize that. 

Oren: Well, he’s a person who has said that. I don’t know if he still believes it, but that was one of the premises of The Blank Slate. It’s a very unfortunate book.

Bunny: Oh, I say that because that is a name I know from If Books Could Kill. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But any case, we have run into a number of people who just weren’t aware of some of these dynamics, and I think it is really important when we’re talking about stories and criticizing stories especially, that we understand the double standards that are out there, so that we don’t inadvertently reinforce them when we’re talking about stories.

There are a number of stories where, unfortunately, we criticize everything. 

Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately.

Chris: But some stories we have to tiptoe around a little bit. Not because we are afraid to criticize them, but because other people are applying a really unfair lens to them. And if we just criticize them normally as we would any other story, we can seem like we’re feeding into that or make that worse because that’s how a lot of this stuff works.

People just reflexively pile onto something and it’s not necessarily that people are intending to be unfair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t require intent. 

Oren: Although, to be fair, there is a lot of intent. There is a whole ecosystem of people who do an outrage grift based on this sort of thing. They’ll look at a fight scene from Echo, the more recent Marvel show, and be like, “this fight scene is so bad. It’s so much worse than Daredevil. Why are they making the fight scenes woke?”

Bunny:  The punching is too feminist.

Oren: Right. So what they do is they’ll slow the fight scene down or play an early version of it that doesn’t have all of the smooth editing or all of the effects they put in to make it look more real. Or they’ll zoom in really close and be like, “Aha! If you zoom in at fifty times zoom, you’ll see that they didn’t actually make contact.”

Now, of course, if you apply any of these standards to Daredevil, the show that they claim is so much better before everything was woke, Daredevil’s fights would also be bad because this is an impossible standard we’re suddenly holding echoes fights to. And it’s not like Echo is a perfect show, but these people are either extremely uninterested or very bad at actual critique, so they come up with this nonsense instead.

Bunny: I take it you’ve been steeped in the sewage of this discourse recently.

Oren: I try to keep abreast of what they’re saying ’cause it’s gonna come up in comments and I need to know if someone is repeating a narrative they heard deep in right wing YouTube.

You can also just tell if you look at public comments on some new trailer that has a visibly marginalized character in it, and all the comments are saying the same thing. They all got that from somewhere.

Chris: At this point, any popular speculative fiction show whose main character is a woman of color, right? You can just guarantee. It’s not hard to identify which shows are gonna be the target of this.

Oren: Right. And the way that it typically works is that these grifters will pick a show that has a woman or a person of color, or a woman of color as its protagonist or a main character, and they’ll hate on it for a couple months from the early trailers.

Then it’ll come out, and if it is well received, they move on and pretend that they never talked about it. And if it’s poorly or mixed reception, they’ll keep hammering on it for the next year. And they do this with almost perfect prediction. This is what happened with Prey where when the Prey trailer first came out, they were like, “Ah! Indian woman in the movie! Blah, blah, blah.” But then everyone loved Prey, so they all immediately stopped talking about it. Whereas with something like The Acolyte, which people didn’t really like, they were like, “Aha! The wokeness.” And that’ll power their algorithm for the next year.

Bunny: And it sucks for us because stories featuring marginalized characters can also just be bad independent of that. But now there’s this whole gross ecosystem of obfuscation.

Chris: On one hand, when we do criticize a story…yeah, it can possibly make it look like it’s worse, but at the other hand, we are also creating discourse about that story and can actually benefit a story too. Having that extra discourse, even if it’s critical.

So, all stories should have some level of criticism if they’re big budget, or bestselling or really popular stories. 

Oren: Right.

Chris: We don’t need to do that with somebody’s unknown novel that’s languishing on Amazon. But generally, all stories are worth discussing, including stories that star marginalized characters. And of course they’re gonna have flaws in them too, like everything else. 

Oren: There’s definitely a line you wanna walk there where you don’t want to just pile on, and you don’t wanna only critique stories by, or about, marginalized people. But you also don’t wanna ever do that ’cause then that suggests you don’t take them seriously.

For a long time, I avoided talking about The Broken Earth in my various oppressed mages discussions just because it didn’t seem fair to go after a black author for doing something that white authors have been doing for decades. But, like, eventually I did have to talk about it ’cause it was getting weird that I wasn’t mentioning it. ‘Cause it’s a very influential book, and if I never talked about it it would be like I don’t take it seriously. But it’s important. It matters.

Chris: Yeah. It’s important and influential and worth talking about.

Bunny: And I feel like these reactionary lines of reasoning go a couple of paths. One of them is that the character is only marginalized to get favor with annoying feminists, or it’s been infiltrated and bent to the whims of these feminists. The second one is representation as being forced down our throat, because you have to look at someone I guess who might have a different skin color?

Oren: Yeah. Well, their eyes actually live in the bottom of their throat, so they kind of have to unhinge their jaw to look at the screen. It’s not pleasant. It’s not a fun site.

Bunny: Oh yeah. Maybe in that case it is better if we withdraw from the forcing, and then after the thing comes out, usually say something like, how you can’t criticize things anymore because we’re all too politically correct. And then they’ll appeal to the idea that things used to be good. But no, they aren’t anymore.

Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite. The, “I don’t hate this type of character. See, I like these ones from 30, 40 years ago. I just don’t like these new ones.”

 And this is usually with white female characters, because there were more of them in the eighties, or at least in science fiction, than other options. But I do see it with people sometimes saying, “I don’t have a problem with black guys in movies. I liked Blade back in the 90’s. I just don’t like Finn ’cause he’s a beta cuck,” or whatever.

Bunny: “My best friend is gay.”

Oren: Yeah, that sort of thing. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is their favorite. Everyone constantly loves Ripley, but hates every character who is like Ripley that was made recently.

Bunny: And look. Ripley is objectively good, but so are many characters these days.

Oren: A Starbuck was a really funny one that came up recently in one of these videos. “Ah, why can’t they make them like they used to with Starbuck, the character who everyone was furious about at the time because it was a gender swap.

Chris: Yeah. So let’s move on from–

Bunny: You’re stopping us from complaining! Come on.

Chris: I just think it’s worth–we know that there are jerks out there. They probably don’t listen to our podcast. So let’s talk about the things that happened that are a little less intentional than that.

Oren: Okay. If we must.

Bunny: Fine.

Chris: Taking this whole, “oh, I’m not sexist, but…,” “I’m not racist, but…” And then making complaints. One that I have seen from somebody I knew was looking at, for instance, the romance in good omens and being like, “well, aren’t men allowed to be friends on TV anymore?”

Somebody’s experiencing a little privilege loss. Their basis, what they’re used to, is always having nobody be gay on television. And then we get like one gay couple and they’re like, “oh my gosh! There’s so many gay people.”

Bunny: When the paradigm shifts, even a tiny bit, you got these people popping outta the woodwork to be like, “oh my gosh. Now you’re not even allowed to have friends,” or something. 

Oren: There is no shortage of media where guys are friends. [Scoffs] That is not an endangered species. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

Bunny: Have you seen the entire genre of buddy cop movies?

Chris: Yeah. That’s one of those things where you have to make people aware of the fact that whatever they’re used to becomes normal, and when they see a change that seems unfair, even if it’s not.

If a straight guy is used to all of the men in TV shows being straight, two gay guys suddenly feels like there’s too many gay people, because that person’s definition of normal is all straight people. Not because that person thinks that there shouldn’t be any gay people on television if they reasoned it out. It’s a reflexive reaction to having two guys who don’t represent you [laughs] when you’re used to every male character being your stand-in character.

Oren: That’s 200% more than there used to be, if you think about it. So that’s actually quite a lot.

Bunny: I wish I knew more specifics, but I feel like there was a study where people would think that a room was half men and half women, simply because there were more than just a couple women in it, even when the ratio was ten men and five women.

Chris: One thing that I love is–so Orin’s novel, the Abess Rebellion. A very frequent beta reader feedback to that one would be like, “Oh my gosh. There’s so many women in this book.” And then Oren would just point out that that novel has more men than most novels have women in that.

Bunny: Yes. That is so good.

Oren: I promise I was not going to bring this up. The point of this episode was not to be like, “yeah, look how feminist I am.”

Bunny: That is such a good retort though. Just such a clap back.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Oren did not plan this. I just decided to bring it up because it was such a good example of how unused to people were of having women in their books.

Oren: Yeah. And to be clear, most of them were saying it as a good thing. I wasn’t trying to do a ‘gotcha’ on them. Most of them were excited to be like, “there’s so many women!” with a couple of minor exceptions. But it was still just an obvious example of they have been taught to expect so much less.

Bunny: I think a similar point, at least, was made with Black Panther. Obviously that one was dealing with race in an extremely explicit way and the Abis Rebellion was not dealing with gender in that sort of sense. But it was pointed out that even as this was a movie full of black people, and that was the whole point, there are still more white characters in Black Panther than there are black people in most other superhero movies.

Oren: Yeah. And we get to call them the token white guys. Come on. That’s so beautiful. I love it.

Chris: Okay, so beyond just the pure number of people, there’s also the inherent judgments that people make that are different depending on a character’s demographics…

Oren: Oh yeah. This is hard.

Bunny: Yeah…

Chris: …that we have to talk about. Right? And we’ve talked about candy and spinach a lot. I think this one is so big and so important for double standards, and the reason is because in the way that candy and spinach work with characters, identification is just a really important component of that.

Probably most of our listeners have heard us talk about candy and spinach before, but let me just break it down a little bit. So candy is like wish fulfillment regarding how cool a character is. It’s basically things that the storyteller puts in the story to make a character cool. And if you identify with that character, then that feels good. It’s empowering and validating. It’s great wish fulfillment and people love it. But if you don’t identify with a character, it makes ’em absolutely insufferable and you won’t be able to stand that character. Whereas spinach is like candy’s opposite, where we’re making a character more relatable, but it means they’re less cool. They’re more average or unattractive, and they don’t have as many skills, and they fail when they try things. As opposed to the candy character that has all the skills and wins all of the fights, and stuff like that.

Bunny: The spinach is the character wearing frumpy clothes and glasses, and candy is when they let their hair down and take their glasses off.

Chris: Yeah, I love that analogy.

So, the fact is that plus spinach makes a character relatable, which also can be something that people respond differently to, whether they’re likely to relate to a character because they have similar demographics. And candy–it feels good if you identify with a character, and the people who are most likely to identify with a character are people who are similar to that character. And that’s a natural thing that happens. But power dynamics makes it so that we have very different standards where white, male characters are definitely allowed to get away with a lot more, either being on one end of the spectrum or the other. And more marginalized characters have to do the tightrope walk between these two things in order to be not…hated, shall we say.

And that’s just because, again, a lot of our stories have been because men have been more powerful and white people have been more powerful, have just a long legacy of catering to white men in the way that they’re constructed, because white men usually have the power somewhere in the company, there’s probably an executive who’s doing the budget or a committee who’s approving a bestselling book that has men in control, and that matters.

Bunny: Wow, Chris. You did such a good job explaining this, that I think you’re turning into a bit of a Mary Sue.

Chris: Oh, no!  No…

Bunny: I don’t know if I can believe this anymore.

Oren: From, like, an editing perspective, this is a challenge. It’s possible for an author to make a woman, or a character of color or some other marginalized character still have too much candy. But do they really? You gotta look closely. You gotta take a second. You gotta use your second thoughts to really examine what you’re doing.

Bunny: You have to make the comparison, right? That’s the whole double part is you have to look at the other half of that. What judgments are we making here that haven’t been made in other places?

Chris: Oren did an article on Fallout, which is just a great example because in Fallout, Cooper is a white guy and he has tons of candy, but people love him. And Maximus is a black guy, and he has too much spinach and people hate him.

Oren: Yeah. And not like everybody, right? The show is pretty popular. But I definitely noticed as I was looking through comments on the show, a really strong bias against Maximus.

Chris: Mm-hmm. And people like Lucy, but that’s because she’s doing the tightrope walk. She’s got that balance just right, and that’s why she’s popular. When we’re looking at characters, the fact is that if you look at really big budget media, it is far more likely that there will be a super candied male character, not a woman. But yet, Mary Sue is the big insult that we have, and it’s targeting women specifically. So, it really shows the male lens that has been applied to our characters and that people just jump on board without thinking about it.

Oren: If you switched up Cooper and Lucy, if a woman was playing the ghoul, you would not be able to look at the comments of the show for shouts of Mary Sue. It would be unlivable.

Bunny: It also reminds me of the existence of the term ‘chick lit’ denoting something that’s a deviation from the norm. The fact that we have a term for it and the norm is that media is not produced for women, or by women, which is usually what that term denotes. And it’s usually applied to romance too, which is predominantly written by and read by women. It’s a term that we have that signals that that is something out of the ordinary. We don’t really have ‘dick lit.’

Chris: One thing that is sad is that the majority of readers are women, and somebody did some number crunching and found that publishers tended to underrate the sellability of books by marginalized people, including women. So, they tended to underestimate how well those books will sell in comparison to books read by men and written by men. It’s just a wildly bad business decision considering that women are the majority of the customers for a publisher. 

Oren: But it is heartening that it shows that the buying public is less biased than the people at the top think they are. ‘Cause that’s always a question whenever these things come up is, is the general public actually going to reject this movie or book, or whatever, because it has too many marginalized characters in it? And it’s not impossible that they might, I mean, people can be really racist. But there also might just be that that’s not the problem at all, and the issue is that either the thing is being under advertised or starved of money, or maybe this particular one’s just not very good.

Bunny: Or just the people who like it aren’t being that noisy.

Oren: If anything, I feel a little heartened by the fact that those books overperform expectations, because that shows that the problem is with the decision makers and not with the general population.

Chris: Yeah. There’s also numbers for Hollywood too. And I read the book, Burn It Down, which gave some numbers. But basically it showed that there is an untapped market with an audience of color.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So Hollywood is losing money because they are not catering to this market that’s ready to buy films or shows, or what have you. You normally think that all companies are great at figuring out how to make money, but this is an area where they’re apparently not as good as you would think.

So yeah, back to candy and spinach; we can directly compare a lot of characters like Janeway versus Sheridan. Those are both candied characters.

Oren: I do love making that comparison ’cause they are so similar.

Chris: They’re very similar.

Oren: In weirdly specific ways. They both have the fake funeral, so that other characters can say how cool they are, and they both have episodes where the way that we show that someone else has been mind controlled is the fact that they are questioning the Janeway slash Sheridan’s decisions. Because why else would you possibly do that?

All: [laughter]

Chris: Yeah, but only Janeway, who was derided for being a Mary Sue. Sheridan doesn’t get criticized for being candied. Unless you’re on Mythcreants, right?

Bunny: Unless you’re hanging out with the cool kids.

Chris: Hanging out with the cool kids? Anyway, we could just take lots of those comparisons. It’s just something to be aware of.

I think general likability outside of candy and spinach also is a thing to just be very aware of, especially when it comes to who is allowed to be a jerk, or abrasive or aggressive. Galadriel, to me, is the one of the latest big examples.

The Rings of Power is not by any means a perfect show, but one of the big criticisms when it came out was that Galadriel was unlikable. And she is just the gruff warrior type. There have been so many male characters that are just like that, and they are not criticized in the same way. There’s nothing about her that’s exceptional for the main character of a TV show, but there’s a whole thing where if women don’t smile, people think they’re, like, angry or aggressive. If you look at any newscast that has a woman newscasting and a man newscasting, and just look at their facial expressions, you’ll see that the woman is smiling a large percentage of the time and the man isn’t, because that’s what people are used to. The smiling woman is like a baseline, and so if she’s not smiling, she must be angry, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. That was the same problem that Maximus had actually. And Maximus and Cooper, beyond just the candy, there’s what kind of bad behavior are they allowed to do before the audience will turn on them? And with Cooper, he’s allowed to randomly shoot people because he feels like it. That’s not a problem. But, Maximus got some payback on a bully of his, and people were like, “whoa, wow. What a bad thing for him to do. He’s such a bad person.” [laughs]

Chris: That was so weird. Those guys were jerks. I won’t feel bad that Maximus–that was just poetic justice.

Oren: People are always lecturing me about how important flawed characters are, and it’s like, Hey, look. Here, we’ve got Maximus. He’s actually a flawed character. The one you guys are always saying you want, and everyone didn’t like him. And by everyone, I mean some people; lots of people did like him.

Chris: Right. Whereas Cooper deliberately baits a young man by telling him he killed his brother. And when that guy attacks him, ’cause he was just baited, Cooper just kills him. That kid was like maybe sixteen. What the hell?

Oren: And this is where we get into some difficult discourse because my take on all this is that in most cases what we should be doing is not letting any characters get away with things that we let privileged white characters get away with. There are exceptions, but I don’t want anybody doing what Cooper does. I immediately turned on Cooper the moment he did that, and I think in a potential future where we have less prejudice, more people would. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to be like, “well, I want my marginalized character to be able to shoot innocent people and still be liked.” I think that’s not the way forward. I think we need to stop Cooper, not create other Coopers.

Bunny: #StopCooper.

Oren: #StopCooper!

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s very clear just looking at some TV shows that people are very used to very toxic behaviors, and a lot of people don’t realize how bad those behaviors are. Because as a culture, our awareness of those kinds of things is just low.

We were watching Resident Alien recently, and the sheriff met with his dad in the diner. And then his dad rips into him. And just says really mean things about, “oh, you’re a failure and so maybe you should go back to New York” or something. And I’m like, okay, so we’re saying his dad is abusive. This guy has an abusive dad. And then later, no. That person is not supposed to be–What kind of parent deliberately attacks their kid’s self-worth that way? Targeted psychological attack.

Oren: Yeah, he’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: But he’s fine. Don’t worry about it. And that kind of thing happens so often in shows. And that’s just one of those things that hopefully people will become more aware of–and they are, certainly. It’s getting better in many places.

Oren: Oh, another thing that is interesting–this is a little bit outside the candy and spinach, but I wanted to mention it since we’re nearing the end of our time–is when you have a marginalized character–and this tends to come up most often with women, but I’m sure it affects other characters too–suddenly people become real sticklers for the kind of character arc they’re allowed to have.

Oh, with Captain Marvel, it’s suddenly a huge problem that she didn’t start off without powers. ‘Cause that’s not a proper arc.

Bunny: I had never heard of this discourse.

Oren: This is very common. Even somewhat progressive people will sometimes make this criticism of Captain Marvel, which is this idea that because she started out with all of her powers, she didn’t have a proper arc.

A), there are obviously lots of male characters who start the superhero story with their powers, and that’s just silly. But B), y’all have been poisoned by too many origin stories. Not every superhero story has to start that way. She has an obvious arc about learning to not let other people control her. You can argue whether it’s good or not, but it’s clearly there. So, the idea that she needed to go from not powered to powered is just a weird bit of brain rot that people suddenly think that she has to have this very specific arc. I don’t see anyone doing that with male characters.

Bunny: Yeah. Just because it’s a common arc doesn’t mean it’s the only arc. And it’s telling that this is where you’ve decided to draw the line.

Chris: Yep. And suddenly we get really nitpicking about all of their small failings, supposedly. That one’s just very made up.

Oren: That one’s just fake, ’cause people have seen too many origin stories.

Okay, well now that we have solved double standards forever, I think we can call this episode to a close.

Bunny: And you two are never allowed to laugh again. 

Oren: [laughs]

Bunny: Stop it.

Chris: If you would like to help us continue talking about double standards, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna 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 is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

 [closing theme]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.

Most of the time, stories do a good job encouraging us to cheer for the hero. But what happens when they don’t? Sometimes, Team Good is too powerful to cheer for or downright obnoxious. And what if the underdog hero is especially charismatic or has a good point? The results probably aren’t what writers want, and that’s our topic for today. Plus, more discussion of an old turn-based tactics game than you might think.

• Song of Achilles 

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: … and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: Alright, so for today’s episode, we’re going to fight another podcast. We’re bigger than them, we have more money, and we started the fight. So clearly you’re going to cheer for us, right?

Bunny: The Mythcreants podcast, famously powerful.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: And rich.

Oren: Look, we have like four listeners, which maybe gives us twice as many as they have.

Chris: Let’s not forget that we have the Holistic Cup of Depression.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: Oh, yeah, yeah! That’s like our super special combo power move.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. See, we like to watch people drown, so that’s what it does to our enemies.

Bunny: I’m sure we force it down their throat a bit.

Oren: And we can climb up on the Soulless Saddle of Sadness, and that lets just give us a speed boost.

Bunny: Does that mean we have a horse? I guess we have an evil horse too.

Oren: The saddle may just be floating in midair. We may not ever know the answer.

Bunny: It’s powered by the immense strength of Mythcreants.

Oren: So today I wanted to talk about stories that inadvertently make you cheer for the wrong side, because… admittedly, this is mostly because I was reading Song of Achilles for work, and I got to this part where most of the story is neutral about the actual war. The war is just something that happens, but then there’s this part where the story is trying to build tension because Achilles won’t fight, and the Trojans are going to win, and… good! The Trojans should win! The Greeks are the ones who attacked them! The Greeks are clearly the bad guys in this scenario. Regardless of this casus belli the Greeks created around Helen, they started the war for all intents and purposes, and they’re the ones causing all of the damage. So it was really weird when the story was like, “Oh, no, Patroclus is sad ’cause maybe the Greeks will lose!” I’m just like, “I don’t care, book. I want the Greeks to lose.” Which of course they don’t.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely a weird myth to base things on, because the myth itself is already just kind of strange. Like the whole Helen element, you gotta buy that everyone would go to war for a pretty lady.

Oren: Well, the premise of this book, and this makes sense to me, is that the Greeks don’t go to war for Helen; they go to war ’cause they wanted to go to war, and Helen provided a useful excuse.

Bunny: Ah, okay. That makes more sense. At least they justified it.

Oren: That makes sense to me. I think that part is reasonable. “Yeah, we want to conquer Troy and take all its money, and Helen gave us a reason,” or the kidnapping or possibly running away of Helen; the book’s kind of vague about that, so that part’s fine; it’s just that mostly it doesn’t expect me to care if the Greeks win or not. That’s not what most of the book is about. But this one weird part is. And at that point it’s like, “Sorry, book, you lost me. I don’t want the Greeks to win.”

Chris: What, Oren? You can’t empathize with just going to somebody’s city and just waging war until you can get in there past their walls and then loot all their stuff and burn it down? That’s not sympathetic?

Oren: You know, it turns out I couldn’t quite go there. It was also just very funny because the book was having Patroclus, who was the narrator, be like, “Oh no, all my friends are going to die,” and it’s like, “Book, you have done nothing to invest me in any of these other characters.” There are like three characters that I have any investment in: there’s Patroclus, there’s one lady, and then there’s Achilles. Nobody else matters. So it was just a very odd choice.

Chris: I have to say, the thing about this problem where you are actively rooting for the side that you’re supposed to be rooting against, because I think usually there has to be more than one thing wrong to make that happen, not necessarily, but at least something that is mediocre, ’cause we have lots of stories that we can point to where the protagonist is just an unlikeable person for a variety of reasons, but that by itself doesn’t get you cheering for the villain. There has to be usually something wrong with the hero and something about the villain that gets you on their side when you’re not supposed to.

Oren: Yeah. Although I have encountered situations where it wasn’t that I liked the villain; it was just that I wanted the hero to lose so badly I was willing to cheer for anybody.

Bunny: I’ve been in that situation.

Oren: I mean, I vote in the United States; I’m familiar. The Deep Space Nine episode “For the Uniform,” which is this episode where Sisko is going after the Maquis, and the Maquis are bad people in this story, like they’ve ditched the whole “heroic rebels” thing and they’re doing a bit of light ethnic cleansing, which is pretty bad.

Bunny: Not a good look.

Oren: No, it’s bad. I don’t like the Maquis. They’re bad people. But Sisko is worse. Sisko, by the end of the episode, is also doing ethnic cleansing in a way to try to force the Maquis militants to surrender, and it’s just… Sisko is so bad in this episode, especially because he’s the representative of the giant Federation military. He has to be held to a higher standard.

Chris: Well, that’s the thing, is there’s actually two things wrong there. It’s the fact that clearly the antagonists are underpowered in this situation, and it feels like Sisko is coming from the more powerful group that’s on the more powerful side, and you don’t sympathize with. You don’t think what Sisko’s doing is moral.

Bunny: I do wonder to what extent this is somewhat inevitable with underdog villains. I’m sure there are some that work, but it definitely seems, at least in both of these examples, and in our fight with the other podcast, the villain that you’re cheering for being the underdog seems to be the thing wrong with the villains’ side, like the mistake you’ve made in crafting the villain.

Chris: Yeah. That does seem to be the most common cause, because that makes the villain sympathetic, which increases their likability.

Oren: In general, people like to cheer for the underdog, partly just because cheering for the more powerful side in the story is boring; they’re probably going to win already. Why should I be invested in that?

Chris: I would still say, if you have a really sympathetic… a likable hero though, then maybe that wouldn’t be an issue. A good example, I think, is Loki in Avengers. A lot of people liked Loki. Became a little too sympathetic. And he is underpowered, that’s definitely part of it, but he’s also just very charismatic, and I think that’s another part of it. And it’s not that the heroes are unlikeable, but he has two things going for him.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve definitely hit on something, ’cause my other examples would be something like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Aslan is just literally God-moded, and you have the witch, who is making these clever, complicated plans to try to win against a much more powerful enemy. And it’s not like the witch is a nice person. She’s not charismatic the way Loki is, but she is putting in effort. And then I don’t like Aslan because he represents weird Christian dogma and I’m not into it, so I end up cheering for the witch.

Bunny: Right. I feel like the other way that this can topple into cheering for the wrong side is if the villain has a point and the point is too good. I feel like this, combined with maybe underdog status…

Chris: Flag Smasher is, I think, the really good example of this one, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. One of their big mistakes was casting Erin Kellyman as the Flag Smasher, and if anybody’s not familiar, she’s the actress who was… let’s see: she was in Solo, and she was in the new Willow show, and a number of other things. But she has a very distinctive look. She’s part Irish, part Jamaican, so she has really curly red hair and lots of freckles, and she’s just very distinctive. You can recognize her, and she’s often used for rebel characters who you want to like. And so Flag Smasher feels like an activist who has the people’s best interests at heart, and honestly, I never quite understood what the cause was supposed to be in that show.

Oren: Very unclear.

Bunny: Could you say that she was… a rebel without a cause?

Oren: The show is really vague on what exactly it is that they’re fighting over. There is some kind of problem caused by the Blip in, you know, where a bunch of people disappeared and then reappeared. What that problem is, I could not really explain.

Chris: But I think she’s supposed to be an example of the sympathetic villain who is, you know… people are genuinely in pain and she’s fighting for them, but she also goes too far, blowing up a warehouse or something. I’m like, “Sure, go ahead, blow up that warehouse. That’s fine with me.”

Oren: She goes too far in a really random and over the top way where it’s like, “We’re going to destroy this facility, which is part of the government relocation program,” I think. Something about the government she doesn’t like. And then she, like, leaves all the people tied up inside to die. That’s a pretty radical escalation for a conflict that until now has been largely nonviolent.

Chris: Like Bioshock Infinite, right? Where we have the marginalized group fighting for freedom and then suddenly, because Bioshock wants to make it so that there’s not an obvious good side and a bad side, suddenly these people fighting for freedom also murder children, and it’s like, what?

Oren: They’re bad people!

Bunny: That’s so annoying because it’s not actually engaging with their point. It’s like tacking on an additional bad thing.

Chris: I would call it graywashing, right? It’s where you take a situation that is inherently black and white and then do something to try to make it gray, instead of just taking a situation where there could naturally be difference of opinion.

Bunny: Right. It’s like condemning environmentalism as a whole because it has roots in the eugenics movement. That’s awful. Of course, that’s awful. But guys, environmentalism has a point.

Oren: We still need a planet. Or, if this was done with an environmentalist story, and I have seen this done with environmentalist stories before, is it would be like this bad guy wants to stop global warming by blowing up everyone’s head. And I think the Kingsman is that story that I’m thinking of, and that one’s a little different. I didn’t really end up cheering for the bad guy in that one, just because his plan was so random and didn’t really feel like it was engaging with the material at all. The global warming aspect just felt like it was there because it was topical. “Kingsman! it has the bold message that middle-class white guys should also get to be heroes, not just aristocratic white guys.” The bold, powerful message we need.

Bunny: How subversive.

Oren: It spoke to me personally. But in general, the concept that you’re talking about of having the heroes be in the position of trying to prevent some kind of positive change, even if the positive change is being perpetuated by an asshole, is definitely one of the ways you’re going to get people to cheer against the hero.

Bunny: I feel like this is especially true if the point that they have is systemic or social. Like if it’s a critique and then the villain is disposed of through lots of punching. Again, like the environmental stuff, like maybe they’re doing this for environmental cause. Are you going to engage with that at all? No. You’re going to punch them until the problem goes away, and I guess we don’t have to worry about global warming.

Oren: I mean, that’s arguably sort of presented in Infinity War and Endgame in the silliest way possible.

Bunny: Here’s the thing: there are ways to engage with issues like environmentalism while grappling with the nuances of that. Like I mentioned, that environmentalism has roots in the eugenics movement, and that’s true. You could do something with that, right? Like, you could talk about the issues with the early environmentalist movement and how it fed on these bad, bad ideas that were all the rage in the 50s or whenever that was. But what you don’t want to do is be like, “Here’s an environmentalist who also wants to kill everyone of this ethnicity.”

Chris: You could have a struggle within the environmental movement so that we’re not just equating this cause that’s important with, you know, saying that every environmentalist is a eugenicist. So we could have a struggle: both environmentalists, but one person is also a eugenicist, for instance.

Oren: The broken moral compass, sometimes gets called. This is a problem that’s going to come up a lot, especially if you’re adapting older stories, because a lot of old stories are based on things that are bad. Hot take. So you know that’s an issue you might run into.

Chris: I was looking at my critique posts for examples of this, and I found some interesting ones, especially since this is just covering a short period at the beginning of the story, but that’s still pretty important. So, for instance, at the beginning of the first Immortal Instruments book, there was this antagonist that I started rooting for that I just called Evil Hot Guy because he wasn’t even named. But what happened here is he is introduced in the very beginning as being A Hot, which we know from romantasy how much… how many people like a love interest that seems to be evil, and also just having an interesting look. He has hair with tendrils that are compared to an octopus.

Bunny: His blue hair, which makes him the target of every Tucker Carlson complaint.

Chris: And then they… everybody’s going into a club. And then you briefly get a little bit of viewpoint description where he’s kind of laughably evil, but at the same time, we talk about how he escaped from this dying world and is now looking around for prey. And then all the characters in the beginning, other than him, are just boring. They’re just very boring people. We have our very normal relatable girl protagonist and her best friend who just came to the club ’cause he has a crush on her, which is uncomfortable. And then the cool kids who we’re supposed to like. And so he just stands out for being an interesting character. And so that’s one where it was generally sad when they just killed him. I’m like, “No!”

Oren: Aw.

Bunny: Rest in peace.

Chris: Yeah, wanted that guy to stick around.

Bunny: Rest in hell.

Oren: My favorite are the ones where it’s hard to tell if this was just a mistake, that the writers just don’t know the scenario they’ve created, or if they honestly believe that this is the correct way to do things, and you just live on a completely different moral plane than they do. Like the video game Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced has this, where I genuinely don’t know if this was a mistake or not, but the premise of this game is that you and several other people get teleported into this really cool magical fantasy land from the real world, and all your real world lives sucked, and everybody hated them. And your protagonist immediately is like, “All right, everyone, we have to go back to the real world and I’m taking you back by force if necessary.”

Chris: Wow!

Bunny: Oh geez. No, thanks.

Oren: And it just feels awful to play this game. And the message of the story seems to be that you can’t live in the fantasy world. But you can! In reality, in this scenario you’ve created where the fantasy world is literal, you can live there!

Bunny: Yeah, it seems like you’re currently living there.

Oren: And so at the end they’re all like, “Yeah, thanks, friend, for violently bringing us back to this place we hate. Good job!”

Chris: It reminds me of the anime movie Mary and the Witch’s Flower, where it’s supposed to be condemning magic. Like, you would never know that by watching it, but we looked it up and found out that the message of the movie is supposed to be that magic is bad. But they make magic look so cool, the entire thing that you would never think that that was supposed to be the message.

Bunny: You really have to justify that, especially if it’s cool and/or pretty.

Chris: It just goes against a fantasy audience too, right? The people who are watching fantasy also like magic; this is not a thing that they’re going to be very receptive to.

Oren: Yeah, and with Witch’s Flower in particular, there is a bizarre moment at the end where the protagonist gives the celebratory yell of, “This is the last time I’m ever using magic!” and it’s like the only time in the entire movie that the creator’s intent shows through, because at no other point in the movie has magic been shown to be evil. There have just been some people who do magic who are evil. It was so random. Also with Tactics, I remembered something. There is a part very late in the game where the tune changes a little bit and the guy’s like, “Oh, we also have to stop the fantasy world,” because he’s realized that a bunch of normal people from town have been pulled into it and are basically being turned into NPCs, which is genuinely a bad thing; that’s like WandaVision. So that’s actually a reason, but that’s clearly not the real reason! You were already on this path before you learned about that, and that’s not the reason that the game emphasizes constantly, because there’s no real moral there. That’s just like, “Yeah, don’t kidnap people,” I guess. There’s nothing to say about that, although WandaVision seems to think there is.

Bunny: I feel like, maybe because just I tend to vet my books a lot more before I read them, because it’s not my job to read bad books, although maybe it is now, who knows? I did read The Sleepless recently, after all. I feel like I haven’t seen this a ton. The main example I could think of was, once again, that really awful obnoxious kid from Last Halloween and how I wanted him dead. But that’s not a very nuanced example. That’s just me hating that terrible little monster vampire kid.

Chris: I think one that might be a good example, again from another critique post I did, the first book of the Malazan series.

Oren: Oh yeah.

Bunny: Oh, are you about to spoonfeed us?

Chris: This first chapter doesn’t… not a lot is happening. Those characters are just talking, which I actually think is part of the problem, right? And I think, again, not having read the whole book, so I’m making some assumptions here, but it really looks like part of what’s happening is that Steve Erikson is trying to fit too much of the book ’cause everything is super, super complicated. And this is a common thing; writers end up with this problem a lot, especially if they’re new, because they underestimate how much material they have. And if you tell instead of show, you can fit more stuff in. And so this first chapter is just people talking. And we have a couple of soldiers, and our precocious child character, and then they start just, like, badmouthing the person who is clearly supposed to be a villain. But I think part of the issue here is, because we’re telling the story and not showing, all we have is their word for it. And showing is just much more convincing to the audience than telling is. And so, when the guys start badmouthing her, you have to either a) assume the audience is going to empathize with them and trust that she’s a bad person, but they might not, and in my case, since the villain was a woman, and we have three male characters who have been introduced, and I just, again, from my experience, know that epic fantasy has a very bad track record when it comes to depicting women, seeing a couple of guys just automatically, you know, “Oh, she’s awful! We hate her!” and she comes in and she’s also very unique. She’s got, like, blue skin, she’s got some weird floating, maybe magical constructs with her, and then they made the mistake of insulting her based on the fact that she used to be a serving maid or something like that, so now she has an underdog backstory. So, even though technically she’s supposed to be more powerful than them, because she’s got the ear of the emperor, and they’re like, “Oh, this woman, she is scheming, she’s getting uppity…”

Bunny: As 2 out of 10 females.

Chris: All those factors… again, she’s supposed to be more powerful than them, right? she’s supposed to be a bad person, but none of those things are actually shown. They’re all told, which means it comes down to whether the reader believes these characters or not. And I was like, “No, I’m cheering for Laseen! I’m cheering for this villain!”

Oren: Well, it’s like if you come across people who are just randomly gossiping and badmouthing a person you otherwise don’t know, well, gossiping about someone behind their back is inherently a not nice thing to do. So, knowing nothing else about the situation except what the gossips are saying, I’m inclined to take their side, because they’re the only ones I’ve seen doing anything bad. Now, for all I know, maybe this person really is terrible and maybe it’s justified to gossip about them, but in a vacuum, I don’t know that. And then, when she shows up, she both a) is way more interesting-looking than any of them ’cause they’re all boring, but also, if you are at all inclined to be sympathetic to people who are typically mistreated and misrepresented in this kind of story, as women tend to be, you’re also going to latch onto her for that reason. So it’s a perfect situation to make someone with our values be like, “Oh, actually she seems pretty cool,” both from a combination of a storyteller/value mismatch and from technical stakes. When you’re trying to figure out what are your story’s morals, that’s a complicated subject, but I think you just have to think about it in terms of how consistent are you being and what is this going to look like to the audience. You can’t just depend on the audience to forget everything that’s previously happened or to know that what is in your head makes it fine. Like, in that Deep Space Nine episode I mentioned, there’s a part at the end where they joke about the whole thing and they’re like, “Oh yeah, by the way, all the people that were displaced by the terrorism we were doing, they’re all fine. They all switched places with each other and everyone lived happily ever after.” And it’s like the writers expect that to make everything okay, but it’s like…

Bunny: That’s the tell-and-show thing Chris mentioned.

Oren: Yeah. And it’s also just, I don’t believe you. That’s obviously a fake excuse you came up with at the end.

Bunny: All of those people went to live on a farm upstate.

Oren: Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm!

Chris: Yeah. I definitely think for a lot of writers… again, there’s an assumption that because we’re told that the protagonists are the good guys, that we will just assume everything they’re doing is okay. And I think some readers might go along with that a little bit, but we can’t necessarily count on them to, and also we don’t really want our readers to get on board with things that are morally repugnant. I mean, I think as a storyteller, maybe I would prefer not to endorse immoral things, even accidentally.

Oren: My favorite is when it’s not even that we like the villains, because we just haven’t seen them, they just aren’t there, but the protagonists look so bad that we just, in our minds, imagine that the villains are probably cooler people. That’s what happens in House of Earth and Blood with the whole human-versus-magical-people fight, where, first of all, the humans are terribly marginalized and terribly treated. So, if you know anything about the way systemic power works, you’re immediately going to sympathize with them. And they’re also underdogs because they don’t have magic, although we do find out later they have mech suits.

Bunny: Yeah, pretty much the same thing.

Oren: Yeah, this world seems to have normal early-21st-century technology and also mech suits that we never see, but we hear news reports about them.

Bunny: They have magic. It’s just the ability to manifest mech suits.

Oren: The only human who’s part of the rebellion that we ever meet is this guy who’s already in jail, and sure, he seems to be bad, but he’s one person, and we don’t ever see the other humans. They’re all offscreen fighting, for all we know, a glorious resistance. But we do see all the magical creatures, and they’re all awful! Every single one of them! It’s just like that’s the only way that Maas knew how to write characters in that book, and until we find out about the mech suits, the humans are the underdogs. So it’s just like this amazing, perfect storm of problems. They also, and this part I just am confused by, is in the middle of this murder mystery, which isn’t even about the human rebellion; they work in this incredibly compelling story about when the magic people first came to conquer this planet that humans lived on, which I don’t think is Earth, but might be, and the last human army gave its life protecting this library so that human knowledge could be smuggled out and not lost forever.

Bunny: Oh, my gosh.

Oren: And it’s just this incredibly compelling story. And then… “Oh, anyway, back to how these humans suck, I guess.”

Bunny: I want to read that other one.

Oren: Yeah, I know, right? I mean, I don’t, because Maas would have to write it, and I don’t think I would like it if she wrote it, but it’s very compelling in that brief moment.

Chris: I think the funniest instance I’ve seen is the beginning of Dawn of Wonder, where we have this main character, Aedan, who was basically a bully, but, like, the writer doesn’t know that he’s a bully, so he’s doing this hazing ritual where he’s got this other boy, Thomas, and he’s trying to get him to jump off a bridge into the water, and Thomas is afraid. And so he’s trying to use social pressure to get Thomas to jump, and it’s very clear that, the way that it’s written, Aedan is supposed to be like a leader and he’s doing this for friendship. Uh-huh, friendship. And Thomas, the way that he’s made fun of, we’re not supposed to sympathize with him, because he’s not manly enough.

Bunny: Poor Thomas.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it really speaks to a very different idea of what’s okay to do. Thomas jumps and then it hurts because he has like a belly flop and then he’s like mad afterwards. And the female character, who has been almost completely silent for everything, because of course she must not speak, you know, was like, “Oh, here, maybe I can make him a nice food dish to make him not mad at us anymore. Do you want to help me?” And the main character’s like, “Eh, no, you can do it. I don’t want to.” You know, like just complete…

Bunny: Oh, my gosh.

Chris: … just complete insensitivity. It’s written so he’s like, “Oh, you know, in the future I will cherish this memory of Thomas’s scream.”

Bunny: Not villain behavior at all. “I’m going to relish this memory of this boy falling out and screaming in fear as he falls towards a river and then injures himself.”

Oren: Lots of bullies think back fondly on high school because, as far as they knew, there were no bullies around. All right, so with that very insightful comment that I’ve just made, I think I’ve just solved the social problems in high school. We’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.

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

Oren: And remember, we need that support ’cause we’re going to fight that other podcast that I mentioned.

Bunny: Keep us rich.

Oren: Yeah, bringing it back. So, 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 will talk to you next week.

Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.

It’s hardly a secret that endings are often disappointing. A story’s finale is often the most difficult part to write, as it has the burden of making good on the story’s earlier promises. But what makes an ending disappointing, and why do we feel that way? This week, we’re discussing mechanics of a disappointing ending and how we can avoid such gristly fates for our stories.

• Cliffhanger 

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

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

Bunny: Hello, and welcome folks to an episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is…

Chris: Chris

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And this is the end of the Mythcreant Podcast. I am so sorry everyone. I know it’s very sudden and jarring and a lot of things are unfulfilled, and we also intimated at the end of other episodes that we might do more of them. But you have to understand the importance of making a point. And this is real life. Podcasts end this way in real life, so you can’t be mad. [Chris and Oren laugh]

Oren: Oh man, they do. Although, to make it really realistic, we would’ve not said anything. It just would’ve been like a normal episode, and then we just never upload any more. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: That’s true. That would’ve been far more disappointing.

Oren: Way more real.

Bunny: But since we have ended this podcast, you’re hearing us end it. But nobody is actually seeing us end the podcast. And despite all of them weeping over the end of the podcast, nobody actually saw or proved that the podcast was dead. So, maybe there’ll be a hackneyed sequel.

Oren: There was no pod body. [laughter]

Chris: Yeah, there’s a dramatic ending, and then the sequel gets canceled. [laughter] This will always have…

Oren: We’re in the streaming era now. There’s not gonna be a sequel. [laughter]

Bunny: We’re stuck in streaming hell. Even though we’re not on any streaming platforms, it’s just reality now. [Oren laughs] For some reason, we are at the will of Netflix, despite not being associated with Netflix in any way.

Oren: We’re just part of the extended Netflix universe.

Bunny: Yeah. So a couple weeks ago we talked about cliffhangers, and while I think that’s a pretty crummy way to end something, and it is disappointing, I’m not sure that’s exactly what people mean when they say disappointing. Certainly if the cliffhanger is never resolved, that’s super disappointing. But, you know, at least the cliffhanger implies there’s something afterward and that eventually you’ll get some sort of resolution, whereas I feel like a lot of the disappointing endings are–that. They’re endings. Like, there’s not an implication that it will continue.

Oren: Yeah. Cliffhanger endings are frustrating. I don’t like them, but I wouldn’t describe most of them as disappointing. Usually with cliffhangers, the disappointment comes either in there never being a follow-up because of production issues, or the follow-up arriving, and it not living up to the hype that the cliffhanger created.

Chris: Right…

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, it’s cognizantly not an ending.

Chris: What can happen with cliffhangers, or something that is kind of similar to cliffhangers where you just don’t have an ending, that the story just, again, stops at that point, is that people tend to feel cheated.

Bunny: Right.

Chris: Right. But that’s not really the same thing as, oh no, we got our, like, final and permanent resolution, and it was super disappointing.

Bunny: Right, exactly. If there’s a cliffhanger, what’s disappointing is the fact that the show was canceled or something, and, you know, not necessarily the cliffhanger itself. It’s disappointing that the cliffhanger was left as a cliffhanger.

Oren: Right.

Bunny: Or sometimes it’s hilarious, as in the case of that old Super Mario Bros. movie. [laughter]

Chris: It’s like somebody promised you cake, and it’s the difference between them just not giving you the cake they promised, or them giving you the cake, and it’s just awful. It’s the worst cake you’ve ever tasted.

Bunny: [laughing] Right. That’s a good metaphor. I think that broadly, disappointment comes from a lack of resolution, or I guess in Mythcreants lingo, a lack of satisfaction.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: The most elusive of the ANTS.

Bunny: Yes. It’s the ANTSss, because it’s mysterious. So when people talk about endings that were disappointing, they might talk about a mystery being resolved in a way that is contrived, or hasty, or like the authors are scrambling to wrap things up, and it doesn’t feel good. They might also talk about forcing a conclusion that doesn’t make sense from the setup, like Game of Thrones.

Oren: Yeah. [Bunny laughs] I would put Game of Thrones firmly in the, like, contrived endings. Because it just obviously does not make sense, right? Like the ending they wanted does not work with the setup they had, and they just did it anyway. And that kind of ending tends to, I would say, get the most attention, because it’s really easy to identify, and so it’s very easy to dunk on. And so we just do that for a while, whenever there’s a big popular story that has a really unsatisfying ending. It was the same thing with Mass Effect 3, like it was super contrived, and Battlestar Galactica, and there’s all these examples. There are other kinds of disappointing endings, but in my experience, those are the most famous ones.

Chris: Yeah. I think, again, a disappointing ending could be just about anything, because endings really do come with tons of requirements, and everything has to go right for people to be happy with the ending, pretty much.

Bunny: Right. It’s hard to stick landings. Especially if you’re someone like me who kind of plots as they go along, and, you know, doesn’t always have the end in sight when they’re writing the middle. And ideally that’s the sort of thing you would edit, but sometimes it seems like it’s just not. [laughter]

Oren: Yeah. On the other hand, I don’t wanna. [laughing]

Bunny: Ah, yeah. On the other hand, it’s hard.

Chris: So yeah, I mean, I do think the saving grace of endings is that you have the entire story to put pieces into place, unlike the beginning where you’re starting from nothing. But at the same time, yeah, some people like to kind of discovery write, or pants, or whatever you call it, and nobody likes to revise. Actually, well, that is not true. We have found the people who like to revise; they exist on our Discord server.

Oren: They’re strange and scary. [everyone laughs] Like a Deep One situation over here. What’s going on?

Chris: So some people do like to revise. Good for them. It must be–life must be good.

Bunny: Must be nice. [everyone laughs]

Oren: One kind of disappointing ending that I find much more often in books than in movies or TV is the big arc, the most important arc, whatever, the throughline, getting resolved by someone other than the main character…

Bunny: Oh yeah. Some guy…

Oren: Or main characters, and I think the reason that it’s more common in books is–this is my own personal hypothesis–is that with movies and TV, they gotta pay a lot for their lead actors. And so they’re gonna get the most use out of them that they can, whereas with books, the author’s not paying for any particular character. And so it can be very easy for the author to just sideline their protagonists in favor of someone else they might like better, or for some other weird reason, right?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I will say that movies and TV shows generally have a lot more people involved with the story. For movies in particular, you might have one person who wrote the original screenplay, and then it’s changed so much that they still get credit for the screenplay, but none of the lines are theirs anymore.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: [laughing] It’s like that’s not an inconceivable thing to happen. And I do think that not giving the main character the star role in the end is a pretty big mistake that requires a writer who is kind of following their whims a little bit. And at some point, I think with so many people reviewing and giving input on scripts when you have something that’s super high-budget, I think that’s a problem that probably just gets ironed out.

Bunny: The flip side of that is the hero whose story has ballooned so out of proportion that it’s just as disappointing that they solve it in any way other than something equally proportionate. Like, the author has gotten beyond the scope that the hero could realistically affect. So the hero scolds some baddies and everything’s better. That’s also disappointing.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Why we made the problem too hard?

Bunny: Right?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yeah. I mean that one is a little bit harder problem to solve. I mean, you can’t be hunting for reasons why the main character can affect events at all or can be the hero of the story. That’s gonna affect the entire thing. And I think for a movie or TV show that’s not gonna–I don’t know. Have we, Oren, have you ever seen a movie or TV show where the main character was just not in the position to make any change on the plot?

Oren: Uh, not off the top of my head. I’m not gonna rule it out entirely. There may have been…

Chris: There’s probably some show that has, like, an ensemble cast, and one person is supposed to be in the main character, but they’re like the humble, relatable character…

Oren: The closest I would…

Chris: …and they don’t have a lot of agency.

Oren: Right. The closest that I’ve seen recently that does something like that is actually My Lady Jane, that we were talking about last week.

Chris: But she does have the power to affect events. They just won’t give her any agency for some reason.

Oren: Right. It’s not that she’s underpowered. If anything, she’s kind of overpowered, but her skills never matter, which is…

Chris: They just don’t let any of her plans actually work. It’s amazing how little agency she has.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: For being the queen.

Chris: But they still put her at the center of events, and they have her come up with plans and try to enact the plans. So they just, I think they just had, because they’re following kind of this historical template where they want things to be similar to real life events, but, like, different in key ways. I think that this was an issue of “But if the protagonist had agency, then she would win all the time. And then we wouldn’t have half these things happen.” And I think that’s what they were struggling with.

Oren: Oh! I actually did think of a TV show that did exactly this, what we’re talking about.

Chris: Oh yeah?

Oren: Acolyte.

Chris: Oh! Yeah, Acolyte has that problem.

Oren: Spoilers for Acolyte, I guess. I wanna be careful when I critique Acolyte because a lot of weirdos are, like, gleefully mad about it not being very good. And I don’t want to be one of those people, but it does have an issue where the main character can’t do anything, and so she spends most of the story just following other characters around. And I do not know what the thought process was on that. Like, I’m genuinely confused why they thought that was a good idea.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I see how it happens. You want a humble protagonist who is involved in events that are bigger than them in some way. Then you’re not thinking too hard about the logistics of, okay, how are they gonna actually make a difference here?

Oren: Yeah. It’s just, I would expect it to go the other way and have her do things despite not having the skills for it and being a little contrived. That’s the normal way that this goes. But no, instead it’s like, yeah, she’s a normal, like, mechanic surrounded by Jedi, and most of the problems in this story can be solved with lightsabers. So she watches them do that. [laughter] I mean, realistic, I guess.

Bunny: Definitely a story that got beyond its scope was The Velocity of Revolution, which I know I’ve talked about before. The ending was also just generally confusing, which is another way to get disappointment. Nobody knows what’s happening.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: I had a couple people, a couple friends that happened with The Great Gatsby, like they didn’t realize that Gatsby had been shot, which caused some confusion and, uh, it’s kind of important to the end of the story.

Oren: Great Gatsby? More like the okay Gatsby.

Bunny: The disappointing Gatsby. [Oren laughs] But The Velocity of Revolution, the problem that the story ended up tackling was this deeply entrenched caste system, systemic racism, colonial occupation. And the story is about motorcycles and mushrooms, like, [sigh] it turns out going really fast with a, like, a lady who’s infused with mushrooms makes all the foreigners sick, and then they go away.

Oren: Gotta go fast!

Bunny: Gotta go fast. [laughter]

Chris: It’s such a strange story.

Bunny: And that just was like, this is too big a problem for going fast with some mushrooms, you know?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: Like, the story was correctly about fighting these systemic issues, and it was very concerned with them, but the ending–that just didn’t work.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: There’s also the stories where the writer’s just really uninterested in solving the big problems, and I’m thinking of City of Brass here.

Oren: Yeah, City of Brass was at least theoretically the first book, so I guess maybe if we stuck around, maybe there would’ve been more of that, but it was so badly handled that I wasn’t interested in finding out.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I will say, if you have a series, again, it’s going back to the, like, is it that the cake tastes bad, or do you not have any cake?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, like people expect to get at least one piece of cake at the end of each book of the series.

Bunny: [small voice] May I have more?

Oren: Here’s a setup where there’s this group of people who is horribly oppressed to a degree that would make most human oppression stop and ask them to chill out. And you just keep thinking, okay, maybe the protagonist is going to help a little bit. She never does. And then at the end the oppression gets worse because it turns out the oppressed people were evil. Like, what? What was that? I guess that was a disappointing ending. [Bunny laughs] I mean, maybe an enraging ending would be a better way to describe it. I don’t know.

Bunny: It just definitely falls under general confusion, I think. Based on that description as well.

Oren: A kind of disappointing ending that you all don’t have to deal with all that often because you don’t read unpublished client manuscripts [Bunny laughs] is just not resolving the ending. Like, most published stories remember to do that. But if you’re new to writing, sometimes you just get to the end and you don’t know how to resolve it. So the story just ends.

Chris: I mean, especially if you don’t have a throughline or don’t know what your throughline is.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, it may just end at some point. Or what I’ll see is the writer doesn’t have a throughline, but they still understand that there’s supposed to be this thing called a climax that’s exciting.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So they’ll write just kind of like a meandering story, and then they’ll bring in a sudden action scene sometimes, which doesn’t really fit the rest of the story, to be the climax. And then when the action scene is over the story just ends. But again, the action scene isn’t really part of a larger plot, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s just some random action. So it’s still not satisfying, because we don’t, again, have that structure in place.

Oren: Yeah. This is a weirdly specific one, but I have seen this at least a couple times, which is a story that starts off with what looks like an interesting arc and then just shunts it aside, and it’s like, “Nope, we’re not doing that.” And then the whole book is spent getting back to doing that arc again.

Bunny: [laughing] No…

Oren: And the most obvious example is from The Art of Prophecy, where we start with the main character as a mentor, and she’s gonna train this young chosen one, and then she doesn’t do that. And we spend the entire book getting back to the point where now she’s gonna train the young chosen one. And it is like, I don’t know, man, you could’ve done that at the start of the book. You didn’t need the rest of this book. We could’ve just started there.

Bunny: Follow the hook.

Chris: It’s what we call zero movement.

Oren: Yeah, we just went in a giant circle. [laughter] I see that sometimes. That’s a specific kind of disappointing ending. Chris mentioned the one where like there’s kind of a meandering story, and then we pivot to sudden violence at the end. A similar but legally distinct kind of disappointing ending to that is a weird sudden pivot at the end where suddenly the ending is about something not what the rest of the show was about, or the rest of the story, whatever it was. Like the anime Magia Record does this, where we have the whole series, we’re getting ready to deal with these two villains, but then it turns out we talk those villains down. So the final boss is against some rando who we’ve seen once or twice.

Bunny: It’s, you have a story about raising unicorns, and all the unicorn trainers are competing to raise the best unicorn, and don’t do drugs, kids, goodbye. [everyone laughs]

Oren: Or, like, at the end of Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet where the whole thing is this kind of cozy, low-stakes, low-tension story. And then suddenly a character dies at the end in, like, this really unpleasant way. And it’s just to set up the next book, right? It has nothing to do with any of the arcs that were happening in the first book. That sort of ending.

Chris: Yeah. To get into more complex territory, obviously you want the ending to feel earned. Besides the main character having some agency and actually making a difference in the ending, they also have to earn the ending, which is where you get a lot of the more complex problems with having good turning points, and karma, and foreshadowing, sometimes.

I recently read a pretty good book, The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. And that one, you know–little spoilers–has like a side character come in and basically save the day at the end, but it’s supposed to be the main character earning that by being willing to sacrifice herself, and then that inspires the side character to come in. But it’s not quite there, because the side character is just so powerful that it doesn’t feel like that has been set up properly.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Okay, just being willing to sacrifice, you know, earned such a good ending that it’s okay for somebody to just, like, snap their fingers and there’s still–so it has a little bit deus ex machina feel, which is when you have just a great ending come out of nowhere, and nobody earns it, and there’s no foreshadowing, and it’s totally unexpected just because…

Bunny: You still want some sacrifice.

Chris: Right, just because of the scale. The scale of the help was just disproportionate. That one was also really funny because we actually had a perfectly good explanation where we had an army that was gonna come in to save them, they just weren’t there yet. And so all we had to do was just have them hold out until the army arrives to take care of the rest. But instead, we have, like, deus ex machina friend.

Oren: Thanks, deus ex machina friend.

Chris: [laughing] So it was just, it was also just very unnecessary.

Bunny: Always helpful to have one of those.

Chris: Yeah. But other issues with, you know, again, an ending that feels earned. Right? You don’t want anything to be handed to the protagonist on a silver platter. Where somebody else is just like, “Here, I’ll just do this for you.” You don’t want that. You don’t want the outcome to feel like it’s entirely luck or fate. And so again, they have to do something and–slightly different flavor of karmic problem–you want the actual polarity of the karma to fit, so you don’t want an asshole that readers hate to just be rewarded at the end. [laughing]

Oren: Wow. But it’s so edgy though. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: That it is, and going off of that, when the story just kind of…ugh, yeah. This is me segueing into complaining about Sleepless again.

Oren: Hooray!

Bunny: I think this goes back to, like, the sort of karma–I guess this might be karma–but an ending that is just, like, dismal? Like, okay, the book kind of scolds you for expecting a better ending.

Oren: Oh, no.

Bunny: Basically, what happens is the world kind of ends worse than it begins. These dangerous sleepless drugs are booming in popularity. They don’t really know why the sleepless are having memory holes, and then the protagonist goes to prison, and it ends with the protagonist narrating from prison. I get that there were big issues on the stage, and I expected a resolution on the scale of those issues. So, like, why are you scolding me for expecting the big corporations to get some comeuppance, when the story was about getting, like, bringing comeuppance to the corporations, right?

Chris: I mean, that just sounds like it’s unresolved, because, I don’t know, is the protagonist gonna be in the prison for the rest of his life, or…?

Bunny: No, he’s just there for now, but he does narrate about how, like, explicitly about how nothing changes. How the story didn’t affect anything in the long run, how the society is still awful. And it’s, like, okay, maybe that’s true…

Chris: But that’s telling and not showing. I do feel like, okay, let’s say we wanted a downward turn. We wanted a, like, tragic ending. So they’ve got these dystopian organizations that are doing bad. Their goal is to change them, defeat them, whatever. And we want a tragic outcome where they fail to do so. And in order to resolve the tension, that failure needs to be permanent, right? It needs to feel like there is no possibility that this is gonna be turned around. And it sounds like what happens is the main character just tells people, “Oh yeah, nothing changes,” without actually showing why it’s not possible to turn things around.

Bunny: And it’s also not a tragedy. Like, it’s a mystery story, and he solved the mystery successfully, and then…nothing happens.

Chris: But he’s also trying to…

Bunny: It ends in, like, depressing jail, about as miserable as it can be. Like, he steps out of the jail, and that’s the end. But the last chapter, which drags on, it’s all about like, “Oh, it’s Christmas now, and there’s really sad tinsel around, and now I can kind of faintly smell fresh air outside. Man, wish I could be out there.” It’s just dismal.

Chris: Did the protagonist do something to earn being in jail here?

Bunny: Here, he’s talking about the villain here, I’m pretty sure. “Whenever I think of him now, I ask myself, what was the point?”

Chris: [laughing] This just has all the hallmarks of a writer who believes themself to be clever. It’s like, look, I’m not gonna make a pat ending. I’m gonna make it an ending that’s rebellious.

Bunny: Yeah. This is talking about his villainous friend. “Despite his efforts, the lies and manipulations, despite his ultimate sacrifice, the world still ended up the way it is. Was it all worth it? Simon probably thought so, but I’m here alive, and I know damn better.” Like, the conclusion is the world is awful. Thanks for reading.

Oren: There is a subreddit called “I’m 14, and this is deep,” and I cannot help but feel like that’s where this ending belongs. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: It does kind of feel like that. Like, maybe it’s setting up a sequel, but the ending was just so downer and frustrating that I wouldn’t pick up another book, even setting aside the world building.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Which, heh, visit the Bad Metaphors episode for that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, the fact that what you’re relating is what the protagonist says, again, strongly suggests that this outcome is not something that we see unfold. It’s something that is simply told and declared.

Bunny: Right. I think we’re supposed to get the sense that he has, like, the moral high ground? But, I don’t know. It’s…

Oren: I mean, authors sometimes like to scold their readers for not liking their endings. I’ve read a couple of books that do that. I don’t understand why you would do that. Like, it just, the thought of it makes me kind of recoil inside, because I want my readers to like my story, but some writers seem to enjoy that part, so I, I guess?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, defensive reactions are what they are, I guess.

Bunny: I was like, excuse me. I wanted to see some of the villains who are part of these corporations, like, pay a price, but it seems like, you know, nothing got better. 

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: No, the mystery was solved, but ultimately nothing mattered, and that was disappointing to me.

Chris: It is really frustrating when authors seem to want to scold their readers for liking what they created, and this almost feels like an example of that where, okay, you successfully got me invested in this world and invested in seeing it change for the better. Now I’m just kind of being scolded for caring, a little bit, and that’s certainly frustrating.

And again, with the disappointing endings–yeah, if you’re trying to do everything right, and your readers aren’t happy, or you’re trying to do something different ,and your readers aren’t happy, it can be really frustrating. But they’re–it’d be frustrating for you, as well as them, but your readers aren’t happy because they cared about the story, right? They wouldn’t have as much reason to be frustrated with your ending if you hadn’t succeeded in roping them in.

Bunny: Right.

Chris: So I just–some cases you can kind of take that as a backwards compliment. Where they care enough about your story to get frustrated…

Bunny: Care enough about your story, but also be angry at you when you screwed it up? [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. But also on your end, I just think we should have some appreciation for the fact that we did things to get them really invested in a specific outcome. So it’s a little bit mean to then turn around and be like, [laughing] “Like what, you cared?”

Bunny: “You’re silly for caring.”

Chris: You’re silly for caring, when that’s our job, right?

Bunny: I mean, to paraphrase Jenny Nicholson, the worst thing a story can do is make you feel kind of stupid for being invested in it in the first place. And that’s probably at the heart of all of this disappointment, you know?

Chris: Yeah. Certainly, again, a lot of the things about endings that are most disappointing is there is some broken promise somewhere, some expectation that was not fulfilled, whether it’s, like, main character switcheroo, where we got you invested in a specific main character, and the main character was just shoved to the side so that somebody else could save the day. Or, you know, we brought in something that was a gruesome fight scene when that was not the expectation we set, or something like that.

Oren: All right. I have a conundrum to end the podcast on, because we’re getting close to the end. This is a riddle, if you will.

Bunny: Ooh.

Oren: So, okay. So…

Bunny: 43.

Oren: As we know, satisfaction is the feeling you get when you successfully resolve tension. Right, this is a basic ANTS principle. We got articles about it. So here’s the question. If the story never properly establishes tension, and you get to the end and there’s no satisfaction because of that, is that a disappointing ending? Or was the story just boring to start with? [Bunny laughs]

I’m thinking of something like The Factory Witches of Lowell, where they–which I know it sounds like I’m saying “The Factory Witches of LOL,” but I promise that’s not how it’s spelled–where it seems like they’re, they go on strike and it seems like it’s gonna be hard, but then it turns out that they’re magic and nobody else is. So they just use magic to solve all their problems. And so then we get to the end, and they solve the last problem with another magic spell, and it’s like, well, that was boring and disappointing. I felt like I was disappointed, but was I really disappointed in the ending, or was it just the entire story?

Chris: I mean, I do think that sometimes when the story’s slow, because we know that generally the goal is to escalate the tension as the story goes, we hope that it’ll turn around.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And stories don’t generally turn around. [laughing] I experience lots of stories. If there is a problem in the beginning, it’s very unlikely that that will get better that much. I mean, some stories do speed up a bit as the story continues, but the problem will keep showing itself later, even when the story gets tenser, usually.

Bunny: I mean, maybe it is satisfying, in that it gave you exactly what you expected. [Chris laughs]

Oren: That’s true. My expectations were not subverted. [Bunny laughs]

Chris: Yeah, geez. I have to say there are, going back to streaming, there are so many shows that would have so much more satisfying endings if they just had enough time. And it’s strange, because you can plot a story of any size that is satisfying.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so I don’t know if part of the problem is that we have a bunch of show writers that are used to having a longer season, and so they just don’t know how to scale down for the length? Estimating complexity can be really difficult, or they thought they had more, and then parts were, like, unexpectedly cut out. Right? Or, there’s just expectations that the show will have a certain number of characters, and a certain amount of overhead and complexity, that simply can’t resolve satisfactorily in, like, eight episodes. But there’s just been, again, more and more streaming shows that have been a disappointment at the end, partly because there was not actually time to properly set up things, and properly explain things, and show characters doing things like changing their mind about stuff, or giving background and stuff, and all of those things. And that’s just, it’s been real disappointing.

Oren: Alright, well with that extremely fun moment to think about, [Bunny laughs] we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Bunny: You can almost call it…disappointing that we ended on that note.

Oren: Yeah, but if you didn’t like it, that’s actually your fault. [everyone laughs]

Bunny: Sometimes podcasts just end this way.

Chris: Well, I have to say, if you were disappointed in this episode, maybe if you supported us on Patreon, you’d be less disappointed. Did you think about that?

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants, and I don’t know, maybe with more money we can make it less disappointing for you.

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

Bunny: [spooky voice] Or will we? [everyone laughs]

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

In this episode, we have a very serious complaint session about all the goobers who try to gain clout by redefining worldbuilding as something it isn’t, then raging against it. After that moment of catharsis, we turn to the real topic: What level of worldbuilding must you actually do? Surprising no one, the answer is “it depends.” It always depends!

• Very Afraid

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]

This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is—

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: and—

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now I’ve realized something since I’ve been pondering a lot on the nature of world building, which obviously is always about re-imagining how planetary physics works. So it is, I’ve realized, the cause of flat eartherism and hollow eartherism.

Bunny: Whoa.

Chris: If you worldbuild, you’re just gonna become a conspiracy theorist. Just inherently an anti-science practice. Worldbuilding is bad, and instead it’s just better to gently imagine the setting of your story. I call this world imagining. And it’s completely different from worldbuilding and totally superior to it. Any questions?

Oren: How come you’re still trying to crush my creativity by talking about worlds? I don’t want worlds in my speculative fiction. They shouldn’t exist. They’re crushing my spirit by existing.

Bunny: Well, I have a rival term, which I think is superior to yours and more conducive to the creative muse within us, and that is universe summoning.

Oren: Because then it can just be whatever you need it to be at any moment. And it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense or serves the story at all. Do whatever you feel like. Summon it into existence.

Bunny: Frankly, you’re being reductivist by reducing this to simply “worlds” or just whatever term you think will boost the thinkpiece’s SEO.

Oren: Yeah, I gotta get those clicks.

Chris: Internet discourse on world building gets really weird sometimes.

Oren: Yeah. Every couple of years, like on a schedule, we get this outburst of people being very weird about world building.

Chris: My whole bit, that was not based on a single incident. This has happened multiple times now where people have done this.

Bunny: The fact that there are many is distressing.

Chris: We’ve relentlessly made fun of world conjuring guy, but he’s not alone.

Oren: He’s not even the weirdest. They always have the same hallmarks. Like someone will define world building as something other than what it is, which is simply the act of creating the place where your story happens. That’s what world building is, and they’ll define it as something other than that, and then rail against that definition of it. And it’s a definition they always just made up. No one ever uses it that way, including them, because it’s not a useful definition of a word.

Bunny: World building is when you kick puppies. That’s why you need to do universe summoning.

Oren: The definition they’ve created is still wrong, but it’s not even bad. World building is when you figure out how dragons would work in your setting and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s one aspect of world building and I hate dragons. Why would you do that? What is going on? The farthest back I’ve been able to trace this is to an article from 2007 titled, “Very Afraid,” but it’s more commonly known as “The Great Galumphing Foot of Nerdism.”

It’s probably not the original, but it’s the oldest one I can find where this guy just rants about how bad world building is. At first he doesn’t define what it means, he just hates it, and he attributes all these problems to it. And he then finally gives us a definition where he says, “I refer to immersive fiction. Any medium in which an attempt is made to rationalize the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it logical in its own terms.” That’s obviously a specific kind of world building, which is not bad, but he’s decided that’s all world building is and that it’s bad.

Bunny: So wait, he wants either realist or completely absurdist stories?

Oren: You know, I do not know. He says what he wants in there and I could not follow it. It is just nonsense. It only makes sense if you also have your head all the way up your ass and have internalized bullshit terminology and then it will kind of start to sound like maybe it means something, but it doesn’t. It is pure emperor’s new clothes over here.

Chris: I think all of this stems from the idea that world building is inherently like hardcore. That we’re not just talking about any type of world building, we’re talking about some kind of stereotype of a specific kind of world building that is super intense and super comprehensive and results in tons of exposition or something like that.

Bunny: Brandon Sanderson. You can just say it.

Chris: The voices of people who do that are pretty loud sometimes. Having some sort of backlash to that, to me, feels overblown, but I have encountered multiple books that are about fantasy or fantasy and sci-fi writing that just state, “here’s how you create a story. First start by creating a world.” There’s a certain assumption that you’re going to do some kind of thorough world building before you even come up with a story idea, and that’s just false. Some people do it that way, and that’s fine.

But it’s just as fine to come up with a story idea and build a world around that and do only as much as you need to instead of just mapping out all of your continents on an entire planet or something. They can be pretty loud. And so this is probably a backlash to that if I were to guess. But again, that’s just not entirely what world building is about. It does not have to be hardcore. You can do a tiny bit. And that’s why when we define it, we just define it as, again, anytime you make any choices about your world, that is not just, oh yeah, we’ve got Earth. As soon as you add vampires or aliens, you’re world building.

Oren: People are really loud about characters and how characters need to be a specific thing and can get pretty prescriptive about it. But I’ve somehow managed to resist going on a rant about how characters are bad and defining them as a kind of character I don’t like.

Chris: Now what we need to do is redefine character development.

Bunny: Character development is when you kick puppies. What you need to have is person be better…ing.

Oren: Yeah. This is the way.

Bunny: I think that there’s two distinct questions here, one of which is how much world building do you need for the purposes of a particular story, and one of which is just how much should you do in general, even if it’s just for you.

I kind of feel like the answer to the second one is just, oh, well, however much. It’s a much harder thing to determine how much you need for your story than it is to be like, how much should you do in general? And the answer to that just seems like however much you feel like

Oren: Yeah, I can’t give you an answer in world building units. It depends. Copyright, trademark, do not steal.

Chris: We didn’t go over what I would consider to be the most essential world building tasks as to, what do we usually recommend by default to people, even if they have a story that does not have a lot of world building? I would start there, what is the basics and also what are the basics for, right?

If people are intimidated by the idea of world building or just don’t like it for whatever reason, knowing, what do you get out of bothering? One is just add entertainment value. Same reason we do anything else, why we have characters or plot or anything. ‘Cause they can add entertainment value. Avoid breaking believability, and plot holes that cause headaches.

Again, if an author doesn’t wanna bother and they’re just like, yeah, I’m not gonna worry about potholes and I’m not gonna worry about believability, that’s their choice. But generally people wanna avoid those things.

Oren: Like everyone’s big on not world building until they run into a story that messes up something they care about, and then suddenly they’re like, ugh, how could someone make something so unrealistic?

It’s like, I don’t know. If you paid a little more attention to the setting you were creating, you wouldn’t have that problem.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely important for that. You want internal consistency unless you’re doing something completely absurd.

Oren: No, that’s the great galumphing foot of Nerdery. It’s bad to do it for reasons.

Chris: And then the last thing that I would mention is just not spreading harmful messages or misinformation. And that depends on what you’re depicting. That’s gonna come into play for some things a lot more than others. If you do stories that are darker, I think that starts to become more important, ’cause then you’re covering some important and sensitive issues usually.

But that is another thing where when we talk about world building, sometimes we’re talking about, what does this say about how the world works and does that do good or harm?

Bunny: Yes. See our episode on bad metaphors for more on this.

Chris: Those are the basic goals. It doesn’t have to be like, create an internally consistent world that you feel is super real. Those don’t have to be part of your goals. The thing that I like to talk about first is usually theming. Again, if anybody’s super intimidated by world building, many writers do theming without even thinking about it. I think it’s still worth talking about because we still run into a lot of writers who don’t have themes by default.

And theming is just, make the world have a cohesive feel and a united impression, rather than being a collection of random stuff. That’s what it means, is to feel like everything comes together in one story, whereas collections of random stuff tend to feel hokey and unbelievable. And so that theming is just deciding what impression you want to create and doing that and adding things that enhance that impression, or if you have really disparate things, you have both elves and aliens in your story integrating to the point where it feels like they belong together.

Bunny: And a lot of that is aesthetic. Writers often also picture aesthetic without really thinking of it as part of world building. There’s a particular aesthetic that goes along with a lot of the -cores and -punks we’ve discussed before, and that is a kind of theming.

Chris: And I suspect a lot of the people who are like “world conjuring” or “world contextualizing,” whatever light term they make up.

Bunny: Universe summoning, Chris!

Chris: “Universe summoning,” theming is probably part of what they’re thinking of. Still probably thinking about what impression they wanna create and making things create that impression. Theming isn’t drawing every continent on a map and coming up with government systems and naming all the places, it’s just thinking about the experience and the impression.

Oren: And I would say for the people who like to do that sort of thing, who want to draw out a huge map and create all the governments and all that, doing things that’s fun is fine. You don’t have to justify doing something you enjoy. I would say that from a storytelling perspective, be careful because if you create your world and make it too rigid, you may find that you cannot tell the story you wanna tell in it.

So at that point, you’re gonna have to change something, be it the story or the world, whichever it is. And eventually you are going to need to write the story. So you can’t spend all of your time world building. But if it’s just a fun exercise you do, especially if it gets you energized to write, there’s no reason not to do it.

What is your process?

Chris: Besides theming, the thing that we usually emphasize is paying a little more attention to your magic and technology, just because those are the things that are almost always causing the plot holes and the headaches later on, if you don’t pay any attention to them.

Bunny: Especially in longer stories, probably wanna devote a lot more time to making your world internally consistent and smoothing over potential wrinkles that just putting tonal elements together might not cover because you don’t wanna set up something that will cause you headaches down the line in your series.

Oren: Yeah. And there’s gonna be a directly proportional line between how big a role your tech and magic plays in the plot, and how much you’re gonna wanna think about how it works.

If your setting has magic, but it’s very distant and mysterious and maybe your hero encounters it once or twice, okay. You probably don’t need to put that much thought into it. If your hero uses it in every scene, yeah, you’re gonna wanna know how it works. ’cause otherwise you’re gonna have the classic problem of why didn’t he do that earlier, which is not fun.

You don’t want readers supporting that. I guess if you do whatever, all the power to you.

Chris: Also, you’re just trying to avoid a transporters on Star Trek situation where that would just make everything too easy all the time, and so you’re constantly coming up with reasons why the hero can’t do that.

You don’t wanna deal with that later.

Bunny: The scale is also super important for this. Really, it’s centering what the story is about. If it’s a really small story that’s not kaiju-sized problems, like the Tea Dragon Society is about tea dragons and friendship and there’s magic in the setting, and there are like fantastical creatures, but that’s not really important to the story, which is mostly about cultivating relationships and raising little tea dragons.

Chris: If your setting is about, I don’t know, the social or emotional effect of magic, rather than solving problems with magic, you can get away with a lot more and you don’t necessarily have to worry so hard about figuring out what magic is capable of. If you do have a protagonist who’s gonna be solving problems with magic, you don’t necessarily have to plan out a magic system that’s logically consistent. I do think it’s useful to, when you create some new magic, maybe put it on a list somewhere and keep track of it, and then of course, by impulse, always just do the least powerful effect that you can think of that will take care of what you need in that moment.

That will be less likely to cause you headaches later.

Oren: You’ll need less world building if you do that.

Bunny: There’s an exercise, which I’ve actually found kind of helpful, even though it feels a little silly to do, which could be applied here as well, which is that whenever you describe a character, write the literal adjectives you use somewhere in a document that you can refer to to make sure you’re not causing an inconsistency, referring to them having brown hair or blonde hair, that sort of thing.

I think doing the same thing with your magic or your technology, what has it done in the past? What have characters suggested it might do? That could be really helpful.

Oren: Yeah, and we mentioned the scale earlier. The bigger the conflict, the bigger the plot that will require you to know more about your world.

If you’re doing a cyberpunk story that’s about a family trying to steal enough parts to keep their cybernetic implants going, that doesn’t need a ton of world building, right? You want something to make the world stand out a bit from every other cyberpunk world out there. But you don’t need a ton.

You don’t need to know the inner workings of the evil corporation’s board meetings. But if your cyberpunk story is about leading a revolution to overthrow the corporate oligarchy and spread your anarchist commune across the world or whatever, you’re probably gonna need more world building there.

You’re gonna wanna know how those things work, ’cause they matter all of a sudden.

Chris: Yeah. If we’re getting into what types of stories need more or less world building, the scale that the plot operates on, matters a whole lot. This is funny ’cause we’ve just been watching My Lady Jane, which is historical fantasy.

We’re re-imagining what happened to Lady Jane Gray and the ascent of Mary to the throne. It’s clear that whoever was just doing the plotting was not really prepared to understand how the politics of the day actually worked so that it could be used in the plot meaningfully, because I can just see the struggle. Historically, Lady Jane Gray was queen for like nine days. There’s a reason why she was deposed by Mary. There’s an actual power struggle.

What happened is they changed the world so that instead of having a Catholic-Protestant split, we have the magical people and the normal people. And of course we have an oppressed mages setting, or oppressed shapeshifters in this case, but it doesn’t work the same, and we have problems because then the main character is now the queen, and realistically, Mary overpowered her. And that happens in the show, but they just don’t know how to create conflicts where technically the protagonist is supposed to have absolute power as a monarch, but they also need her to not solve the plot instantly, and they don’t really understand how the historical political system worked well enough to actually explain what the constraints are on her power and why she can’t just behead the villains as soon as she wants to.

Oren: And there are other scenes where suddenly she can just give edicts and everyone has to obey her ’cause she’s the queen. I don’t know, guys. Which one is it?

Chris: Again, the conflicts, they don’t feel real. It feels really flimsy. You’re left not knowing what she can do and what she can’t. Everything is contrived because you’re like, why is she trying to prove that they’re guilty when she can just behead them whenever she wants? Okay, we really needed a better idea of how this world functioned so that we could have conflicts that feel robust enough for this kind of political intrigue story.

Oren: It’s definitely one of the shows of all time. Of all the shows that came out, everyone agrees that that was one of them.

Chris: If you’re gonna do political intrigue, you gotta think about it a little harder. That’s one of those things that calls for a little bit more intense thinking and research. And warfare can too, for sure.

You could have a story where you have one soldier going into battle and it’s just their journey and you’re not worrying too much about how the battles work or the war is going, but that is a larger scale conflict.

Bunny: No matter how much world building you do behind the scenes, it’s good practice to narrow the window of relevance as tight as you can for the stuff that’s absolutely necessary. We talk about focus on your darlings, center your darlings, and if you’re worried about having too much world building, doing this is probably the best way to reduce it.

Chris: It is worth knowing what you care about. Again, if you’re telling a personal tale and keeping the scope of the story down because you don’t wanna do world building, that’s perfectly fine with those kinds of, like, dragon tea parties.

Often the realism can be really low too, which is another thing I think that helps. You don’t have to do as much world building. So like a lot of, for instance, fairytale fantasy has like royalty everywhere and who cares what kingdom they come from. Their purpose is just to talk about who is betrothed to who and who is gonna fase that dragon and what quest they’re gonna go on.

That works partly just because we have a consistently fanciful, whimsical, surreal, you know, whatever flavor of low realism you like story. And in the sci-fi genre, space opera is often also low realism, where we just got lots of playful alien races from different planets and we’re not worrying about how gravity works on spaceships.

It just works a lot better if you are really consistent about that, ’cause once you start adding gritty elements, that’s when it starts to feel weird that we don’t know where the royalty comes from.

Oren: Or on Star Trek, one of the many things, aside from the transporter bomb that everyone on Star Trek loves.

There’s also a thing where some Star Trek writer every so often will be like, oh hey, what if, to stop an enemy on their ship, they just mess with the gravity? Like they turn the gravity way up or turn it off, and, okay, sure. But once you do that, you can’t have cool phaser fights on the ship anymore because turning off the gravity or turning it way up wherever the enemy is, is a way more efficient way to stop them.

You just have to be wary of stuff like that. I actually have a fun little cheat, ’cause this is my thing now. When we come up with a topic, I tell people a way they don’t have to do it.

Chris: Oh, a hack.

Oren: One weird trick if you want to avoid most of the problems of not doing a lot of world building, but you also don’t wanna do a lot of world building.

A good option is the fun subversion where you take a recognizable set of world tropes and a recognizable genre and you do something weird with it. You subvert expectations in some way. Right? Now doing this with D&D is very popular, where you have D&D characters running coffee shops or inns or what have you, Scalzi has done it a few times with space opera. This is how the Discworld books started. They were basically just a spoof of high fantasy.

Chris: You were not meaning to suggest that Scalzi wrote Discworld. I think that was just two list items blurring together.

Oren: Sorry. No, I did not mean to suggest that.

Bunny: Scalzi is usurping Pratchett!

Oren: Anyway, the point was, if you just ran a standard D&D world, it’s pretty boring, right?

People have seen that a lot, but you make it weird by having the characters run a coffee shop, which is the hot new thing, and that makes it interesting. But you also don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about how the world works. So this is a way to save on your world building budget as it were, and not have to pay any of the costs that would normally be associated with that.

Chris: Works like a parody because the whole point is that you’re commenting on the original, so you wanna make it resemble the original. And if there are things that are unrealistic, that’s also something you’re commenting on.

Oren: The two downsides to this are, versions lose their novelty as more people do them. That can be an issue. It’s like, oh, hey, I’m subverting D&D adventures with a coffee shop. Okay, we have seen this before, but also this doesn’t tend to work for longer stories. That’s why Discworld eventually stopped being a spoof of high fantasy and started to have its own very distinct world building as the series went on, because otherwise it just wouldn’t have been sustainable.

Chris: Certainly the humor starts to decrease and then we need more tension.

Oren: Discworld’s always funny, but it starts to have its own very distinct flavor and stops just being, what if Lord of the Rings was a joke?

Bunny: Also, a third reason is that some people are obnoxious about the subversions and they do the subversion to gawk at the original and the stupid people who like it. Don’t do that.

Oren: Yeah, you could be mean-spirited about it. I would generally not recommend that.

Chris: As an example of when High Realism starts to become more demanding in the world building…I did a critique of this book, They Mostly Come Out At Night, in the Yarnsworld series, and it’s kind of a fairytale fantasy ish, but we set up what feels like is an intentionally gritty setting where people live in just, like a one room hovel. And then everything is really dangerous and they’re always hiding at night. This idea of, we’re impoverished and everything looks kind of ugly, the town is ramshackle and all those things. I start questioning the fact that the grain is sitting out, that’s not in a grain ark because we might as well just eat that.

And I start questioning the fact that a character says that berries are too sweet ’cause that would actually be a great luxury in that kind of setting. Like, people don’t have a lot of access to sugar. Whereas if this was not intending to be this kind of ugly poverty and it was instead more light and whimsical, then I just wouldn’t really worry.

Like whatever, we’re pretending, there aren’t mice that are gonna come and eat your grain during the night. Of course, people have access to sugar, even though historically they wouldn’t have because that’s the kind of setting it is.

Oren: One more thing I wanted to mention, since we’re almost out of time, from what I can tell at least, part of this weird animus about world building we mentioned earlier definitely seems to come from authors who want to do more surreal stories, which don’t have settings that are logically consistent because that’s not how surrealism works. As far as I can tell, if that’s the kind of story you wanna write and go for it. I think the question that comes up when I look at these stories in editing, is that really what the author is going for? Or is it just one or two scenes that don’t make sense? If it’s consistently surreal, cool. But if it’s a normal story and then suddenly it’s like, oh, well the plot here doesn’t have to make sense ’cause I’ve decided it’s surreal, that’s not gonna go over well, that’s not gonna land with any audience.

Chris: The last consideration about world building where some thought is sometimes called for is just doing what you say you’re gonna do in the story, so if you have a futuristic setting and your book advertises the setting as futuristic, it should actually seem futuristic.

And if it has tons of anachronisms in it, where culture hasn’t changed in like a thousand years, that’s not going to seem futuristic, and so that contradiction is just going to feel like a contrivance to readers. If you want to have an egalitarian setting, then it should actually be egalitarian, which means you should be counting your characters and looking at how many people belong to which demographic and how they’re distributed.

Because if you say it’s egalitarian and all of your characters are like white dudes, especially in leadership positions or something like that, you’re not doing what you say you’re doing. Finally, if you’re gonna depict oppression, please work on making it accurate to oppression. Otherwise, if you wanna fight oppression in your work, just leave it out and go for an egalitarian setting.

That honestly takes way less thought than putting oppression in your setting.

Oren: Well with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We can stop world summoning now, Bunny.

Bunny: Ugh, “universe summoning,” Oren.

Oren: Oh, oh no.

Bunny: Brought to you by World Summoning Flakes.

Chris: Well, if we helped you with your world imagining—

Bunny: Boo.

Chris: Consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Settle down class. Everyone pay attention as I write on the blackboard. Schools still have blackboards, right? This reference isn’t horribly dated? Anyway, this week is about building tension in stories that take place in school. That’s more difficult than it might appear, at least for the kind of high-action stories that speculative authors are fond of. Fortunately, we’ve got some ideas, and only one of them involves getting pedantic about what exactly constitutes a school.

• A Deadly Education

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

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Oren: …and…

Bunny: Bunny!

Oren: Everyone, settle down! It’s time to learn things in a structured environment that also has a duty of care. If you need an adventure pass, you’re gonna have to raise your hand. You can’t go on a dangerous adventure without a pass. And if you misbehave, there’ll be a very normal consequence, like detention. In the seventh layer of hell.

Bunny: Ah!

Chris: Oh no, but I just gotta break the rules. I just gotta!

Bunny: How else am I supposed to be cool?

Oren: Yeah, there’s no other way. You’re gonna have to go out and do extremely dangerous things. What other options could you possibly have?

Bunny: But won’t I get extra credit for being brave and kind-hearted while I’m doing these things?

Oren: Yeah. Mostly for being in the Team Good house, I guess, is where you’ll get most of your points. That’s just how it goes.

Chris: Yeah. Your reward is that the headmaster will declare you and your fellows superior to everybody else. This is very healthy.

Bunny: Even though we’re not supposed to be doing that, but, you know, you can’t quash brave-heartedness.

Oren: So today we’re talking about creating tension in school stories. ‘Cause I’ve been thinking about this a lot because Starfleet Academy is finally happening as a TV show. It’s been like everyone’s second best idea for 50 years. And now they’re like, we’re finally making it! We’re doing it, full steam ahead. And I’m concerned to be honest.

Chris: Yeah. I wonder if the impossibility of the premise is why they keep punting it.

Oren: That seems like it to me, right? It just doesn’t seem like it would work very well because it’s a school, and school stories are notoriously difficult at the best of times.

Bunny: So is the premise just our heroes are in school? Is that it?

Oren: We don’t know. We don’t know much about it. All we know so far is that it’s called Starfleet Academy and we have like a cast list, which is a combination of actors from previous shows and like a group of hot young people who are presumably the students.

Chris: Maybe we should start placing our bets on whether in the first episode the entire school is just like attacked and then all the students have to flee, and then it’s just them fleeing around the galaxy. But you know, it’s a metaphorical school. I mean, it’s still technically a school ’cause there’s teachers with them. So we’ll call it school.

Oren: I have been wondering, okay. By Starfleet Academy, do they mean like a ship with cadets on it? Because that seems like a thing they might do. The USS Starfleet Academy. Surprise!

Chris: I’m sure that that’s not the original concept that they intended. Because I mean, we’ve seen these other Star Trek episodes where they hearken back to their academy days and tell stories about it. So I’m sure the idea is supposed to be that people are just at school. But yeah, that will take all of like a few writers in a room for a few hours to probably go out the window.

Oren: So I guess at this point, rather than just ragging on a show that doesn’t exist yet…

Chris: Yeah, maybe we should be optimistic. We should be kind and, you know…

Bunny:  20 points to you for being kind.

Oren: Yeah. Maybe it’ll be good. Who knows? I would like it to be good. It’s not like I’m cheering for it to fail, I just have concerns about the premise. But, okay, so the obvious obstacles to tension are that schools are learning environments for kids. And when people have a choice, they don’t typically send their kids somewhere dangerous. And then schools also have a direct incentive to not let their students get eaten, ’cause it’s harder to attract more students if your students get eaten.

Bunny: Especially private schools, because you are paying to be there. And presumably some of that is so that you don’t get eaten.

Oren: One of the ways we will go into a little bit of making this easier is not all schools are super well-funded, and not all schools have great incentives. So there’s that. And then the last one is that, especially in magic schools, which is the most common type of school narrative in spec fic, you have a bunch of teachers around and the teachers are usually more powerful mages than their students, ’cause that’s just how magic schools typically work. And then that creates another problem of if there’s an issue, why aren’t the teachers fixing it?

Chris: When I think about these problems, I think about a couple things. First, why parents would send their children to the school. And you could have a situation where everyone at the school is an orphan, but writers don’t usually wanna do that.

Bunny: They want their special chosen one to be an orphan!

Chris: Right? And they also want, usually to have like rich, privileged kids at the school. Other things like that. So we need an explanation for why parents would want to send their children to school. And if it’s too dangerous, that doesn’t work. And also, why doesn’t the school shut down if things start happening, right? If there’s, if kids are no longer safe, if they used to be safe, but that has changed… a normal school would just shut down and send all the kids home. So it’s hard to come up with a premise that works and creates tension when those two basic facts are in play.

Bunny: Right. And I think a lot of the conflict that we’re used to in like real world school is also like, not conflict that necessarily makes for a super exciting story. Like grades.

Oren: I mean, you can do a school drama, right? Where the drama, you know, all the storylines are emotional problems that kids are having. That’s a famous thing that happens even at well-run schools. And you know, you can be trying to study hard for tests, but let’s be honest, that’s not what most people want when they sit down to write a speculative fiction school story.

Bunny: Right, you want the magic part to have some salience, and in that case it could just be like your normal high school.

Oren: Yeah. If, if you go to a magic school and nothing magical, adventurous ever happens, readers are gonna wonder why this is a magic story in the first place.

Chris: I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of a magic school cozy. It wouldn’t actually be necessarily that different from House in the Cerulean Sea, where we just have a bunch of magical kids. House of the Cerulean Sea basically has a threat of this orphanage shutting down as its throughline. That’s how it manages, but it still brings in lots of things that are from the outside and it doesn’t actually focus that much on the schoolwork. But you could probably, again, take some pressure off if you did want to do a lighter story.

Oren: So you can use the schoolwork itself to generate tension. I’ve seen people talk about that and, you know, you can attach some pretty hefty stakes to schoolwork depending on the type of story you’re telling. It can be potentially life or death stakes. Like it’s possible that your character is like some kind of renegade super mage or whatever, and they’re like, “you’ve got one chance to shape up. You’ve gotta stay at this school or else bad things.” So that’s an option. It could be something a little more reasonable that’s like, well, I need to do well here so that I can, you know, get a good job out of magic school.

Chris: Or something with the skills that they earn. Like, my family is cursed and I gotta somehow become good at magic to lift the curse on my family.

Oren: Yeah. So you can attach stakes to that. Those tend to make good background stakes and create like a base level of tension. It’s kind of hard to use those for the whole story just because if nothing else, it’ll get repetitive after a while of like, okay, well we’re studying for another test. Great.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you have stakes like, okay, my family is cursed, or I gotta shape up, you’ll also need them to be present at the school so that you can find ways to ramp up tension. So if your family is cursed, then you would want that curse to somehow be present at the school and easily affecting the kid if possible, so that we don’t just have people periodically sending messages, “oh no, your uncle is getting worse. You better learn that magic!” And then you need a reason why the protagonist is struggling with their schoolwork, which is doable, but it just shouldn’t be asshole teachers who are bad at training.

Bunny: Right. And I think also we need to see why the schoolwork is difficult, which in some cases it’s clear. Like if you’re at a fighting school and you have to fight, clearly that’s difficult. But when you’re using a very abstract magic system, it can just feel like… I don’t know, your protagonist is thinking really hard and then failing to produce results for reasons.

Oren: Concentrate!

Bunny: Yeah. Think more!

Oren: Just tell them to concentrate harder. That’ll do it.

Bunny: Right. So I feel like it’s important to know if the classwork is going to be part of the tension, why it’s tense, why it’s difficult, why it’s a conflict, rather than just being like, well, you know, it is difficult.

Oren: Yeah. If you’re gonna use the school work as a source of tension and it’s a magic school work or a tech school work, in the case of Starfleet Academy or what have you, you do need to know how it works, at least on some level. I think Starfleet Academy is gonna suffer from that because we already know how Star Trek technology works and it’s bullshit!

Chris: It works by technobabble.

Oren: And that’s not an easy thing to make interesting stakes out of.

Bunny: Right, but obviously if your magic school is about like… to cast spells, you need to pull from the evil nether realm, and that might cause a demon to pop out onto your lap, it’s a little more intuitive why that might be difficult.

Oren: If you’re the kind of person who likes making detailed magic systems with specific rules and how they work, then a school story is a great place to introduce that, ’cause you have a built-in reason why we have to learn all of it.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think that if you were writing a long series, it might be hard, if you were just focusing on schoolwork, to keep that fresh after a while, but I do think that that might work pretty well in combination with some other solutions, right? Like if you had a curse and that curse caused some life or death stakes at the school occasionally on its own that you had to deal with besides just having the protagonist learn the schoolwork to try to eventually solve this problem, then that would give it some variety. When you run into really difficult plotting problems, sometimes the best you can do is a combination solution, so that no one solution is leaned on too hard.

Bunny: I will say I’m quite tired of the type of story in magic school settings or really just, you know, fantastical school settings where it seems like literally every part of the schoolwork is trying to kill you. Like you have gladiator battles that kill students, and this is not really commented upon like, oh, there’s just a tough school.

Chris: I do see some people wanting to make the school antagonistic, just like outright cruel. That is part of the premise. That’s not unheard of. But I do think that even in those stories, even if again, there are no parents, there are no loving parents sending their kids to school. So your backup like everyone is an orphan or something like that.

Bunny: There’s also not much point to it. Like if you try to position this in the larger society, I feel like I mostly see this with like, it’s the military, right? But then you’re killing all the soldiers.

Chris: Bunny, you can just say Fourth Wing.

Bunny: Look, I wasn’t gonna. 

Oren: Or, I mean, Red Rising, if we want another example. Red Rising is one that supposedly all of these high caste gold families send their kids to murder school where half the students are killed on the first day. And it’s like, well, I don’t really believe you. And you know, I was willing to just buy into it, ’cause whatever, this is like a high octane space adventure where we kick ass and take names and don’t really worry about the societal implications that much. But then, like we also tried to use it for drama. So that the main character could have to feel guilty ’cause he had to kill a student who wasn’t prepared. And it’s like, well, I mean now I just kind of feel like you’re taking advantage of me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief, but now it’s like you’re trying to make me feel bad with it and I don’t appreciate that.

Bunny: Yeah. That would be kind of like if, I don’t know, like halfway through Mad Max, the title character got down outta the rig and just started weeping over all of the war boys he’d killed. Like it would feel dissonant.

Oren: Right. It’s like, that’s not what we’re here for, man. This is the story where we go to murder school. I am trying my best to buy into that premise.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: Fourth Wing definitely has this problem. Again, it’s a Dragon Military Training Academy. So people try to become dragon riders and it’s supposed to be prestigious. Now, granted, if the death rate is too high, none of the powerful families would wanna actually send their kids there, probably. And if I’m gonna be really generous to it, we do have a setup where there are fewer dragons than riders. And the dragons, some of them seem kinda evil, so they don’t like the students. They might just burn them to death. And so you can theoretically see, the school is run by an evil empire, why it might let that go. Because the dragons have all the power in this situation and they’re the more precious resource. But like there’s still lots of things where, you know, on day one to even get into school, they have to go across this parapet that they could easily fall off of to their deaths. And there’s just no reason for that. It’s like, put some mats down there, so if they fail, they just don’t get into the school. There’s no reason to just have them fall to their death. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re just wasting resources at that point.

Oren: Plus they continue the whole “students can die at any moment” thing after they’ve bound their dragons. And we’ve been told that a rider dying can kill a dragon. So… what? Like, what’s going on?

Bunny: So be a little more careful guys, especially if dragons are a precious resource.

Oren: I get that they’re an evil empire, but that doesn’t make them incompetent, especially if they’ve conquered all this, their military must work on some level. Yeah, that’s a whole thing. One thing that I see people often reach for is the idea of like, well, what if the school is actually impoverished, right? And so it doesn’t have the resources for proper safety measures or the money to hire teachers who have the students’ best interests at heart. And sure, like that’s a real problem that exists. It’s tragic. I’d be careful throwing that in. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t, but is that really the story you want to tell, is the question I would ask. ‘Cause when I run into a lot of authors who try this, they think it sounds cool for about five chapters, and then they’re like, “oh, this is actually a huge bummer. This isn’t actually what I wanted.” And then they end up doing something that just doesn’t fit with this supposedly poverty racked school they’ve created.

Bunny: Well, that’s because it’s like, you know, a big part of magic school is wish fulfillment and there’s not a lot of wish fulfillment in going to, I don’t know, a shabby public school where all they serve is meatloaf.

Oren: And also with a lot of these schools, even poverty isn’t gonna explain it anyway, right? Like, if you’re dealing with schools where demons are constantly attacking, even parents who don’t have any other options, they’re just gonna keep their kids home because like, okay, they’re not getting an education, but they’ll be alive. That explanation has limits and it very often doesn’t mesh with the kind of story authors wanna make anyway. You can also do what I’ve started calling the worldbuilding bonanza explanation, which is what you find in stories like A Deadly Education, where the entire novel is basically set up to try to justify this inherently illogical premise. And I wrote a whole article on why I didn’t buy it and why I felt like it really slowed the story down. But even if you think that it did a great job, Novik is basically – Naomi Novik is the author – is basically spending the entire book fighting her story’s momentum, and I just have to feel like there’s a better way. You want a setup where you don’t have to spend the entire thing fighting the premise you created.

Chris: Yeah, honestly, at that point, I think-

Bunny: Right.

Chris: -just having a completely unrealistic school and ignoring the problem is better. I would choose that over spending my entire book with lots of exposition, trying to justify everything.

Bunny: I do wonder if part of this is sort of a bifurcated problem with two different types of magic school, one in which the danger could come up at any time and does, and the other in which like a cataclysmic danger has just showed up and it’s an anomaly. And I think most of these are dealing with the first one, right? Like you want this environment where the danger is all part of it. But I feel like the other option is something that more authors should think about. I think that there are a lot more plausible premises where everyone is out of their depth. And like students and teachers alike, it makes more sense that the students would be jumping in on the action or that maybe the teachers are antagonistic and they are part of what caused all of this. Like the call is inside the building.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, attacks and emergencies that are just one-off and aren’t normal at the school are definitely a solution that helps. The problem is that they only work for so long before they just become as unrealistic as everything else that’s been happening, because you have to explain why the school doesn’t shut down and send the kids home at that point. Now, you could have something like a literal siege where the kids can’t go home ’cause they’re surrounded. But sieges are pretty bleak. Again, so if we’re going for wish fulfillment, you know, having everybody like run out of food and start eating rats is probably not…

Oren: You’d also have to justify, why are we still doing classes at this point? Like is it really a school story if it’s a siege that happens to take place at a school? Like, it’s probably not what most people are imagining,

Bunny: Right, I feel like this would probably, unless you want to do the siege storyline and have your students eat magic rats or whatever, I think the premise that makes the most sense is like a mystery story in the setting where it’s not very bombastic, but like the students are investigating and who can you trust and stuff like that. I’ve actually read two different graphic novels recently that basically had that premise of like, it’s a mystery at magic school, one of which was Over My Dead Body, and the other, which was Sorceline, which was thoroughly meh, but did do the like, it’s an isolated school where weird things have started happening and it might be one of the professors, or it might be the protagonist inadvertently causing the spooky things to happen. So she doesn’t want to tell anyone.

Chris: Yeah, I mean if it’s subtle and under wraps enough, right, that the school can keep running. Yeah, you could keep that going for a while, right?

Bunny: And Under My Dead Body uses- or, Over My Dead Body uses- uh, wrong direction! Uses the antagonistic teachers thing to explain why people aren’t doing more, which ultimately works in its favor when that twist is found out.

Chris: Yeah. But again, just as a reminder, when we’re talking about things like mysteries, a mystery doesn’t typically on its own create tension, right? Because it’s more curiosity inducing, but that doesn’t sustain the plot in the same way. It is definitely an enhancement, but usually a mystery story also has stakes added to the mystery so that there’s like tension going forward. So right in this case we have the question of what’s happening, but the source of tension is like the actual threat that’s being perceived by the student when weird and possibly dangerous things are happening. And if it’s at a more personal scale, if it’s not an epic scale thing that’s threatening all the students in the whole school and it’s just one student, and the student has a reason not to disclose that, maybe they don’t trust their teachers, then yeah, I could see that that working for a while. I mean, maybe not an entire series, right, but for a book.

Bunny: Yeah. Right. And Sorceline, it was like people, I think people turning into glass, so like what’s causing that is part of the question. And they think it’s a one-off. But that does like, again, it veers towards the ” why aren’t they closing down? Because students are turning to glass” type of thing.

Oren: In my experience, you can figure out ways to make these sorts of special circumstances work and they can often work for maybe even an entire book if you’re devoted enough. One that comes to mind is Legendborn where the protagonist has to get into demon hunter school because she thinks that someone at the school killed her mom. And so she’s trying to find out who, so obviously she can’t tell anybody ’cause you know, they might protect each other and she doesn’t know who it was. So that worked out. Now that book ends and she’s no longer at demon hunter school, which I think is the right choice. ’cause I can’t imagine that premise working a second time. But it was strong enough to sustain a relatively long novel. So that worked out.

Bunny: Oh, now her other parent is dead and someone else might have done it!

Oren: No, I really like her dad!

Bunny: Let her stay another four years.

Oren: No, no. Her dad is great. Don’t touch her dad. Her dad is a precious snowflake. I love him a lot. You can also do one of my favorites, which is to dodge the issue entirely and just use the school as a backdrop for something else that’s happening. I love to like, find a difficult problem and just not deal with it, just cheat by doing something else. So, you know, this is like you’re technically students at a school.  But really you’ve been recruited by the weird criminology professor to do a murder trial and you just happen to have shots at class sometimes, stuff like that. That sort of thing allows you to get some of that school flavor without having to deal with the huge constraints that being in a school puts on your plot.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s not so different from the mystery plot that Bunny suggested, where something happens at school. It just has to be, again, there can’t be too much danger at the school. Our weird teacher can’t take us on adventures that are too dangerous, and at that point it’s just, okay, can you bring in the school enough that it still feels like they’re at school?

Bunny: It’s an internship for which you get class credit.

Oren: Another one that I haven’t actually seen much, but that I think has a lot of potential and I might have stolen this from Chris, if so, I apologize. It’s the idea of extending some kind of political conflict that is going on outside the school into the school, like if there are factions that are vying for power in the mageocracy or whatever, and those factions, you know, have a presence in the school that can create a lot of fun conflict and at the same time feel much more believable why the school doesn’t intervene to shut it down, because it has to also appease these much larger factions.

Chris: Now that I think about it, I did have some weird idea for a school political intrigue that I might have told you about.

Oren: This was a while ago now.

Chris: It was a while ago.

Oren: Yeah. I had this concept for like a magic school story and the idea would be that like people were in their school houses or whatever, but those houses are also like, you know, political factions outside the school. And so there was conflict within the school trying to recruit the best students. And then like the factions also would, some of the teachers were loyal to different factions. So that was a whole thing. I think that could probably work, you know, you’d have to actually make the politics believable. You probably don’t wanna have a house that is explicitly for evil people. That’s probably not gonna work.

Chris: I think you’d also, again, the institution of the school would need to be really culturally and politically important.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So that what happens at the school matters at large. And that’s not impossible to do, but I think that would be important so that you can have like larger stakes beyond, you know, so when we do weird things at the school, other people notice.

Oren: Red Rising tried to do that, but it ended up actually making it worse because, so they have this thing where like, it’s not like the houses that they’re in, the Mars, Jupiter house or whatever… I don’t think those exist outside the school, but there are networks of people who know each other from the houses they were in at school. And so they like, you know, have a loyalty to their school and they do all kinds of politics in that regard. So like, getting to know people in your school is supposed to be important. But at the same time, the author really wanted the protagonist’s house to be like the disadvantaged, scrappy one. And there’s no explanation for why, they just get less stuff than everybody else. And I’m just wondering why that is. Why aren’t the patrons of that house on the outside objecting? ‘Cause this is hurting their chances of recruiting more qualified people out of the school. And it, you know, it was a weird thing that they added in, that clashed with another thing the author wanted to do, which I mean, story of my life. Fair enough.

Chris: I do wanna talk about rule breaking, since that is a fairly obvious source of conflict, that it can help, but it also has limited use. Which is, basically, you give your protagonist some reason to break school rules and get into trouble. And it could be, you know, them doing their own investigation and then doing forbidden things where they go spy on other students, or you have to arrange something, but it’s not too hard to arrange something. I think one of the things about that is besides just like, okay, how bad are the punishments? Like you could potentially make it so that there’s a reason why the protagonist has to stay at school and getting expelled from school would be bad, but you could only take that so far before the school starts to look toothless. So either the protagonist keeps breaking the rules and they never get caught, in which case it loses tension because the chances of them getting caught then feel really low, or the school catches them and gives them a punishment. But unless, again, we’re doing something really dangerous that no school would actually do as a reasonable punishment, that punishment is just not gonna look like much until this student reaches the point where they might actually be expelled or something, at which case, again, the punishments start to look meaningless as you give them more punishments.

Oren: The punishment is that you have to participate in the school’s amateur production of The Breakfast Club, which I think we can all agree is a fate worse than death.

Chris: So yeah, that after a while, again, the only way to make that last longer is to have punishments that are actually cruel.

Bunny: It’s also, I feel like you can extend that too. If the hero, like say if you’re doing that political maneuvering school story, if the hero has allies who call in a favor about it, so you don’t get the ultimate punishment, but now the stakes are higher because they’ve called in that favor, and also you owe them something. And that puts you in the bad graces of people who think you didn’t deserve that, etc.

Oren: That’s where you have the antagonistic love interest, who now you owe a favor to. Ooh!

Bunny: 10/10, would read.

Oren: All right, so that is about it. We are done for time. Class dismissed. All of you go home. Do your homework though, otherwise, you’re going to the murder forest.

Chris: No! Your homework is to go to patreon.com/mythcreants and support us.

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

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

Sometimes you immediately fall in love with a character and want them to succeed. Other times, you want nothing more than to fire that character into a passing sun. It’s the second category we’re talking about today. What is it that makes characters unlikable, and how do you fix it? Assuming you want to fix it, of course. If not, then just do the opposite of everything we talk about in today’s episode.

• Save That Cat

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song] This is a Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:

Bunny: Bunny!

Chris: and…

Oren: Oren! 

Chris: You know, you two are both such pathetic losers who are so uncool. I’m so much better than you. But hey look, I just saved a cat, so you have to love me now. Even though I said that to you.

Oren: Chris, you didn’t have to save that cat. You were already a cool, truth-talking rebel [laughter from Chris], who doesn’t let society censor what you have to say.

Bunny: Now that I see you holding that cat, I realize I disliked you and whined over here in the corner. It’s just because you’re just so cool and nice. 

Chris: Obviously, you were jealous of me.

Bunny: I was jealous. It’s true. 

Chris: Yeah. Everybody who hates me is really jealous. That’s how this works. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s just how it works.

Bunny: I’m jealous and therefore weak, and everything you said was correct. Now, can I please touch the cat? 

Chris: Okay, but only because I’m very gracious. 

Bunny: Oh!

Chris: But also this cat likes me better ’cause I’m the coolest.

Bunny: [laughter] That’s only fair. 

Oren: Wow. We just love this character. 

Bunny: It has great taste, that cat.

Oren: This character is just so great.

Chris: Uh huh, am I not the most likable character? 

Bunny: We all bow down to your supreme likability in the face of our whining, quivering inferiority. We’ve both got, like, unflattering haircuts, and we’re constantly kind of sweaty in a really sullen way. 

Oren: Yeah, there’s a lot of descriptions of “moist” when people talk about us…?

Bunny: Yeah, we’re like, mopping our forehead. Got damp handkerchiefs. Everyone’s like, oh, Chris is the only normal one in this podcast. 

Chris: Yeah. So yeah, this time we’re talking about what makes protagonists unlikable, ’cause there are a lot of things that can get in the way and make people hate a character that generally the storyteller does not intend. Just to clarify, I do think, again, defining what we mean when we say “likable” can be important. This is a pretty contentious topic−

Oren: Little bit.

Chris: And to be clear, we are not talking about whether or not you would like somebody if you met them in real life. We are not talking about whether somebody is moral or immoral, although that does factor in. We’re specifically talking about whether this is a character that readers enjoy reading about. That’s it. That’s pretty self-evident, ’cause that kind of aligns with the storyteller’s goals, right? You have an immoral character where readers enjoy reading about them, enjoy having that person as a protagonist, then you don’t have a likability problem. 

Oren: And it’s one of those things where it’s true that it isn’t a question of would you like them if you met them on the street? But there is more… overlap to that then is sometimes convenient for the way people want to talk about this question. Things that you can do that would make a character likable that wouldn’t work on a real person, but at the same time, a lot of the things that would make you dislike a person in real life will also apply to characters.

Bunny: It is just technically true that you will be spending a lot of time with this character. You’re not going to be hanging out with them at a coffee shop per se, but you are gonna be with them a lot. So, I think it’s true that at some level you want to be… not actively turned off by them. 

Chris: I think the biggest difference is that us storytellers, we have our tricks because whether something has emotional impact really matters. So, if you meet somebody and you find out they’re scamming seniors on the side, you might be like, “Ugh, I don’t think I should be this person’s friend.” But if you watch a show about The Good Place and you have a character, Eleanor Shellstrop, and you find out that she’s doing that, but the show is funny and the storyteller does their tricks to make sure that you never feel bad, you never meet any of those seniors, you never see them get scammed, you never have that emotional impact of the bad things that she’s done, they can get away with a lot more. 

So, I think that’s the biggest difference, especially when it comes to people judging immoral actions. Part of that judgment is always the harm, and that is always judged at an emotional level. So, if you can keep people from feeling something emotionally, you can get away with a character that does more.

Oren: There’s a certain taste question to it. I have a specific pet peeve that makes me instantly dislike a character, which is when they are “fake” outcasts. They act like outcasts, and the story treats them as one, but they have all the traits of a popular person. Or, at least, the thing that they are supposedly outcast for isn’t a thing that would actually happen with−

Chris: −like, every magical high schooler is like, “Freak!” Looks like a really normal, cool high schooler. There’s nothing here. 

Oren: Or Quentin in The Magicians, the TV show version. He’s supposed to be a nerd, ’cause he likes the Lord of the Rings, and people don’t like him for that. And, I don’t know, maybe in the 80s that was true. It’s definitely not true now. Or when the show came out, which was in the late aughts, early tens? Being a nerd was very cool by then.

So, the idea that he was outcast ’cause he liked Narnia and Lord of the Rings is like, nah, no thank you.  

Chris: I mean, it wasn’t cool when I went to high school, but I don’t think it counted against me either. 

Bunny: Definitely nothing out of the ordinary now. Everyone likes Lord of the Rings. 

Oren: Yeah, a more extreme version is Wednesday from the Netflix show where she’s like a social outcast who hates all of the things that it is socially acceptable to hate, like social media. Oh wow. What a trailblazer there. Hating social media. That’s certainly not a thing anyone does, but not everyone seems to care about that, so that might not be a broad spectrum thing. 

Chris: There are a lot of big budget or popular bestselling stories that meet storytelling requirements or requirements for likability through some very serious contrivances, and it has definitely divided people on whether or not you buy it. Are you gonna buy that this super attractive, cool-looking teen is gonna be bullied because they have magic? I wouldn’t buy it. But obviously some people might want to buy that. So, that definitely gets divisive, I think. 

Bunny: I will say, one thing that’s not necessarily in the writing of a character’s likability, but in the presentation in visual media−talking about the fake outcasts thing−when you have a very attractive actor and you dress them in baggy, unflattering clothes and then have everyone tease them about being ugly. That’s really obnoxious. 

Oren: Yeah. I’m not a fan. 

Chris: I do understand the appeal of the transformation movies. We just wanna see a character go from unstylish to stylish so that we can have that sequence where she’s gotten her hair straightened or something and she walks out in her new dress and people are like, [gasp]  understand the appeal.

Bunny: Wow, you are hot all along! Holy crap, you’re played by Halle Berry!

Chris: Makeovers can be fun. It reminds me of this trope that has now found new life−the 80s trope where we watch a character go try on a bunch of different clothes, and we have a montage of them just wearing different clothes. 

Bunny: I think the Wonder Woman movie had that, of all things.

Chris: Yeah, and I watched Lisa Frankenstein recently, another movie that had a sequence like that. It is very cheesy, but I can see that it’s in service to a specific trope that people enjoy seeing. 

Oren: Yeah, okay, so moving away from that specific trope. Probably the most reliable thing that will make a character unlikeable is if you give them too much candy. Just tell everyone how cool they are, and they’re super cool, and they’ve never failed at anything, and they’re perfect and beautiful. 

Bunny: Yep. 

Chris: Candy characters have the opposite of sympathy. Because usually a lot of candied traits are very inherent traits to them, not things that they’ve earned. So, they just… are automatically good at everything. They’re just a genius who takes to every skill immediately. That’s not really something that they had to struggle for. So that puts them in karmic debt where we feel like they have more than they actually deserve. 

Now, some audiences are just sweet tooths. They just do like these characters. I think kids are more likely to like candied characters. So, it’s not like nobody grabs onto them, but if you don’t immediately like them, then you start to resent them instead of the character winning the audience over, which is ideal. 

Oren: And a lot of it has to do with, do you identify with the character or not? This is why Kvothe is able to be popular despite the fact that he’s the best at everything. He does all of the things that even basic writing advice says not to do, but he manages to be popular okay, because a significant number of the readership were like, “Oh man, what if I was Kvothe?” It’s also turning off everyone who didn’t think that. So, it’s a really major division of your audience.

Chris: And this is the kind of ironic and unfair thing. We call it “candy”, but outside of us, what most people would recognize is the term Mary Sue. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Which blames this on women, but actually, if you look at popular stories, these are usually men because female characters are much less likely to be given that kind of budget if they have lots of candy. 

Bunny: Yay.

Chris: There’s a double standard where if it’s popular and has a budget, it’s probably a male character. Not that there are no popular stories with female candied characters, but they’re less likely because everything is still male-centric. 

Oren: Yeah. On the bright side, I haven’t seen this that much in novels in the last five or six years.

Bunny: I unfortunately just read a novel that had an over-candied main character. 

Oren: Oh, really? 

Bunny: The Sleepless.

Oren: Oh. 

Bunny: The story begins with several pages of him describing how many cool skills he has because he now has all this time to learn cool skills, which is everything from kung fu to cooking really good steaks, but then those never come up, really. 

He gets in a really brief fight at one point, and then immediately gets his ass beat. I was like, where’s your kung fu? So it’s got the kind of weird situation where he’s got all this awesome, cool knowledge, and he tells you about it. He’s so empty inside, but he’s still got all this cool stuff, don’t worry. But then it’s just… it’s window dressing. So he is both candied and not, it was very weird, but I did dislike him at the beginning because I was like, stop bragging.

Chris: Yeah. Characters also have a tendency to be hard on other characters. They tend to steal the spotlight from other characters and render those characters helpless so that the candied character can just get all the glory and save the day every time.

They often are smug. A lot of times, the author gets joy of having them get one over on other characters and show other characters up. So these are all things that tend to make candied characters a lot less likable.

Oren: I’ve actually recently been running into the opposite problem more often than I would’ve expected, which is when they have too much spinach because then they’re just unpleasant and downtrodden and dejected. 

Mm-Hmm. 

Oren: Like in the book that I had to stop, The Bone Shard series. Spoilers for the first second book. I really like Lin, the empress character, but in the second book, it’s just a series of her being told she’s wrong over and over and over again. And it didn’t help that me and the author were clearly not jiving on what the correct solution to these problems were because every time Lin would suggest a solution, I’m like, yeah, that’s probably the best solution in this circumstance. Then she would be told, “No, that’s the wrong solution. You have to do this other thing.” And I’d be sitting here being like, no. And then that other thing would work, and I would get so upset.

Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating. 

Chris: I recently read The House of the Cerulean Sea, and this one is a funny one because it’s clear that the author just loves all of the side characters, and so the main character just gets all the spinach and all of the other characters, they’re candied, and they’re constantly telling him that he’s wrong about things or being condescending to him or forcing him to do things.

It’s like a character arc by telling, not showing, but like every other character other than the main character is the author’s mouthpiece. And so again, a lot of this comes with a difference between the storyteller and the audience, or a difference between different audience members, on which character is the character that you are emotionally attached to.

So in this case, it felt like this author created a main character to just be the person who’s downtrodden and wrong about things, who then has to learn better because the author liked these other characters. And probably some audience members did too, because they’re the ones that are given cool stuff.

The main character doesn’t get any cool stuff. Doesn’t get any magic powers, for instance. But I really liked the main character. And that’s always going to happen when you make somebody your main character, because if you open several chapters with this person and they have to like the main character to continue the book on some level. Which again, is just why if you have a candied character or favorite character, I always recommend making it your main character because that is the person you are basically telling your audience to like, and that’s the character you need them to like in order to want to continue the book. So, falling in love with a side character and giving that character all the candy, going to be a bad time for some of your readers. 

Oren: I had that problem with my villain in The Abbess Rebellion. One of the things that I did several times when I was editing the book was adjust scenes so that the villain didn’t seem more right than I wanted him to be. I wanted him to not be cackle-y and mustache-twirly. I wanted him to seem like he believed he was doing the right thing, and I think I mostly succeeded by the end. But in the beginning I definitely gave some signals that some readers were picking up on that actually, he’s right the whole time, which is not what I wanted. So I had to balance that and I think I did okay. Buy my book! It’s okay! 

Bunny: What an endorsement. I do wonder if comedies sometimes have more of that spinach problem. On St. Patrick’s Day, I watched Leap Year, which is a romcom set in Ireland, and the female lead in that, it goes out of its way to humiliate her. At one point, she’s driving with a love interest, who at this point is like really prickly and doesn’t like her, and they get stopped by a herd of cows, and she gets outta the car to move the cows out of the way, and then she steps in cow poop, and then the car rolls backwards into a ditch. They have to walk because the car is now busted.

And then she thinks she’s about to get a ride from some guys who then steal their stuff, and the love interest this entire time is just making a smug “I told you so” face. The poor female character−the lead−doesn’t ever really get to use her actual skills in this. It’s just the cool one is the love interest, and he gets to be sad and somewhat snarky, and she’s always on the back foot. I just found it really frustrating. 

Oren: Characters failing things is great comedy gold. That can be very funny. I have seen comedies that, at least for me, take it too far and make the character just unpleasant to watch, and it’s hard for me to say where that line is with comedies, especially filmed comedies, right? That’s two degrees of separation outside of what I normally work on. 

Chris: I think there’s a couple things that happen. One, a joke can just become too repetitive if you overuse it. And also, this is what I would talk about with the spinach-candy balance. Its spinach becomes a lot more tolerable if they also have time to shine.

If they also have some cool skills, if they also get to solve problems and make a difference−and those things should just balance each other out a little bit−you can have a character that tends to have more candy, but still has a little bit of spinach, or a character that tends to have more spinach but still has some candy, but gotta have both, or it’s just not gonna land well with a lot of people.

Bunny: And I think it was also that this wasn’t just a straight comedy either, like it’s a romcom. We’ve also got the romance element and some more, like, serious tender moments in there because romance, right? The main female character supposedly does have skills. Her skills are, she’s an interior decorator, and I expected that to come up at some point because the love interest is kind of a rough man of the earth, I guess. He doesn’t have a lot of soft skills. So, I expected that she would have more of that or that her interior decorating skills would come in handy. At one point, they’re staying with an older couple, and they’re starting to connect, and they’ll make dinner, and that’s the only time that her skill comes up is she arranges some flowers on a table. I just wanted to see her doing things well. 

Chris: Another thing that I think is really important in the context of characters being unlikable is character flaws. There’s so many other writing outlets out there that just emphasize flaws a lot. Literary genre types especially like to emphasize character flaws, I think, in rebellion to characters that they see are not flawed enough probably. And also, if we’re doing character arcs−and a lot of people put a lot of focus on character arcs−they don’t have to start with a flaw. A character who’s grieving doesn’t have a flaw.

Chris: For instance, they often do start with a flaw, and writers tend to get very focused on flaws, but flaws−especially if they take over a character−really can push audiences away. So thinking about having a flaw there in a balanced way, because I’ve seen a lot of stories where it basically entirely defines the character, the writer’s hitting that flaw button so hard. 

Yeah, I get it. There’s gonna be a character arc, but we don’t need it to be their main feature of their personality. That’s just unpleasant.

And it does vary depending on what flaws they have. Some flaws are much more unlikable than others. Arrogance and selfishness are the two biggest ones. But for instance, when I did my retelling of Snow Queen, my character is meek to start out with, and some readers were just fine with it. There were a few readers who… they didn’t like how meek she was at the beginning. They wanted a character that was more empowered. And so, not sure that there’s any flaw that if you have it there strongly is entirely safe when it comes to likability. And maybe that’s okay. Sometimes we’re okay losing a couple people, but I do think it’s worth just thinking about that balance of having it present but not having it take over too much. And especially readers get really frustrated when they watch a character make a decision that they know is the wrong decision and watch that blow up in the character’s face. 

Oren: Yeah, they’re not fans. Something that is very common, not quite in either the candy or spinach area, is a character who hinders the other characters in moving the plot forward. That kind of character is especially annoying. Probably the archetypal character for this on TV is Neelix ’cause Neelix is constantly messing things up and making it harder for the other characters to do their jobs.

And so you’re just sitting there wondering, “Why is Neelix even here?” But you can have subtler versions of it. The superhero stories. The superhero’s love interest is often pushed into this role of the, “No, superhero, don’t go out and save the world!” Well, he’s obviously gonna. He has to do that for the plot to work. This doesn’t feel like anything other than delaying the story.

Chris: Or the wife that’s like, “How dare you go save the world. You need to spend more time with your family!” 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Oh, why did we create this scenario? We really created a scenario where people are gonna die. Now, we’re putting them in a position where him taking care of his family is being made into a bad thing, and then his wife is being made into the bad guy for wanting him to spend time with the family. I don’t like it. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I don’t like it at all. 

Oren: It’s not great. I wish writers would stop doing that. 

Bunny: There’s also−maybe this is just because of film media−I feel like child characters have a higher probability of being annoying or unlikable when they display these traits. The character I’m thinking of−this was from the webcomic The Last Halloween−is an obnoxious child, and the cast are children, but the author clearly loves this awful vampire kid who’s constantly being the worst.

Chris: That sounds like a candied character. Anytime you’re like, oh, I know the author loves this character, that’s a huge sign of candy. And it can be hard to recognize because it’s not just that a character is objectively super cool. When you see a character is just getting a lot more energy from the author, the author makes them quirky and elaborates on the backstory and describes what they look like, seems to make the story revolve around them a little bit more, even though they’re not supposed to be the main character.

Bunny: I think the author just found this guy fun, and I found him awful. It was clearly, “Oh, what a little rascal, ha ha!” But his being a rascal involved actually killing people or leaving them to burn alive while also being all of the worst things that a little boy can be. When he disappeared, everyone was sad about it, and I was like, thank God.

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s so much candy. 

Bunny: And then he reappeared! 

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s another common candied character thing is a character’ll even die sometimes or whatever, just so everybody else can be like, “Oh no, I should have done what that character wanted. And I never appreciated how cool the character was. Oh, aren’t we all so sad? This character was the best.”

Oren: When a character fake dies so that there is a funeral for the other characters to gush about them over, that’s too much candy. That’s too much. 

Bunny: It’s pretty telling that that sort of thing would happen to my terrible self inserts when I was learning how to write and just sticking myself into every hero. They would always have a fake death, and then everyone would be like [crying noises]. 

Chris: But hilariously, I’ve also encountered a couple of annoying child characters that it wasn’t actually that the author wanted to give them candy. It was that the author didn’t know how to make them likable, and the child was just supposed to die.

Not what I expected! So, Skin of the Sea, a book that has a lot of good traits, I have used it for word craft examples ’cause I do love the prose in that book, but it has this precocious child character that I’m just like, why are they bringing this character? He is obnoxious and he really shouldn’t be going on this dangerous mission, and it’s frustrating that they’re bringing a child along. Sometimes having undue emphasis on a character by the storyteller really does doom that character. 

And maybe they’re doing it ’cause they want the audience to like that character. Maybe they’re trying to make you care about the child just to kill the child off, which is a bad idea. Don’t do that. Um, if you succeeded, you would make your readers real upset. 

Oren: It feels like I’m being bludgeoned or almost like emotional blackmail.

Chris: It feels manipulative. I didn’t feel natural. 

Bunny: I think the only story I’ve seen do that sort of thing decently is also pretty brutal, which is John Wick. Where he’s just lost his wife. He’s having a really hard time. The wife as a parting gift gave him a dog, and then the villains come in and wreck his house and kill his dog. And that’s the impetus for sending him down a murder destruction pathway. And John Wick is an extremely violent movie, but I was listening to an interview with the directors and they were like, yeah, you only ever kill one dog in your career. We’re not doing that again. 

Oren: John Wick does a lot to make it seem this character is doing his best with his dog. It’s not like he brings his dog with him into the den of the evil mafia, and then the dog gets killed. Yeah, which is what was happening in Skin to the Sea, which is one of the reasons that character was so obnoxious. It’s like, why are they still with this child? Why have they not returned this child to his house? They know where his house is. 

Chris: Yeah. In fact, I feel like there was even an elder that was like, “Hey, after you show them to this village, come right back.” And then he just doesn’t, and it’s like, I don’t think you have permission from his elders to bring him with.

Oren: Yeah. He stowed away on their boat, and they basically decided, “I guess we don’t have time to take him back.” And I was honestly thinking, I think you have time. 

Bunny: Probably have time. 

Oren: He is going to make your mission worse if you bring him. So, that was weird. A thing that is a little more subtle that I think might be worth mentioning before we end the episode is when your character has an unpaid karmic debt. This is a thing that authors struggle with a lot because sometimes they’ll have the character do something that to them just seems like either a fluff moment or establishing who the character is.

But to the reader, it’s like, well, that was a bad thing he just did. He should pay for that. You have your character who is mean to a barista. In the first scene to establish that he’s gruff and having a bad day, but he was mean to a barista. Rude. He should pay for that! I don’t like him. 

Bunny: He’s a meanie. 

Chris: The character in Fallout−Cooper−he has a fair amount of candy, and he mostly gets away with it because he has a charismatic actor who is also a white guy. But even though he’s kind of immoral, I tolerated him for quite a while. Until he shot that young man. And it was the kind of thing where like, yeah, maybe the young man was gonna shoot him, but Cooper deliberately provoked him. Right? That was a situation−

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: −that Cooper could have easily just not told the kid that he just killed his brother−And avoided any violence.−and the fact that he just does that and walks away and doesn’t have to pay for it at all. That was it for me. Now, I don’t like this character anymore. Sometimes it’s just one thing that they do that’s bad.

Oren: For a villain, okay, sure, ’cause we’re hoping to see him get his comeuppance, but he’s clearly not a villain. He was clearly an anti-hero who was moving closer and closer to just being a protagonist by the end, but he still killed that kid for no reason. So, yeah, it’s obnoxious. 

Chris: So if you do wanna have a character that’s a sympathetic villain that you want to be likable or who is selfish or does bad things, you really do have to carefully manage, okay, what are we gonna actually show them doing and make it so that they only kill people who the audience already hates?

For instance, or we assume they’re supposed to be killing people, but we only ever see them knock somebody out or kidnap them. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That careful management of emotions so it’s not too far. And Oren has a post on redemption arcs where you use the concept of, okay, but it’s about how far they go and having to be redeemed and the amount of time you have for the story to redeem them. If you’re not willing to spend tons of time making them grovel in order to stop the audience from feeling resentful about the bad things they did, then you really shouldn’t make them do things that are very bad. 

Bunny: Yeah. 

Oren: Okay. Well, on that note, I think we will call this episode to a close. 

Chris: If you found us likable, please consider contributing on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And if you didn’t find us likable, contribute anyway so we can buy likability lessons.  

Bunny: Yeah, maybe they’ll teach us how to clean off our foreheads. Stop being so moist. 

Oren: Yeah, and 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. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.