Every story needs a viewpoint, and most of the time, that means a point of view character. This is often taken for granted, even though we’re never really taught the basics. Instead, authors just have to figure it out by feel. This week, we’re working to correct that as we go over viewpoint fundamentals. Who should your POV character be, what should they sound like, and how can you describe them? Also, why they should totally be Sam Smorkle the random goblin.

• A Spell for Chameleon 

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–

Oren: Oren.

Chris:  And– 

Bunny: Bunny. 

Chris: Well, I know that I’m sitting at a computer talking into a microphone, but I can’t see either of you, so for all I know you’re speaking to me from Antarctica. 

Oren: Yeah. I’m really mysterious. You can’t see what’s going on inside my head.

Bunny: I’m actually a penguin. I’ve been a penguin this whole time. I cleverly misled you by calling myself Bunny. 

Chris: Wow.

Oren: That is a good reveal. 

Bunny: Yeah. I didn’t reveal this until four fifths of the way into the book, but you know… 

Oren: You should definitely surprise reveal the species of your main character three fourths of the way through the book.

Bunny: Yes. 

Oren: I swear half the weird questions I see on various writing subreddits are “how do I conceal this essential piece of information about my viewpoint character?” And it’s “no, you don’t.” 

Bunny: Oh, stop. Bad. Retreat. 

Oren: That’s the neat part. You don’t. 

Bunny: And don’t mislead people into thinking your character’s a centaur either. Going to centaur school. 

Oren: That was a funny example, right? Because he is like “I’ll have to go to centaur school!” This is from A Spell for Chameleon. In the first couple pages, when it was still kind of cute/funny, and not like gross/creepy funny. And he has that line where he says “I might have to go to centaur school”. You eventually could figure out it means a school run by centaurs, but since we’ve had no description of what he looks like at that point, it could just as easily be a school for centaurs, of which he is one of them. 

Chris: So this time we’re talking about viewpoint characters, some basics, and questions that people ask and things like that. 

Let’s start at the top with the obvious. What is a viewpoint character? 

Oren: It’s the person that you shoot the point of view gun at from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Bunny: Or maybe it’s the personification of a pretty overlooked point on the side of a highway. 

Chris: Oh yeah, that sounds good. 

Oren: It’s very nice. It’s very scenic. 

Chris: Yeah, so it just means the narration is supposed to be in their head to some level,  reporting what they are thinking or feeling and nobody else. So stories that don’t have narration don’t technically have them. 

Although in a show you can see that scenes might follow a character, and so it kind of feels similar to that character having a viewpoint, but it’s not technically the same because we don’t have their thoughts. 

Although with voiceover…I don’t know, maybe with enough voiceover, you could call it a viewpoint character.

Oren: The new Murderbot show looks like it’s going in that direction just based on the trailer, which it can probably get away with better than most because it’s using them to make jokes, which, sure. Generally speaking, that much voiceover is not a good idea. But if it’s funny, people will accept that. 

Chris: And we call this type of narration limited, because the narration can only relate what the viewpoint character knows and nothing else.

Bunny: Because Chris is trying to take away your rights. Rise up! 

Chris: because I’m a prescriptivist! 

Oren: Your rights to just say whatever you want in the book.

Bunny: Use the chaotic viewpoint! Do not be restrained. 

Chris: And a lot of times we do find people making mistakes in manuscripts where they accidentally slipped up and described a thought or a feeling of another character.

It’s not that you can’t describe how other characters are feeling, but you always have to have citations. Basically how your viewpoint character knows that. So instead of “she was sad” if in this case she’s not a viewpoint character, you’d be like “oh, she looked sad” or “she seemed sad” or “she didn’t smile so I guess she was sad” or “she must have been sad because she didn’t smile”. 

Bunny: Right. 

Chris: Whereas if you just state outright in your narration “oh, she was sad”, you seem to be declaring that as though you automatically know it. And that doesn’t work if this character is not your viewpoint character. 

Oren: And it might be worth covering why we say that. Because this isn’t just something we decided on one day. There are some reasons. The most obvious reason is that it is giving up a big advantage of using the limited viewpoint in the first place, which is that you can get deep into a character and understand who they are and immerse yourself in them and sympathize with them a lot and all that good stuff.

And the more that you bring in stuff that that character doesn’t know, the more distant you’re getting. And at that point, it starts to raise questions about why you picked a limited viewpoint to begin with. And then of course there’s also confusion because if you introduce something that the viewpoint character doesn’t know, readers then have to wonder how do they know that? Do they know that? Or is the book just telling me that? Does the character know? 

And it creates all kinds of issues. The story would just be smoother without them. 

Chris: Generally the readers need to know how they should interpret narration. And so if you have a viewpoint character, the idea is that when the reader reads narration, that is supposed to be, at some level, a reflection of the character’s experience.

And that can read very differently than if there is an outside narrator, like an omniscient personality, narrating the story. That can mean different things. The narration can be saying different things that way. 

And if you do want to have a lot of emotional intimacy with a character and you want the reader to get really attached to them, get familiar with them, bond with them? Then you want the reader to be in their head a lot, knowing what they’re thinking and feeling. At that point it’s a lot more convenient to stick to  “yes, everything is happening from their experience” as opposed to–A lot of omni-narration actually will do that, but you have to start from the idea of a personality outside the character’s head and then smoothly dip into their head and back out again. And it’s almost more work. 

And also having a viewpoint character with limited narration does help writers focus on what’s important because a new writer doesn’t necessarily know what they should focus on in their narration and what’s important to the story. And I do think it can be very helpful. 

So yeah, it helps build more emotional intimacy. And at the cost of giving up, the convenience of being able to just say whatever you feel like in the narration. 

Oren: Don’t worry though. Authors will find plenty of ways to go off on random tangents that they shouldn’t in a limited viewpoint. [Bunny chuckles] Authors are creative that way. 

Bunny: They will not be stifled by words like “limited viewpoint”. 

Oren: Look, a limited viewpoint character can think a lot of weird random trains of thought is all I’m saying.

Bunny: Yeah, but it’s not the same. Limited is different from some other things. It’s different from close narration. Apparently people are using the word “deep POV” a lot. Apparently they’re not very consistent about what it means. 

Oren: Yeah, I see it come up sometimes and it is usually in the form of people complaining about it and they don’t seem to know exactly what it is.

They seem to be conflating limited and close narration. And close narration specifically refers to how much the narration is just the character’s thoughts, which is usually paired with limited, but they’re not exactly the same thing. 

Chris: Yeah. So close is a matter of narrative distance. We’ve talked about narrative distance before.

Every single time I have an article on point of view, I have to tell readers again what narrative distance is. It’s kind of a pretty technical complex topic, but it’s basically where the narrative camera is. 

Does it feel like you’re looking at the character from like hovering in the air far above the city, or does it feel like you’re looking down at the character from somewhere like a foot above their head? Or does it feel like you’re behind their eyes? 

Bunny: Is it Stardew Valley, Call of Duty, or Hades? 

Chris: [Excited] Yeah! That’s great. So if it’s really close, that’s the feeling that you’re right behind their eyes. And that generally means that you’re using limited narration. Although, again, omniscience can do it temporarily if it’s careful.

But at the same time, limited can get surprisingly distant. So an example: Gideon the Ninth, a really popular book, is in what I would call “distant limited”. It’s not like super distant because you can only get so distant and [still] have a viewpoint character. But the narration doesn’t entirely feel like it’s Gideon thinking those things or talking about those things.

But at the same time, it still is limited because it restricts itself to what Gideon knows. And if the narration is full personality, the extra flexibility of not having to use Gideon’s personality can be used for things like humor. I personally do wonder, well, maybe you should have just gone with omniscience instead, since we were already not fully in Gideon’s head.

Why restrict yourself to limited, to only what Gideon knows? But it’s not super bland. Distant, limited can be really bland sometimes, but can also be done with personality. And there’s tons of books like that. There’s tons of books that have distant limited, and sometimes they’re bland, sometimes they’re not.

A lot of times I don’t think that that’s an optimal choice, but nonetheless, it’s not uncommon. So, that’s the difference between limited and close. Where is the camera exactly and what information do you have access to? It’s also a little different from does it feel conversational? People talk about a first person narrator being the person talking like it’s dialogue, but that’s not true in many stories.

Sometimes a narrator will sound more conversational, like they’re talking to somebody, like they know they have an audience often, and sometimes it doesn’t sound like that. And that’s completely different from whether it’s limited. 

Oren: So my first question is: who should your viewpoint character be?

Can it be just some rando? Can it be Sam Smorkle, the goblin we saw in the tavern once? 

Chris: Depends. Is Sam Smorkle the goblin your main character? 

Bunny: It’s always Sam Smorkle the goblin. 

Oren: Obviously not. No, I would never tell a story about Sam Smorkle. He disgusts me. 

Chris: Awww, poor Sam Smorkle. 

Bunny: [Sad] Noooo. Look, if Sam Smorkle is in the story, it’s automatic. That is your viewpoint character now. 

Oren: You don’t understand my art. It’s a deep commentary by making you view the story through the eyes of the detestable Sam Smorkle, who isn’t there and doesn’t see any of the things that happen. I am telling you a deep commentary on the nature of fantasy. I’m ready to write my thinkpiece.

Bunny: I have to get on Substack, I guess. 

Chris: No, no. Again, people will tell you different things. My opinion is that your viewpoint character should always be the main character and if you have multiple viewpoint characters, you better be writing an ensemble. 

We’ve talked about multiple viewpoints and how there are a few situations in which I think they’re a good idea, but most of the time I don’t think they’re a good idea [chuckle].

But basically, I really, really think that the viewpoint character should be the main character. We even had this as an example in our unworkable story choices episode. [Like] the Watsonian POV. Just say no to Watson’s. 

Oren: Yeah, just say no to Watson’s. 

Chris: [apologetic] I’m sorry. 

Bunny: If someone approaches you in a back alley and opens up their trench coat and there’s a Watsonian viewpoint inside, just say no.

Oren: Just dare to say no. 

Chris: The reason is that readers just grow more attached to the viewpoint character, which is just really important. It’s really important for having people be engaged with your stories, for them to like your main character. They will like the viewpoint character better. I’m sorry, Robert Jackson Bennett, but I care more about Din than Ana.

I know Ana is your favorite. [Bunny and Oren laugh in the background] I can tell. And she’s fine. But Din is where it’s at. I’m sorry. 

Bunny: [emphatically agreeing] Din is where it’s at.

Oren: Din’s my special boy. [jokingly threatening voice] You give Din more to do, you hear me? You give him more to do, Robert. 

Bunny: You turn this around, Robert. [chuckle]

Chris: And also readers reasonably expect them to be important. I do think that setting your viewpoint characters also is a signal to readers about which characters are of central importance, and that readers will generally, purposely get more attached to them.

They’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have some, it’s not like completely voluntary, but there is definitely some level of choice involved in who the reader gets attached to. Hence why when a show kills off too many characters, people stop getting emotionally invested. Because they choose not to, ’cause they know they’re gonna get burned after a while, for instance. 

Oren: Yeah. I’m not convinced people can make the choice to get attached to a character that they don’t like at all, but I know for sure the opposite works where they can decide to not get attached to someone who they might otherwise have liked.

Chris: Yeah, I do think there’s an element of, okay, we know this is the main character. If we want to like the story, we might try to cut it a little slack. The point is that it is also beneficial. So, yeah, definitely the viewpoint character should be your main character.

Bunny: And you can also turn an audience against your viewpoint character, to be clear. They get a little bit of automatic sympathy because they’re the main character. You know, you wanna root for the person whose story this is, or [the person] who is your primary eyes through which to view the world in the story. We’re just more intimate with them than we are with any other character. So of course people are going to find them more sympathetic.

But if your character is a jerk, you can lose goodwill pretty quickly. And if the main character’s a jerk and people don’t like the main character, that’s probably a recipe for them putting down the book, more than disliking any other single character. 

Oren: Yeah. The stakes are certainly very high. 

Chris: Looking at you people who are writing villain protagonists. It’s not impossible to do, but… 

Oren: There’s an audience for that. I’m not convinced that’s the best move, to be intentionally limiting your audience to only people who like that kind of story. But you know, you do you. 

Chris: Yeah. So make them your main character. And if you wanna know who your main character should be — most people already know that — it’s the character you like, it’s the character that’s affected by problems in the story, and ideally, kind of at the center of the problems and has some ability to actually create change and solve the problem, which Sam Smorkle the goblin probably doesn’t, unfortunately.

Oren: Poor Sam Smorkle. He’s doing his best. 

Chris: And be well positioned for likability, which in many cases means they’re in some sort of sympathetic position, which is why we like underdogs. Underdogs are always our heroes. 

Bunny: In my experience, and I don’t think this is universal, but at least in the sorts of writing circles I’ve run in, it seems like a lot of people conceive of their main character at the same time as they conceive of their story’s premise.

So usually I think people who have, at the very least, a little writing experience have a decent sense of who should be there and who will be the most well positioned to be the main character. Now, that’s not always the case, and it can change if they start writing the story and end up liking another character way more than their original viewpoint character.

Oren: The biggest concern I’ve run into is less that they just don’t know who their main character is and more that they start off with one main character, but then end up getting attached to someone else as the story progresses. Stories take a long time to write. You get new ideas, you introduce a mysterious secondary character and you’re like “Ooh, they’re mysterious and cool, not like my boring old main character that I know really well”. 

That’s what I’ve found to be the biggest problem. 

Chris: Or sometimes they have multiple viewpoints and you can convince them to cut those viewpoints down, and you have to choose which person is the — 

Sometimes what happens — again, a lot of times when people have multiple viewpoints —  is they end up with separate storylines because the viewpoint character also makes it so that you have to feature events that include the same character, and that’s really useful for plotting because it kind of forces writers to make their stories more cohesive and make everything interconnected.

And so what usually happens when you have multiple viewpoint characters, and sometimes writers use them on purpose for this purpose, is that now that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they can be on different continents. They don’t have to have anything to do with each other. So although things they’re experiencing also don’t have anything to do with each other, and so basically we have two different stories that we’re just kind of hopping back and forth between, and they’re very disconnected from each other.

I really do think that lowers engagement, so I don’t recommend it. I think it would be better just split them up and make them each their own story. It’s fine. But again, in some of those cases, we’ll recommend cutting down the number of viewpoint characters. And often because they have completely different storylines, one of them will just be working a lot better than the other one.

And we could be like “Hey. Your story would be a lot stronger if you just focused on this storyline with this character, ’cause that one is just working better” oftentimes.

Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about when you are picking your main character and figuring out their viewpoint is that by picking someone to be your viewpoint character, what you’re basically doing is you are making them sympathetic and relatable over making them mysterious.

Which is a thing that I think a lot of writers struggle with because they’re used to TV or film where the main character can also be mysterious because we can’t see what’s going on inside their heads. So halfway through the movie, we could reveal that they’re a vampire or something, which probably wouldn’t work in a book.

In a limited POV book, it would be really weird to wait that long to reveal that they’re a vampire, unless they themselves did not know. 

Chris: Yeah. So you kind of have to give up what we call those meta mysteries. 

Bunny: That’s okay. All of the advertising material will reveal it anyway. 

Chris: That is true. Yeah, you have to give that up, but it’s worth it. The trade off is totally worth it. 

But in any case, another issue that we have with viewpoint characters — this came up in my Revenger critique recently — is just don’t let your viewpoint character disappear. They should have a presence in the scene. It should feel like they’re there. And if they seem to just disappear from the story, it’s not good because where did they go?

This reminds me of Project Hail Mary. There are all these flashbacks, the main character remembering things. And then there’s one flashback where the main character just isn’t there. All the flashbacks are his memories. How is he not there? But as far as we know, he’s not even present. [Chris trying to hold back laughter] And it’s like we just wanted to have that scene and didn’t have an excuse to have the main character there, so we just thought he’d just slip it in and maybe we wouldn’t notice that the main character was missing. 

Oren: Maybe he just heard about it by description and he’s just remembering having heard about it. 

Chris: This tends to happen if the scene is about watching two important people talking to each other and the viewpoint character is mostly watching them. This is when this tends to happen a lot.

Bunny: Don’t let them just be a camera. 

Chris: It can be hard to figure out what they do. Ideally they would participate in the conversation. Failing that, like maybe your viewpoint character is actually eavesdropping, so they probably shouldn’t chime in, you can at least have them react to what they hear, give some emotions, and if you create a pause in the conversation, you can use that to have them think about what they’re hearing a little bit.

They can at least react. 

Oren: Definitely a “less is more “situation. For me, this has always felt normal because I just think of it in terms of role playing games, and if my players have to sit and listen to two NPCs talk to each other? Nu-uh, they’re gonna be outta there. 

Chris: Except for when we had that fantasy arbitration.

You were so self-conscious about that, but we all loved it. We’re like, yeah, no, we’ll just sit back and watch the GM talk to himself. 

Bunny: We were so invested. 

Oren: Well, that was three NPCs that I had spent a huge amount of time getting you involved in. One of them was your love interest and the other was your evil frat lady, bad guy.

There was a lot of effort that went into that scene. I would not have tried that at the beginning of the story. 

Chris: The other thing is if your viewpoint character disappears, what you’re left with is what I call film POV. And this is a disparaging term and it’s a reminder that narration has some advantages over film.

Film isn’t just better. Sometimes people need reminders of [that]. I’m just laughing because there was some suggestion by tech bros that they would have a startup where they would turn books into a multimedia experience. Whatever that means. And it’s like, no, people actually do like reading books.

Oren: Yeah. Whatever that means. 

Bunny: It probably involves NFTs. 

Chris: But not just inferior films, okay? That’s where basically you don’t get to show any character’s thoughts or feelings because there’s no viewpoint character anymore, and it’s not good. You should avoid that. 

Oren: They’re just hanging out, you know, they’re just vibing, just chilling. Don’t even worry about it. 

So on the topic of viewpoint characters disappearing. In Revenger, it was notable that this was definitely supposed to be the start of an arc where the main character discovers her identity and learns to assert herself. And that’s a legitimate arc. But they don’t have to be non-entities before that happens.

I would argue that no one is actually a non-entity inside their own head, unless they’re some kind of weird alien or robot or something. If they’re like a normal person, they will have an internal life of some kind, even if they have an arc about finding who they are or whatever. In that early scene, the problem is that the sister just kind of takes over and the POV character is just like, yeah, whatever. Has no thoughts or opinions on things. 

If we wanted to start that arc of her having to like discover her own identity, what you might do is have her be initially reluctant, but then decide actually, yeah, I’m gonna be super gung-ho about the sister’s plan, and that would show that she has an arc, that she needs to learn to be her own person instead of just kind of being nothing.

Chris: What we really needed there is some thoughts and motivation from her, whatever they were, because her sister is basically manipulating her. This is Adrana and Fura. Fura is the main character, the viewpoint character, and we have no idea what she’s thinking or feeling, but we can see that her sister is manipulating her into something that she seems to not wanna do, but she also isn’t really fighting back. 

So there could be multiple things going on there where a) she actually does wanna do this, but she’s supposed to be responsible so she thinks that she shouldn’t, but she secretly does want to. So she’s not fighting too hard. Or she really doesn’t want to, but she feels a lot of pressure, she wants to make her sister happy. 

There could be all sorts of things happening inside her head as this occurs, but if we don’t know, she just feels like a sack of nothing. We don’t get to bond with her. We don’t get to understand her. We don’t develop as much attachment to her. So we can’t just leave it blank. There has to be something there. 

Okay, so a few common questions. The biggest question that everybody always asks is, how do I describe my viewpoint character? 

Oren: You don’t. You never describe them. Don’t mention what they look like at all. 

Bunny: They might be a penguin. 

Chris: Honestly, if it’s a short story, you might not have to.

I do think that it matters, but I think that at novel size people do expect you to describe your viewpoint character.

Bunny:  Or you could be like John Scalzi and not describe anyone, including the main character. 

Oren: He doesn’t have time for that. 

Bunny: Some sassy eyeballs named Jamie. 

Chris: I think Jamie is supposed to be gender ambiguous, but even a gender ambiguous character, you could still say a few gender neutral things about that character’s appearance if you want to.

Bunny: Murderbot is also–

Chris: Murderbot is non-binary, I think. Whereas Jamie is ambiguous, as in Jamie could very well have gendered pronouns, we just don’t know what they are. 

Oren: Murderbot is actually the same. Murderbot’s gender identity is not stated, at least not in the first book. People had to go and ask Wells in an AMA about that.

And that was how we found out that Murderbot’s pronouns are “it” because that’s just not anywhere in the book. 

Bunny: That one’s complicated because the other characters do refer to Murderbot with “it”. The thing is that we don’t know if that’s what Murderbot wants. 

Oren: Right. Whereas with Jamie, John Scalzi is repeating his trick from his Lock In books.

But with that one, it was a little clearer because the character was largely represented by a humanoid robot that they piloted around, whereas this character does not do that. It is a little harder to figure out that that’s what’s happening. You have to pay a little closer attention. 

Chris: I didn’t notice at all, but that’s partly because I was listening to an audiobook that was narrated by Will Wheaton and that gives me a specific image.

In the first scenes, what Jamie says and what Jamie’s doin, it was hard for me to not imagine Jamie as a guy. 

Oren: Well, the thing that got me about it was that my old spoilers, I guess there’s a rude, evil tech bro in the story. And the way he talks to Jamie, it just doesn’t make sense to me that he’s talking to a person he sees as a woman this way.

Chris: Right. And the way Jamie talks to him also.

Oren: He talks to Jamie like one of the bros. 

Bunny: To be clear, this takes place in the real world. It takes place in 2020 explicitly, so you don’t have the ambiguity of maybe a gender egalitarian setting. 

Oren: I’m willing to conceive of the possibility of some asshole techbro who talks to women like they’re part of his asshole techbro circle.

Not like that couldn’t exist. It just did not seem likely without any attention called to it. 

Chris: Right. I suspect that was accidental on Scalzi’s part, that Scalzi was just writing from the perspective of a man. Since he’s a man and might not have realized that that would come off as gendered. 

Bunny: Yeah, and I think I agree with Oren as well.  I think I did just implicitly be like the way Jamie is acting in this first scene and that sort of exchange with the first asshole tech person did strike me as I can’t really envision Jamie as a woman in this case, just because of the dynamics of that.

Oren: Or at least not someone that other people perceive as a woman.

Chris: But in any case, I didn’t notice that there was supposed to be gender ambiguity at all when I read that book or listened to that book for the first time and learned it later.

Bunny: Hire Will Wheaton. That’s our advice. 

Chris: But in any case, my point is you could still describe Jamie in ways that, if you wanted it to be ambiguous, it would still leave it ambiguous.

So you don’t always have to describe your viewpoint character, but generally for a novel, people expect you to. You’ll probably get some comments if you don’t. You can do whatever you want with your own novel, but you’ll probably get comments. 

So how do you describe your viewpoint character?

We’re assuming that this is something where you’re kind of in a close perspective and the narration is closely representing their thoughts and experiences and people used to have their viewpoint character look in the mirror, but that’s considered cliche now. 

You just wanna find a reason to remind them about their appearance, so they think about it. So have them dress up, or maybe they get like dirt on their clothes and hair, or perhaps they have a friend or family member that they would reasonably compare themselves to in the way they look to. Instead of looking in a mirror, they can look at photos or paintings of people. 

I have an article with a list of more ideas, but the key is to just [think] when does your appearance matter? When do you think about it? And then create one of those situations and get them thinking about it a little bit. 

And then the last question people ask, does their narration have to be their thoughts? Like literally?  The answer is no. Don’t overthink it. Exposition is important. It’s not supposed to be their stream of consciousness from their mind. Just have it generally reflect what they’re thinking about and you’ll be fine. 

Bunny: Unless you’re James Joyce and want to confuse everyone. 

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

Chris: If you found this episode useful, 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’s 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.

Time to clock in for another shift in the podcast mines, processing audio ore and the like. But what if our workplace had… drama? Why, then you might be writing a workplace conflict, which we have advice for! We discuss whether a workplace is healthy or unhealthy, what kinds of clashes can be expected, and naturally, why the captain is always going on away missions instead of lower-ranked crew members.

• Severance 

Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. 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 to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny and with me is…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: So we’ve all gotten a job at the Rad Dragon Nursery raising and training cool dragons in the middle of the magical mountains, which means that we’ll get to ride them and befriend them and form bonds with them. It’s gonna be great. Are y’all so excited?

Oren: No, you can’t trick me. We’re starting a union. This isn’t gonna be like an “isn’t it cool to work at a cool place and have a cool boss who you do lots of unpaid overtime for?” story. I’m getting my mandatory breaks,

Bunny: But Oren, the CEO says we’re a big family! And the CEO is also HR. So it must be true.

Oren: It’s probably fine.

Chris: I feel like maybe if we’re working with dragons, there’s some workplace hazards here.

Bunny: Nah!

Oren: What could go wrong?

Chris: I wanna make sure I get my workers’ comp.

Bunny: Nah, if you follow the incredibly lackadaisical safety procedures, you probably won’t get incinerated. Uh, and if you are, we’ll hold a big sad funeral because family, and uh, definitely not write it off as a business expense.

Oren: Fantasy OSHA is gonna shut this place right down. We’ve got people given unsupervised belly rubs to the dragons. That is not safe.

Bunny: Yeah. And, uh, unfortunately, we also have to deal with workplace hazards like someone microwaving fish and a boss clipping their toenails on the desk.

Chris: Oh. Hmm.

Bunny: So yeah, maybe, maybe we don’t go work at the Rad Dragon Nursery. There might be a little too much conflict there. But on the other hand, we do like conflict for stories and jobs and have a lot of that.

Chris: I do think one thing, if you’re adding conflicts at work, that is just good to think about is whether or not you want to depict a healthy workplace. Because it’s really easy for storytellers to look for sources of conflict and add them and create a lot of toxicity in social interactions, which again, if it’s supposed to be dystopian and exploitative, that’s totally fine. Just don’t package a toxic workplace as a healthy one. So you want Severance, not Orville season one, basically.

Bunny: But leg theft, Chris!

Chris: Gosh, I’d even forgotten about the leg theft. It’s like the least of the toxic things that happen. So basically, again, if you package it as a healthy workplace when it’s actually a toxic workplace, then you’re giving some level of endorsement to like really bad, often abusive behavior. So let’s just not do that. You know, again, you can create a story reason why your character is working at a dystopian job, or a job that is the worst. They just need a stronger motivation for doing so. So if they’re gonna take a job that could kill them, then they need to be desperate. That’s basically the difference.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s also much easier than, for example, a magic school story, right? Because like jobs don’t have the same expectation of having a duty of care for adults. That doesn’t mean that they don’t abuse their workers. They absolutely do. It’s just not the same as a school where kids go. And at the same time, there isn’t the expectation that if a job is bad, the character’s parents would pull them out, uh, unless they’re also a child, which is this whole other problem. It’s also much easier to explain like, why would they stay there? The job sucks and it’s like, well, you need money to live.

Chris: Right. Yeah. And again, there’s nothing wrong with “no, this workplace is exploitative, it’s dystopian.” But it feels different if you know it is, right, and the characters talk about it rather than, this is supposed to be a utopian setting in a utopian workplace, and we have really toxic things happening. So again, signs of a toxic workplace include things like: employees not getting the training they need to do their job; the employer isn’t making the best effort to keep people safe, or they’re not giving people time to heal, rest or recover; if you have like a boss that is demanding absolute perfection and always find something to criticize, that’s very toxic. Cutting people down or like purposely damaging their self-worth. I mean, if people give each other put downs and there’s no reason for doing that other than just to make them feel bad… That’s a sign of a very toxic person. And, you know, harassment or toxic behavior from other employees should be addressed if the workplace is a healthy workplace.

Oren: They send out emails saying, asking you to say five things you did at work that day. I’m not even joking, like, you know, that’s in the news, but that’s like classic bad manager, right? That’s like the weirdest thing where it just shows that whoever is in charge has no idea how this business works.

Chris: Yeah. 

Oren: Because if they knew…

Chris: or just asking for inappropriate things. Like, I know of a personal story. 

Oren: …they wouldn’t need to ask. 

Chris: That’s real bad.

Bunny: Yeah, that’s terrible.

Chris: Right? So asking for unpaid labor, asking them to invest their own money and things, or asking them to do things that are illegal, like buy drugs for them, that is a real thing that happens a lot in Hollywood, apparently. It’s not good.

Oren: Hmm. I love the idea of someone signing up for a paid internship and they get there and it’s like, yeah. What I meant was that you will pay to go to places as my intern. That’s why it’s a paid internship. What else would that mean?

Bunny: Yeah, you thought you would get money, fool!

Chris: Yeah, and so that’s the thing is if, again, if a coworker is being really inappropriate, and that’s part of the conflict. You have to decide, is this a dystopian workplace or do you wanna work within the constraints of the fact that the manager should be jumping in doing something?

Bunny: Frankly, dystopian workplaces are outside of the idyllic, small business owner archetype, which is cozy. Dystopian workplaces are definitely more conflict rich, I will say that, just don’t pretend that it’s totally normal when your boss does illegal things like withhold your paycheck.

Oren: I would say that it depends a lot on what kind of problems you want your character to be solving. Because if they work somewhere dystopian, simply being there can be the problem that they have to solve, right? Because they can be dealing with a toxic loss or toxic coworkers or unsafe working conditions, things like that, right? And that can provide plenty of conflict to drive a story beyond whatever it is they’re actually doing. Whereas if you want a better workplace, then you’re more likely to lean on what is the job the character is doing and why is it important, and that is going to provide the majority of your tension. It doesn’t necessarily have to be all of it. Like you can still have a somewhat unfriendly relationship with someone at a job that’s not awful and that could still cause some sparks, right? But you are less likely to lean on that for like the majority of your tension.

Bunny: And there are lots of problems at work that do not necessarily feature dragons and fantasy OSHA, this episode was largely inspired by me reading a lot of Ask a Manager, so go over there if you want to see some truly absurd workplace scenarios and some pretty mundane ones that are nonetheless difficult to deal with. There’s problems that we’ve all encountered. Chris wrote a short story about the annoying colleague who is annoying and blocking your way and preventing you from doing things.

Chris: Yeah, this is Hellgate 42, I think it was.

Oren: Yeah. Hellgate Incident 42.

Chris: That one’s all in emails, all in coworker emails. I think that makes it more cowork-y.

Oren: I love it. It’s so much fun.

Bunny: That’s what we call epistolary.

Oren: You could always just peruse like the various LinkedIn drama subreddits. They find some real weird stuff there. I was so confused by the concept of LinkedIn when I heard about it. And to be honest, I still am. Like, a work social network? What, why?

Bunny: [sarcastic] Yeah, it’s a social media platform about being unemployed. It’s great.

Chris: Admittedly, Hellgate Incident 42 is inspired by my experience of sexism in the tech world. I, as a developer, always worked as a freelancer, which made things better for me, but it was weird because every single time I had to interact with another tech consultant that worked for my client, and we had to coordinate, it was amazing how much they tried to block and obstruct me. And it was kind of like, the most innocent explanation is sexism, ’cause otherwise I would have to assume that every tech professional just aggros against every other tech professional, and that’s almost worse.

Bunny: The wild tech professionals circling each other on their territory of a WordPress.

Chris: And then I would have to often bring in the client and you know, I could beat them at the game. But it was still annoying.

Bunny: Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely another common problem at work is, you know, sexism or racism or other kinds of bigotry and, you know, handle that with care. But it is absolutely a source of workplace conflict.

Oren: From my own experience as, you know, not being particularly subject to either of those, people can be really uncooperative jerks, even without any kind of structural issue. So I can only imagine that that would probably make it worse.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, for me, I realized that the male tech professionals that weren’t like that were people who would always self-select to work with me. They were like people who were my clients, referred people to me, or had chosen to work with me at some level. So no, it was sad. It was sad and kind of unbelievable sometimes because they would just act really bizarrely. But sometimes that happens.

Oren: Yeah. But you got a really good short story out of it several years later. So was that not…

Chris: I mean, I did have some really good moments like pwning them that I still remember fondly. 

Oren: Was it not all worth it in the end? We didn’t publish my story Hellgate Incident 43 in which the main character makes a suggestion and people accept it reasonably and continue with their day. I’m just saying, Chris!

Bunny: Or mine, Hellgate Incident 44 where someone comes to return a shirt and it goes fine. Yeah, all of these things can provide good conflict and good fodder for short stories. I think it would be helpful to step back and address the really basic question of like, why do we want stories where the characters work, right? Like, uh, presumably a lot of us work and we do that and we don’t always have fun with it. And, you know, stories are escapism. So why do characters work when jobs kind of suck sometimes?

Oren: Because we’re all real weirdos! That’s the issue.

Bunny: Yeah. We’re inflicting this upon ourselves is why. But jobs provide good conflict, as we were just discussing. I mean, maybe the most classic interpersonal conflict dynamic is, you know, the buddy cop dynamic, right? I mean, we have a whole other episode about this, about that specific pairing of characters who don’t like each other and then come to like each other as they work together on their job.

Chris: And I do have a blog post with a list of personality clashes for your inspiration, ’cause that’s something that people have a lot of trouble writing just off the top of their head. So I have lists of them. And those ones can be really good if you want a couple coworkers who just inherently have, you know, work in different ways and have trouble getting along at first.

Bunny: And crucially, a job forces them to work together, right? Like, if they were just neighbors, there’s less of a reason for them to tolerate each other and work through their problems because unless there’s something truly forcing them together, then it’s harder to contrive a reason for why they would work together even if they hate each other. If you’re an office drone and your boss says you have to work with, you know, Carrie, who you have a personality conflict with, and you and Carrie are gonna butt heads over everything and then eventually form a team and fight vampires or whatever, like, that’s a good arc. And it’s harder to make that work if you’re not assigned together.

Oren: You need a reason for characters who don’t like each other to stay in proximity and do things together, and there are many ways you can justify that, but the fact that they work together is an easy one. It’s very self-explanatory.

Bunny: Jobs can also send you into dangerous situations, like you can be hired to do dangerous things, and if your workplace is toxic and you’re desperate, then you are likelier to put up with this. And dangerous things can be exciting. It’s also sympathetic. So readers, again, have jobs and are familiar with the struggles. Um, that’s not true of all readers, I mean, some of us are podcasters, but… you know, most of them. And then just also, we love whimsical jobs, right? Like running a tea shop or raising dragons. And there are also plenty of comedic stories where, you know, a normal drudgery workplace has some sort of fantastical elements going on. And if you need further proof of the fact that people like seeing stories set in an office, just look at The Office. 

Oren: With jobs, they are both pretty relatable for all the reasons you mentioned, and then they are also potentially good for wish fulfillment, which can be a cozy of like, this is a really nice tea shop that I work at where everything’s nice. But it can also be that the job’s hard, but I’m doing something meaningful. Right, because a lot of people do not feel that in their normal jobs. They do not feel like there is any point to what they’re doing, and so feeling like their work matters and seeing a character doing that as part of their job like that does have serious wish fulfillment.

Bunny: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. The wish fulfillment can also be about the output of the job rather than the job itself and why it’s worthwhile to struggle through that.

Chris: And if we’re thinking about a small business owner, running a small business is difficult and a lot of the books I’ve seen about that I feel like could do a little bit more to create conflicts around running a small business. Like, for instance, one thing that most people don’t know until they get their first employee is how difficult training is and how much time it takes. Takes about five times as long as you think it will take, at least. ‘Cause you don’t know how much you know, and so you’re imagining, “oh, it’s only a, it’s a very simple task. I just, you know, tell them XYZ, and it’s done.” And then it turns out it’s actually a very complicated task where in different situations you make little adjustments and you don’t have any documentation because you’ve never had to train somebody before. And all of that is, and there’s so many things like that in small businesses, and that’s something that I’d love to see more stories similar to Legends & Lattes actually just get a little bit more rigorous because I do think there’s so much you can do there.

Oren: Like what do you mean it’s hard to train people to feed the dragons? You just put the food in the trough. It’s really easy, and I mean, yeah, sure. If they’re looking a little aggressive, you make sure to look just off to the left so you don’t seem confrontational, but you also don’t seem like too easy a target. And sure if their scales are the wrong color, you know, you wanna deal with that. Easy, right? How long could that take to learn?

Chris: Right? Oh, and that other dragon is recovering from sickness. So we have that dragon on a special diet.

Oren: Obviously! 

Bunny: Of course, that’s just intuition. Oh man, did y’all ever feed horses as kids? And we’re told like, “put your hand flat, has to be flat!” and then, you know, have nightmares about the horse sucking your fingers into its mouth, like carrots.

Oren: I was terrified that the horse was gonna bite me. It never did. I’ve never been bitten by a horse, but I was always scared of that.

Chris: Yeah, I had a horse run off with me when I was a kid. My sister was really big into horses and horse riding, and so…

Bunny: Oh no!

Chris: …that resulted in situations where I was put on a horse. Even though I was not big into horse riding, I just kind of found it scary.

Bunny: It was just taking you to the equine kingdom where you could have ruled as queen.

Chris: I mean, it was springtime. Apparently the horse had been cooped up all winter and was eager to get running. Uh, wish it had done it when I was not on its back.

Oren: Yeah. I kept pressing X, which is supposed to be dismount, but just nothing happened, so, you know.

Bunny: Oh, they never ported it to console, did they?

Oren: Yeah, the control scheme is not good.

Bunny: Report the bug, report it! So there’s quite a few jobs that are pretty common in fiction. The ones that sprang most readily to my mind were researchers, detectives, spies, soldiers, and journalists who are actually just detectives with a journalism mask. And then the small business owner, we already talked about, if you want to learn about uncommon jobs in fiction, we have a whole other episode about that. So I won’t go into it.

Chris: Can I just complain about Lockwood & Co a little bit?

Bunny: Oh please.

Chris: So Lockwood & Co is funny because it’s a workplace, but it’s not a workplace. It’s a workplace, but they live together, they’re also roommates. And technically they wouldn’t need to. They just do. Again, in the world of Lockwood and Co, there’s like a ghost apocalypse. So there’s ghosts everywhere and everybody goes inside after curfew, and only young people can actually psychically sense the ghosts. So the people who handle ghost cases are all young. It’s a kind of neat world building actually. And so the idea is that we have young people who have their own ghost agency and so they hire somebody, but then that person comes to live. Like Lockwood is the main character and so he hires people and then they come to live with him in his house.

Oren: I mean, he can’t really pay them very much, it seems like. So I guess offering them room and board, ’cause he happens to have a house he inherited from his parents is like, I guess the best he can do.

Bunny: In general though, disclaimer, if your boss asks you to live with them, probably say no. 

Chris: There’s a situation there that actually is more close to what you might have in a workplace conflict where they are really busy, they have lots of work, and I think they toss around the idea of maybe getting some help. And then Lucy goes on vacation and she comes back and Lockwood has already hired somebody. And when he had set up the clear expectation that this would be the hiring process that she would also be part of, and again, if he’s the boss, right, in some workplaces that would be totally normal for him to just make a decision and hire who he wants. But considering that they all like room together, right? And this is a very close collaboration, and Lucy had a reasonable expectation that she would be part of the process and be able to interview candidates, having her suddenly come back to find that he’d hired somebody, and it turned out this person was somebody that Lucy had a little bit of personality clash with, right? So that’s also just a bad idea for Lockwood to do because he can’t see whether the candidates work well with his existing employees.

Oren: But in fairness, the personality clash they have is primarily that the other person is a girl and Lucy hates other girls because that’s a writing choice that the author made.

Bunny: Uh, is she not like them?

Oren: It’s weird, okay, it is real weird.

Chris: The new worker does occasionally act kind of passive-aggressive towards Lucy. Occasionally, right? I think it’s supposed to be a personality conflict.

Oren: Yes, it’s supposed to be, but the way that it was written made it feel like Lucy had basically decided to hate her. And then she also did some things that were a little annoying, is kind of what it felt like.

Chris: I mean, she’s supposed to be a little jealous. Stroud, when he writes the scene, really sets things up to make Lucy jealous, where she comes back and finds this girl at her desk and other things like that. But the thing about this is that Lockwood is like completely off the hook for creating this situation. Whereas Lucy, I think the assumption the book goes with is that Lucy is wrong and she should just accept this girl. And when I look at this situation, no, actually Lockwood is the one who’s responsible for all this tension, right? Because he went and did something that was violating the norms, the expectations that he set with his employees and the norms for their workplace, right? Because when Lucy was hired, his other employee was part of that interview process. But it acts like, oh no, this is all Lucy’s fault and possibly this other girl’s fault. It’s like, no, it’s all Lockwood’s fault, actually. In my opinion.

Oren: Lockwood definitely deserved more blame for that situation than he gets, which is none.

Chris: Exactly.

Oren: Although Lockwood & Co does dovetail into another interesting choice that you can make when you are writing a workplace story, which is, are you gonna do the easy mode, which is where you have them mainly go out on missions, and that’s the work. ‘Cause that’s, I just want you to know, if you do that, you’re a coward. That’s basically the same as a normal story. To be clear, I’m totally doing it and I’m a coward. Or are you gonna do an office bound story where they actually have to go to their work location and spend most of their time there? Uh, ’cause that’s harder, it’s more… it’s not bad, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying that it is more different than a conventional adventure story. Whereas if they’re like a team of agents and they go out and solve problems and then they report to the field office at the end of the week or whatever, it’s like that’s not really that much different than any other story.

Chris: If they stay in the office, then think of the low budget TV show it can make.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, they only need one set. It’s great!

Bunny: I think the sorts of conflicts that they’ll deal with and the scope of them also depends on where they are in a work hierarchy. By far, I think the most common level in that hierarchy that we see is the low level employees. Like, you know, the grounds, the boots on the ground, the people in the cubicle farm, etc, just because they’re less insulated from danger. Most real life people probably feel like they’re in that position on the ladder. It’s sympathetic, and they have boots on the ground. They’re like right up next to the conflict in most cases. And then there’s like social conflicts where you have superiors who are ordering you around and you’re being treated as expendable maybe. And then they have to choose where to draw the lines, things like that. So for example, you would have a story about the soldier rather than about their commander. But these characters don’t have a lot of power. So you have to be careful about the scope of the problems you throw at them. They might feel out of place or useless if the conflict is too big.

Chris: Or give them like a special ability, special magic power that makes them more useful or something.

Bunny: Right. And you have to be careful to make the characters ordering them around remove their agency where we were discussing before, like the issue in Revenger where the character is just kind of floating around after the other characters, without any agency as they command her to go here and there and do various things. You don’t want that to happen. That’s not terribly exciting. This was the category that I could come up with the most examples for off the top of my head. So Lower Decks maybe being obvious, it’s the lower decks, it’s the people in the background, it’s the redshirts, so to speak.

Oren: I mean, I guess you could argue every Star Trek is a workplace show.

Bunny: It is, but I would argue that most Star Treks are a different level on the ladder, which is the characters are bosses. 

Chris: The command crew.

Bunny: They’re managers. 

Chris: Yeah. I do think on Lower Decks they do send them out on missions, planet-side missions fairly often, and that is what helps give them agency because then they have a reason to send them away from the ship and away from the commanding officers. So they have to solve problems on their own.

Bunny: Which is kind of funny because in the normal Star Trek shows the commanding officers just kind of do that too. Yeah, don’t worry about it.

Oren: Lower Decks is also just a pretty low realism story, so like. They are on the ship and find that the ship is about to explode and then they go and deal with the problem themselves instead of like, you know, calling the bridge and being like, “hey, we need you to send like every person to help fix this problem” because it’s Lower Decks. It’s all for the bit.

Bunny: Comedic, for sure. And I’m pretty sure Severance is in this category too. Light Brigade. The Mimicking of Known Successes too, which is a good example of…

Oren: Really?

Bunny: Yeah. Platy, it’s not super prominent, but Platy has to deal with like… she’s not a manager, she’s not a grunt either, but she is not overseeing anyone and she has to deal with internal politicking between different departments at her college. So I’d say she counts as this, even though it’s not a huge element of the story. She’s not a boss or a commander or a manager. She just eats scones and researches things.

Oren: Who loves scones. But yeah.

Bunny: And then you can have characters at the very top of the hierarchy, which are the leaders or the CEOs who have a lot of power and influence. So they’re well positioned to tackle big threats. If they’re the small businesses, they can struggle against failure or against the big businesses. Although usually these are, I don’t know if we should count these or not, because they’re not workplace conflicts so much as they are conflicts about the workplace. Specifically, whether it’ll survive.

Oren: Right. Well, that’s the difference between… is your conflict about your protagonist dealing with crappy office culture, or is it about them trying to do a really important job and there are exterior problems stopping them from doing that? It’s that sort of difference. 

Chris: But I guess if your protagonist is like in HR, right? Their job is to sort out what’s going on with the workplace. So those things are kind of intertwined and I think a lot of… a small business person would realistically have to do all of the admin work in addition to whatever the business is about. Right? So if we’re making coffee, we have to deal with making coffee, but we also have to deal with hiring employees and training them, and doing the accounting, what have you. And I feel like those admin tasks make it feel more workplace-y.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, the thing about having this level of character is that there are plenty of examples of them. Batman and Tony Stark, both are technically big business boys, but we don’t really see them do business things, which could be cutting commentary on the laziness of CEOs or it could just be the narrative not caring about that. You decide.

Oren: I was so surprised, or sad and disappointed really, in the most recent Batman movie because the bad guy’s plan basically depends on the fact that Bruce never goes in to oversee his company, so he doesn’t notice that his company’s funds are being misappropriated. And I thought for sure that was gonna be a character arc moment where he’s like, “oh. I should spend more time managing my business and making sure it’s being used responsibly.” But no, he doubles down on Batman. Yes, punch every criminal now.

Chris: And nobody calls him to be like, “hey, there’s a major problem with funds at your company.” I think somebody would call him and let him know this was happening.

Oren: Don’t worry about it.

Chris: I think the issue with having the leader of the workplace or the business, they have the most agency, but they have more liabilities when it comes to likability because it’s just harder to put them in a sympathetic position. And I think this is one of the reasons why the Orville turned out so terribly because I think they were trying to make the leadership position sympathetic. But when Ed comes in, he is responsible for all his own problems. And it’s like they make him relatable, being like, “oh, so you didn’t really deserve to be captain, but we’re making you captain anyway.” And yeah, I don’t think that was a good way to go. Now if this was a ship they were thinking of retiring for reasons outside of his control and nobody else wanted this command, then you could use that to make it sympathetic.

Oren: Well, that’s the classic problem that a lot of writers have is that they misinterpret second chance with fail up. Right? It’s like, look, a second chance means we let you try again at whatever you were bad at. Or maybe we let you try again in a different area where you aren’t gonna cause the same problems or something. This is like, you messed up and now we are directly rewarding you for messing up.

Bunny: Yeah. Going back to the whole logical worldbuilding thing, logic versus realism. And I think it’s difficult if it’s like a big entity, a lot of villains are leaders of big companies, right? Like the evil CEO and that’s also true in fiction.

Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We had our own kind of workplace story, I guess, to the extent that podcasting is a job.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, 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, and 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.

Many of our favorite spec fic tropes don’t make much sense. Does that matter? How important is it for the masquerade to make sense, and is that different from other logical issues that aren’t so well established? This week, we discuss the importance of logic in worldbuilding, or perhaps the lack of importance. We’ll see how much it matters for different parts of the world to realistically affect others, when it’s most likely to bother people, and how you can get readers to let things slide. Also, why are blogs named like they are?

• The Hammerhead Corvette 

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

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

Oren: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is−

Chris: Chris.

Oren: and−

Bunny: Bunny. 

Oren: So, I like things that are cool. Swords are cool. Jets are cool. So in my setting, I’m gonna tape swords to the front of jets so that they can run into the bad guys real fast. Ultimate stabbing. 

Chris: So, is that two times the cool or is that cool squared?

Oren: I think it’s coolness times velocity, actually. 

Chris: Oh, I see. 

Oren: This is, of course, only a little more ridiculous than what you would see in your average Warhammer 40000 story. And honestly, I would not put it past them to introduce some kind of aircraft that rams things and then has reverse engines to un-ram itself so it can ram things again. I mean, Star Wars introduced the Hammerhead Corvette, which… I hate that thing. 

Chris: You know, the thing that they use when they want to instant-win after a long hard fight. Turns out they could have won the whole time. All they needed to do is just use this Hammerhead to ram things, this Hammerhead spaceship, 

Oren: I hate it so much. It’s a good movie. I love Rogue One, but that part is so bad. 

Bunny: They called it the Hammerhead Corvette. 

Oren: Its introduction is super conspicuous too. None of the other ships get a name, and this ship isn’t in the movie except for that one part. And it’s like, are you trying to sell a toy?

Chris: They make a big deal out of it. 

Bunny: Here’s one on eBay I just found. 

Oren: Were you expecting Hammerhead Corvette toys to really fly off the shelves? Maybe they did. I don’t know. Lots of little kids being like, “Mom and dad, I want a Hammerhead Corvette for Christmas.” 

Bunny: Looks like Lego is in on it, so rest assured, lots of kids are getting their Hammerhead-flavored popsicles.

Chris: And then what is it they did in Last Jedi? Was it a light speed to−

Oren: Yeah, they did the Hyperspace Ram in Last Jedi. 

Chris: It was a really nice special effect. It was.

Oren: Okay. It’s beautiful. Unlike the Rogue One scene, it at least looked good. It just didn’t make any sense, and was also dramatically bad because it seemed like the movie was over, but then the movie kept going, which happens two or three times in the Last Jedi. 

Bunny: It doesn’t even look like a Hammerhead Shark. It looks like a really derpy fish. 

Oren: It’s doing its best, okay? 

Chris: And this is what happens, of course, with weapons all the time. If they were able to do that all along, why haven’t they done it before?

Oren: That is the obvious question. 

Bunny: History. Who needs it? 

Oren: We’re also like three minutes in. We haven’t introduced the topic yet. I was just complaining about how I don’t like podcasts that do this. So, that’s me now, apparently. That’s who I am. 

Chris: I mean, we were talking about it. People can read the podcast title.

Oren: They can, but we know they don’t. Come on. No one reads podcast titles. You just get a little ding. Oh, there’s a podcast episode! And then you listen to it. Anyway, we’re talking about logical worldbuilding. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently for various reasons. How important is it? Does it matter? 

Chris: Sometimes? Depends. 

Bunny: Implicitly, we care because there is a podcast episode about it. 

Oren: I know I care! 

Chris: You care when the nacelles are the wrong shape! 

Oren: They can’t just make the nacelles the wrong shape, Chris!

Chris: Bet a bunch listeners don’t have any idea what the nacelles are. If you watch Star Trek, usually their ships have these two little glowy parts on either side of the main body of the ship. Sometimes they move up and down and they glow before the ship takes off into warp or whatever. Those are the nacelles, and Oren notices when they have nacelles of the wrong shape, when they change shape from shot to shot or episode to episode. 

Oren: This happens a lot in Voyager, because Voyager went through several models of shuttle before they landed on the one they liked. At first they had the old TNG shuttles, which, okay, sure. And then they switched out the nacelles of the old TNG shuttle for a different kind of nacelle, which seems like an odd thing to be doing when you’re stranded on the opposite side of the Delta Quadrant. And then they changed the shuttle completely, but they kept the new nacelles. So they Ship-of-Theseus’ed these shuttles is what I’m saying.

Chris: I think this is a much smaller problem than the fact that they destroy countless shuttles in Voyager, and you assume that they’re replacing them in the background until they have a specific episode about making a new shuttle, and it takes them a huge collaborative effort to make one shuttle and then they immediately destroy that shuttle.

We even had a comic−Once Upon a Trope, Bunny and I had a comic about this−about taking inventory and discovering that there were negative shuttles. 

Oren: The shuttles are breeding. 

Bunny: Once you have a stable colony, you can just sit back and let ’em do their thing. Just don’t deplete them too quickly.

Chris: Star Trek technology is so wild, right? The thing about Voyager is it’s supposed to be having resource shortages because it’s all by itself on the other side of the galaxy, but we also know that they have replicators. If they have energy, they can just make anything they want. 

Oren: Maybe. Sometimes. That did really confuse me, because with shuttles it’s like, “Okay, I guess the shuttle is too big to just replicate a whole shuttle.” But I was really confused by the idea that they could run out of torpedoes, which they make a big deal of in the first season. A torpedo is just a little package of antimatter on top of an engine.

Chris: Maybe the replicators can’t make antimatter. 

Oren: They can though! They use it for the warp core. 

Chris: Wait, do they actually replicate antimatter? 

Oren: I don’t know if they replicate it, but we in real life can make antimatter. It’s just a very slow, very inefficient process. Presumably, they can do it a little better in Star Trek.

Chris: Anyway, logical worldbuilding. Which Star Trek is not known for.

Oren: But I like Star Trek. But I also like logical worldbuilding.

Bunny: It’s a complicated dilemma you find yourself in. 

Chris: Now that we’re talking about Star Trek and logical worldbuilding−the Xenomorphs in Strange New Worlds. No! They’re supposed to be an intelligent species. They’re basically Xenomorphs. I mean, it’s the Gorn, which were completely different in the original series, but now the Gorn are Xenomorphs, and it just doesn’t fit the setting at all because there’s no reason for an intelligent species to do this. And all of the species are intelligent in Star Trek.

Bunny: Gone are the days when you could take your shirt off and wrestle one on a sandy dune. 

Oren: We don’t do that anymore. The Gorn are now serious space-murder-torturers. We don’t do silly wrestle scenes with them anymore. So the Gorn episode of Strange New Worlds is interesting because it is a place where theming and logic meet, and theming and logical worldbuilding are not always the same thing. In fact, theming is often used to cover up logical inconsistencies.

Chris: Like katanas in a cyberpunk setting, for instance. 

Oren: Exactly. Only katanas though. Bring out a broadsword in a cyberpunk setting, everyone’s gonna look at you weird, but it’s okay if it’s from Japan, I guess.

Chris: Because people are so used to katanas being in cyberpunk that it now feels like it’s in theme, but it’s not really logical for people to be using katanas in a high-tech setting.

Oren: Every time I play a cyberpunk campaign, I demand to use a glaive, like a big old bill hook. They’re like, “You can’t use those!” It’s like, “I can use melee weapons. There’re stats for it. You can’t tell me I can’t use them.” 

Bunny: It does seem like most−maybe most is an overstatement, but many, many−illogical worldbuilding choices can slide because they’re genre expectations or tropes. You know, we want space battles, and we don’t want drones to do all of the battling. So we accept that you gotta go in and dog fight rather than launching missiles from a distance. 

Oren: That’s the theming part. You want things that feel like they belong together, and theming often covers over logical inconsistencies. I mean, we see this in stuff like even The Expanse, which is famous for being more realistic than most popular sci-fi, but still has some pretty big logical inconsistencies that we gloss over. 

Like, once you have the level of free fusion energy they describe in The Expanse, a lot of the problems they suffer from become kind of trivial. The problem of life support management, if you have infinite fusion energy, isn’t really that big an obstacle, but that’s not in theme with the setting. Right? The theme of the setting is that it’s grungy and everything’s hard and we’re constantly scrambling by, and the only reason we have the magical fusion drives is to explain how we can get around because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere and that wouldn’t work. 

Chris: There’s also the settings-level of realism, which is technically different. That’s basically whether the story has an atmosphere that feels realistic, grounded, gritty, et cetera, et cetera−it doesn’t have to be dark necessarily−and the degree to which it seems to follow the same rules as the real world.

A lower realism setting would have characters easily jumping from rooftop to rooftop and lifting impossible things that are many times their size and weight. We just don’t expect there to be completely rigorous physics. Wile E. Coyote’s the ultimate example of low realism, right? Where he runs off of a cliff and then just keeps walking in the air for a while and doesn’t fall until he notices that he’s standing on air.

Bunny: What would a logical but not realistic version of Wile E. Coyote be? 

Oren: It’s that movie that’s actually going to come out about Wile E. suing the Acme Corporation. We thought that movie was dead, but it’s coming out, and I’m gonna go see it. 

Chris: Things can be high realism, but still have parts that are illogical. For instance, if you have a plague outbreak and no one is wearing a mask and there’s no comment on it, that could be something that feels realistic, but has illogical components. 

Oren: Thinking of the one with the deer kid. I don’t remember what it’s called. 

Bunny: Dragon Prince. They had horns, right?

Oren: Sweet Tooth, Sweet Tooth. 

Chris: Oh, Sweet Tooth. That one is so funny because it has extremely low realism portions and really high realism portions, and they do not get along together. But we’re doing a very high realism plague outbreak, and this was during Covid−or right after Covid−that everybody saw this show. So we all know what it’s like to have a big pandemic, and yet everybody is just really careless about whether they’re transmitting it. 

Oren: And of course there was the inevitable pointing out that there’s a whole segment of the population that acted that way. But the people doing it in Sweet Tooth do not have the “political motivation”, shall we say.

Chris: But there’s also a specific community that is so hypervigilant and violent about transmission that if anybody’s found to have it, they burn them down in their house. But they still visit people without masks and share some water. 

Bunny: Oh, that’s how you get mono. 

Chris: So there’s clearly some contradictions in the world there, even if everything kind of has a feel of high realism.

Oren: I want to rewind a little bit, because I mentioned that the Star Trek Xenomorph thing was an interesting combination of logical issues and theming issues. Logically, that makes no sense, right? They have all kinds of advanced technology that they have to come up with a bunch of excuses why none of it works.

And then sometimes they don’t even give excuses, like their phasers just don’t hurt the Gorn for some reason? 

Chris: In the Alien movies, the characters do not have Star Trek level technology to defend themselves against the aliens. 

Oren: They don’t have any guns at all. They have makeshift flame throwers in the first one, and then in the second one when they have guns, that’s why they introduce a swarm of Xenomorphs.

Bunny: Ah, but what about katanas? 

Oren: They should have had some katanas, honestly. But then also theming-wise, it does not make sense, because−again−the theme of the first Alien movie is space truckers meet an alien, basically. They’re not trained for this. They’re here trying to do a job and get paid. They’re not professional explorers with crisis combat training. That’s why it feels like it works, but the Star Trek crew, they are professional danger explorers, so it feels weird that they’re suddenly so helpless. And so that’s where you have a combination of something that is both badly themed and just horribly unrealistic.

Chris: The Federation’s relatively utopian. Not that they don’t face dangers outside of the Federation, but the general idea is they go and they meet other intelligent alien species. In that context, Xenomorphs that purposely decide to plant their young where they will kill other sapien species, it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a logical thing. 

Oren: Star Trek can have completely evil enemies, or at least enemies that you have to fight, that you can’t talk to.

Bunny: Wrestle them. 

Oren: Yeah. The Borg, for example, but the Borg are a little more complicated than “we are evil because we evolved to be evil”. The Gorn feel like they’re from a fantasy series, which, I wouldn’t love them there either, but they would at least feel like they were not completely out of place. It doesn’t seem like this should be a thing here. Aliens are supposed to be at least a little more three dimensional than this. I’m still curious if in season three of Strange New Worlds we’re gonna pull a huge retcon and be like, “Oh, actually the Gorn are a normal species. Those ones you met were just jerks. You met the Gorn KKK. That’s why they were all assholes.” 

Chris: I mean, that’s probably the best explanation they can come up with. 

Oren: That doesn’t really make sense, but I’ll take it. 

Chris: I’m afraid of them being, “Oh, we’re reasonable people except we have this cultural tradition!” 

Oren: One thing that has been on my mind a lot has been this book that I read recently called The Sword of Kaigen, which more than most books that I have read, felt like the worldbuilding elements were thrown together in a pot with no real thought into whether or not they made sense together, and the book did very well. I’m not here to tell you that it was like a failure and you should never do what it does, but it did feel very weird that we have this modern setting and then also these magical samurai who hang out and everyone’s like, “Wow, you guys are a really big deal, you magical samurai.” And I’m here wondering, “Why did magical samurai matter when y’all have machine guns?” And then they have a brief fight where the magical samurai have to deal with modern weaponry, and they can’t. And then the story just keeps going as if that didn’t happen. It feels like most books would put in some effort to try to reconcile how the magical samurai work in a setting that has machine guns, and this book did not do that. 

Chris: Look, I can take down a Black Hawk helicopter in hand-to-hand combat; it doesn’t even have hands! 

Oren: That’s what I was expecting, right? I was expecting they would have some way to do that, and the answer “no, they don’t” is, I guess, realistic, but then raises the question why everyone thinks they’re so important.

Bunny: So I guess that’s realistic, but not logical and perhaps not on theme either. 

Chris: I would say probably one of the number one sources of illogical conceits is just people not acting in their interest in the story. The example we gave of Sweet Tooth is one where it’s like, “Okay, well, if people don’t want the disease, why aren’t they taking X, Y, Z steps?”

This particularly applies when we’re not talking about single individuals but whole groups of people. If a whole group of people, like a society, for instance, appears to not be acting in their interest, generally that means you are misreading the situation. I love this example on the blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, discussing peasant farmers. People have looked at their farming practices and assumed they just didn’t know what they were doing and weren’t acting in their own interest. For instance, if they had a good year, they would spend all of their extra food feasting and giving it to their neighbors and then they would starve during lean years.

People could look at that and be like, “Well, why did they do that?” They should have saved in some way so that they could have that extra wealth or food or whatever for when times were hard. But if you actually understand the economy of the time and how things work, they just didn’t have any way to do that. And so their best bet was to invest in social capital and build a social safety net so that they would feast their neighbors and then their neighbors would help them if they had lean times. And that was actually the logical thing to do. So if you see some kind of weird historical behavior it’s a good idea to ask about what is the context for why people are doing this? If you wanna put that in your world replicating that context, in which case it actually makes sense and it’s efficient, and it benefits people to do that kind of weird thing. 

Oren: What I find unrealistic is that a blog with such amazingly useful and well-written information about history would be called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is a really hard thing to say when you’re trying to tell someone about this blog.

Bunny: Like calling your book The Mimicking of Known Successes. Very inconvenient.

Oren: Doesn’t have anything to do with the story. Why is it titled that? I’ve just started calling it Devereaux’s blog. I don’t have time to say that really long name every time, and it doesn’t communicate what the blog’s about anyway. 

Chris: I could just say ACOUP. 

Bunny: ACOUP! 

Oren: No, I will never say ACOUP. 

Chris: If you ever do it, I will know you’re an imposter. 

Oren: If I ever do that, I’m acting unrealistically. Then I’ll say that the nacelles don’t actually matter. It’s fine. 

Chris: I will say this whole question of self-interest, though, in some ways has gotten a lot harder because of recent politics. There’s been a lot of arguments about what is plausible for an evil overlord, especially when we’re talking about villains. People would be like, “Oh, it’s realistic for the villain to be incompetent, because politics.” Most of the time we’re not actually talking about realism. We’re talking about what’s good for the story, which is different. A lot of people don’t understand that it’s different, but it’s different. 

In some cases, like when I looked at Quicksilver, there’s this elite queen’s guard that apparently is supposedly wearing plate armor made of pure gold. It’s supposed to be illogical, a sign the queen only cares about appearances. And it is kind of holding these guards back somewhat. I had to be like, okay, well this doesn’t make any sense, but I suppose if the evil queen is a clown…? At the same time, I still think that there is some limit there. How obvious is it working against their self-interest? If the guard can’t even move, the queen would probably change her mind at that point. 

Oren: I would also question can even the most clownish of evil queens afford even one suit of solid gold plate mail? Plate mail on its own is already really expensive in any setting in which it is relevant. Gold is expensive, and there isn’t that much of it. Most gold things in history are gold plated. They’re not usually solid gold. That’s pretty rare. The amount of gold you would need to make a fully gold suit of armor is like… and these are supposed to be more than one! I question whether even a really clownish evil queen who is gutting all of her public services for money and is trying to sell them for parts, would be able to afford that many suits of golden armor.

Bunny: Wow, this is worse than nacelles. 

Oren: Eventually, reality does come back to call. Clowns do a lot of clown stuff that it feels like they shouldn’t be allowed to do, but eventually it catches up with them. 

Bunny: I also wanna say that this scenario of truth being stranger than fiction is something that’s been in actual nonfiction for a really long time. In nonfiction, you also still have to make the audience believe what you’re saying, especially narrative nonfiction, right? So, it’s true. These are facts about what happened that you’re putting together, but it still has to be believable, which is a weird thing to say when you’re putting together something that’s literally true. But I’ve been in classes where we talk about nonfiction and believability is still a huge matter.

Oren: You gotta give your readers the context to believe these things. If you just list weird facts and are like, “Yeah, that happened.” Readers are gonna be like, “Oh, if you say so, I guess.” Maybe if they really trust you, they’ll accept it. 

Bunny: There’s some real weird crap. There are warships painted zigzag. 

Oren: Yeah. Why are they painted like zebras? I could tell you, but we only have four minutes left. In that case, you want to ease them into it. You want to give them a way that they can understand it, not just be like, here’s a weird thing. Don’t question it because weird stuff happens. 

Bunny: Another way to cover up illogical worldbuilding is to have characters in the story act like it’s normal. I think that actually goes further in some cases, like with the dangerous magic schools. The fact that the adults aren’t panicking constantly makes the reader not panic until it gets obviously absurd. Or until the author ties herself in knots trying to justify it.

Oren: The dangerous magic school is another one that is often covered by tropes. This doesn’t make any sense, but we are used to it. It’s a thing we’ve been seeing since the magic school genre blew up. So people will usually accept it as long as you don’t be weird with it. If you start calling a bunch of attention to it, you might have some trouble. Or you might not. 

Again, Deadly Education did very well, so I can’t say for sure how much anyone cared. I can say that I know at least a significant number of people who read the book and had a hard time with all of the exposition, which is exactly what I would expect. It’s not really controversial to say that people don’t generally like reading huge blocks of exposition. An even bigger number of people did like the book enough to keep reading even though there was all this exposition, but to what extent the bizarre worldbuilding has any real effect, that’s harder to measure. 

Bunny: It’s also worth mentioning stories that are intentionally illogical or at least present on their face as a bit absurdist or surrealist, because these exist, and it’s often stories with fairy tale logic or high comedy stories like Shaun the Sheep. Not very high in realism or logic. I watched an episode recently where the dog gets his chair attached to a drone and goes to space, and then falls back to Earth. We’re not supposed to be like, “Why isn’t he asphyxiating?” And The Butcher of the Forest being a good example of a fairy tale logic sort of world where you have to trust that it’s working on its own internal logic, even though it seems absurd.

Oren: I read The Other Valley recently, which is a kind of surrealist story, where the premise is that the entire world is one valley, but like to the east and west of this valley, there is an identical copy of that valley that is like 20 years before or ahead of it in time. You’re not asking, “Where do these people get their cars?” Because they have cars. Where do they get gasoline? Where do they grow their food? That is not the point of the story. As long as the story itself does not bring that up as a big plot point, as some kind of “gotcha”, sure. The point of the story is about what you would do to change your history, which I think is fine.

By the end of the story, if someone had been like, “Hey, didn’t you know it’s really weird that these valleys are able to survive despite being cut off from the outside world?” that doesn’t make sense. I spent this whole book suspending my disbelief over that. You don’t get to pull it as a gotcha now. Well with that, I think we are gonna 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 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 music].

We all love to describe things. Why not add a little more description? Even more. What could go wrong? Oh, no, now the description is confusing. We’ve got to clarify it, but how? Fortunately, that’s the topic of today’s episode. We’ll discuss how to tell if your description is confusing, what to do about it, and also why a certain gate is the bane of Oren’s existence.

• The Tainted Cup

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

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: And…

Oren: Oren. 

Chris: Now folks, to understand this podcast, you have to know about the space I’m recording in. So it’s thirty-two feet by fourteen feet with windows on the east and west sides, has two floors, and the staircase is along the wall on the south side, ending in a five-by-five foot landing on the top floor, and then a tile entryway about the same size on the bottom floor. Now, the TV is in the center of the bottom floor facing north, but along the north side is a beanbag, a couch, a laptop desk in that order going from east to west. Okay, so can you picture it perfectly now?

Bunny: Your recording room has two floors? 

Oren: I live here and I’m pretty sure I don’t know where I am anymore. I think I’ve gotten lost sitting at my computer.

Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]

Oren: I’m gonna need GPS coordinates.

Bunny: Yeah. What latitude and longitude though? I feel like that’s the thing that willl finally paint the picture.

Chris: Gonna give you all the dimensions for all the rooms now. And then I’ll just, like, tell you how many feet north or south they are. East or west. Instead of saying where they are next to each other. 

Bunny: Please tell me you were walking around the living room with a compass.

Chris: Gotta figure out how to orient here in my own home.

Bunny: Yeah, you gotta use absolute units, not right and left.

Chris: This episode is on description, and in particular clarifying it when it is overwhelming and confusing. And as silly as that description of where I’m recording is, that’s the kind of errors that I see when people are trying to describe something in their narration. There’s a number of things happening there where instead of building a picture for you, I’m telling you about all these separate items, and then somehow you have to do the work of placing them all. And I’m being overly precise and technical about it, and that’s kind of what tends to happen in people’s description.

Oren: The moment you start bringing out precise measuring units, it’s like, eh, it’s not that you’ll never need those, but you probably don’t need them most of the time. If there’s a situation where you were considering them, the answer to whether you need them is probably no. Probably just going to make things worse.

Chris: First, it might be good to talk about just why you shouldn’t make readers do too much work. Especially since we have people sometimes going around being like, “Oh, but I just wrote this to challenge the readers.”

Oren: It’s ’cause what you have to say isn’t that important. Respect your readers’ time.

All: [Laughter]

Bunny: You’re not special.

Oren: Like, a perfectly self-serving perspective: it’s that your readers are not gonna tolerate having a certain–more than a certain amount of their time wasted. From a moral perspective. It’s like, okay, is it really important to what you’re saying and is what you’re saying really important enough to need a full description of the living room? Is it really? Not like the answer is never gonna be yes, but it’s gonna be pretty usually no.

Chris: Part of the issue is trying to do too much. Obviously in this situation. Whereas if I had a floor plan and I was, like, telling a mystery story, for instance, and the floor plan and the precision of it is that important. That’s kind of when you need the actual drawing in the book to make that work. And obviously if you’re in indie publishing you could make that happen. For traditional publishers I don’t know what it takes to convince them to include something like that. But that’s only because in a mystery story, you expect the audience to follow along perfectly and part of the fun is that they are putting in–they are trying to solve the puzzle themself. That’s when you need something like that. And generally there are times–and we’ll talk about that when you do need to convey some aspects that are a little bit complicated. But not usually something that precise.

Bunny: Maps in the front of books are a staple of fantasy. People should be able to have, like, a general idea of what you’re talking about without having to refer back to a map. But I will say they’re useful. When I was reading The Tainted Cup, I referred back to the map a couple times and that was fine. I think I would’ve been able to understand the book perfectly fine without it. And that should be the litmus test. You shouldn’t rely on having a map in the book. But that is a tool that writers sometimes use.

Chris: But even then you have only so many maps. You wouldn’t, for instance, have a map for every fight scene. Sometimes for a fight scene the environment does matter and that can get complicated.

Again, just going briefly back to, like, the problem with making readers do work; why it has to be simple as possible. There’s this principle I love called ‘cognitive load’ and I was talking about it before I had that term. But then when I was researching learning and education for making courses, I found, like, oh! That’s what they call it in education. That’s great. That’s perfect. Cognitive load. Basically, the idea is that, like, even a reader who has some kind of genetically enhanced super brain. Created by aliens has limited brain power. Nobody has infinite brain power. Everyone has limited brain power. And the more of their brain power that you use on one thing, the more you degrade their ability to understand everything else. 

So if they have to use their brain power assembling all these pieces together into an image or making a connection between two different ideas. Or, like, let’s say you have unusual phrasing with a word they’re unfamiliar with or any small thing that they have to use a little bit of extra brain power on. That means they have lower ability to make a second logical leap or understand anything else. Also, they have less attention to devote to the other regular details. So they’re more likely to miss something important. They’re less likely to remember what you’re saying. And some of that spare brain power’s just needed to enjoy the story. Right?

So a reader who has to focus too much of their attention on just figuring out what all the individual words has none left for, like, what do those words mean together and following along. That’s why you just need to lower cognitive load as much as you can. I mean, and sometimes you’ll wanna spend it to get some result. But the point is that less is always better, so you know, make it as easy as you can.

Bunny: Occam’s description. The simplest description is usually the best one.

Oren: Or, like, not even necessarily the simplest ’cause we’re not advocating that you make everything bland and be like, “There was a hallway. There was a room. A person was in the room.” That’s not the goal here. The goal is to focus on the things that matter. And to not waste time on things that don’t matter, which would be, like, most of the furniture in most of the rooms you’re in.

Chris: And also describe things effectively so that it’s easier for people. And I think one of the issues with a lot of these really big blocks of complicated description is not just that you’re asking readers to use their brain power, but it’s so much in such a small space.

You could have in a paragraph maybe one new term, maybe two. And other than that, you don’t wanna have more than one. Too many fantasy world labels, for instance, on cities they’ve never heard of or character names that they aren’t familiar with in one paragraph. Because again, if you use up all of their brain power on one thing, then they get less for the rest of the paragraph. So then when you have, like, a big block of description that’s, like, super technical it’s all at once and it’s just overwhelming.

Oren: It was just interesting ’cause for most of the time when I see people arguing about this, they’re arguing against what seems like an imaginary opponent who wants their writing to be super bland. And so they’re like, “No! My writing’s not gonna be bland. I’m gonna write it as much as I want. And if it’s confusing, that’s the reader’s problem.” And for the most part it’s like, that feels like a straw man. 

But there was that Kirk Vonnegut writing rules article I did a little while back in which he–or the advertising executive that wrote this for him–basically said that readers only want to see stuff that’s like what was written before and don’t do anything new. And it was like, all right, I guess we found him. We found the person making that argument.

Chris: We found the straw man.

Bunny: His name is Vonnegut.

Oren: It’s here. He’s made of straw. It was Vonnegut or this advertising guy. Fuess, I think was his name. It’s one of those guys.

We’ve been talking about, like, too much information. I often find it confusing when they leave things out ’cause there are things that need to be there.

This was one of the issues I was having with Beneath the Rising, which is a cosmic horror story. And to a certain extent maybe that was on purpose. Maybe I was supposed to feel disoriented, but a lot of it was just like, wait, we’re on a plane now. Okay, the plane is landing and it’s a rough landing. What is happening? There are missing transition moments, so I didn’t know where we were from one scene to another.

Chris: Some writers have more trouble with this than others, and I wish that I had better tips and recommendations for how to fix if you have missing context. But I think in a lot of cases what happens is that the writer knows what’s happening. And so they don’t realize what the reader needs to know. ‘Cause they’re not in the reader’s shoes. And so then they leave out some very basic context about transitions and things like that, that readers need. And that’s kind of a hard thing and it can lead to narration that’s very confusing.

I will say for description, one thing that you want to look for is that you’re not just focusing on evocative details. I think the difference between mediocre description and great description is really getting specific and having those interesting details instead of using sort of vague terms. But if you have nothing but the little details, then you’re not creating the big picture. ‘Cause you wanna create the big picture first in more general terms that are really easy to pick up. And then you associate the little evocative details with that big picture. And if you forget that first part, then there’s just a bunch of details and we get back to the reader and ask to try to assemble them into a picture of some kind. And that’s a lot of work to figure out.

Oren: This was a really interesting one because I started listening to a book called The Marvelers, which I couldn’t tell what was wrong. I could just tell that I was not really seeing the world. The world did not seem novel to me, even though it’s like a magic school setting. And if I stopped and thought about what I had just heard, because I was listening to it in audio, there were lots of details, but I just couldn’t imagine like, what is this supposed to be? It didn’t seem like an interesting world, and I didn’t know what was wrong. And I was so desperate to find out what it was I bought Chris a copy of the textbook so that she could look at it and tell me what the issue was.

Chris: And it’s honestly really interesting. So yeah, this is a middle grade magic school story and honestly the descriptive details in this book are gorgeous. I love them. They’re so beautifully written. But has the very, very big problem of not including general descriptors and context so much so that when I was looking through and just trying to read it, I was just exhausted. Just exhausted by reading a middle grade book. And no doubt the cool details is what got it published anyway.

Okay. For an example: what would happen is like, I think–again, I have to say “I think” because there’s a lot of uncertainty in trying to read this book. Where, like, an airship comes to take the child away to the magic school and there’s no text just saying that it’s an airship. Instead, it’s all these shapes and pieces of it are described and I have to figure out that it’s an airship.

Oren: The way you would normally do it is you would describe some details of a shape or a prominent fixture, and then say, like, the airship descended or something. It’s kinda like instead of ever saying the word elephant, it’s like you just describe different parts of an elephant.

Bunny: The details have to be details of something. They can’t just be details. 

Chris: And you would do it different ways, depending on the narration. You could say, oh, and then the airship appeared through the clouds. And then describe the airship. And first again, start with general descriptors like it was long and sleek, or had a big pillowy airbag. Or give some general “this is what it feels like,” and then you start looking at the individual details a little bit more.

Or you could just–you’d be like, oh, I saw something through the clouds. Some shadow, some long, sleek shape because the protagonist hasn’t identified it yet. And it’s like, “Oh, it comes closer and I can see that it’s an airship,” and then start to notice details as it comes closer yet.

 But the point is that normally you would say what it is. And it’s okay to start with, like, a few adjectives to give a general sense of size, where it is, how far is it from the protagonist, and things like that. Especially when you walk into a space, it’s like, oh, this is a cozy room. That’s cramped with lots of oddities. And then you would start describing the oddities. But the whole cozy room with oddities tells the reader what impression that you want to create with all of the details, and makes it easier for them to understand the relationship between all those details and the narrative in general. So they know why you’re talking about details.

Bunny: I think this is related to another descriptive mistake that I’ve made and I’ve seen other people make before, which is describing a really big significant thing last. I had a set of description of, like, a town. And then after I described the town, I was like, oh, I’m gonna describe, like, the airship.

Oren: Yeah. Always airships.

Bunny: It was an airship. It all comes back to airships. “The big airship hanging above it.” And my readers were like, “Wait, I had to completely revise my image of this town once you described, like, an airship hanging over it after you described the town.” And also, wouldn’t that be the first thing the viewpoint character notices because it’s unusual. It’s out of place in this town. And yeah, that’s true. If you describe a desk that’s got pencils on it; also, there’s a golden retriever sitting on top of the computer. You really have to revise your mental picture and kind of go backwards. And that’s not ideal for keeping readers in the moment.

Chris: It’s okay to have the protagonist notice something belatedly. But then you usually make a point that they’re like, “Oh wow. That golden retriever was so still I didn’t notice that there was a dog right there.”

Oren: Or, like, there was a shadow and the person just assumed it was clouds, and looks up: It’s like, “Oh, it’s a ship. Oh, okay.”

Chris: Otherwise, if something is big and you’d expect them to notice it. And especially if characters are gonna interact with it later. 

Again, my favorite example of this is always gonna be in Eragon. In the beginning where we’re following this shade antagonist character who was in the woods and is throwing red balls of fire at the elves to steal the McGuffin–

Oren: Just as one does in the woods, right?

Bunny: Just chilling.

Chris: –and at some point he was in the woods on the path, and then he just gets on, like, a tall rock pillar. And like what? Where did that come from? There was a big, tall rock pillar that you could just get on. And where was it before? And then he’s out there with his minions or, like, orcs, basically. ‘Urgals.’ And then at the end when he leaves he gets on his horse. You’re like, wait, there was a horse hanging around during the fight this whole time?

Bunny: Horse: famously not spooked by fights.

Oren: Yeah. Very calm horse.

Chris: I think there was another book, this one called Tiger’s Curse, where in the prologue there’s just people who pop into the room. Like really important characters. We describe the king in his throne chamber and some of the environment, but neglect that two people who are, like, really important to the protagonist are also standing there.

So yeah, that definitely happens and it’s very confusing when it does. Again, another reason to think about when the protagonist encounters something new–goes into a new area, especially. But like, yeah, an airship approaching would be another example–to draw the big picture first, make sure everything important is in place, and then dive into your details.

Oren: And when we’re on the subject of things where you are going to need to spend the audience’s cognitive load, you are gonna have to be able to do things that might be a little confusing. This is often gonna happen if you have a big speculative fiction conceit. For example, in The Expanse I noticed that once they started getting into, like, the space fights it was sometimes hard to keep track of because they are describing this very complicated maneuver where the battle is decided by who can force the other ones into a high-G maneuver they can’t get out of. Which is not very intuitive.

I don’t think most people, except for space nerds, even know what that means. So it’s not easy to describe that. But to a certain extent, that is unavoidable because that’s, like, central to The Expanse. You can’t take that out. So anything you can do to save your audience’s attention elsewhere will make that easier.

Chris: I think that it’s worth talking about layouts and spatial relationships a little bit.

Oren: I hate ’em.

Chris: [Laughs] Because sometimes you will have situations where you do have to convey something for a fight or a battle. Oren has a couple of these in The Abbess Rebellion that we worked on together.

Oren: Oh yeah. Oof.

Chris: I just had to kind of repeat and clarify as best we can. Because one of them is a fight that takes place on either side of a gate in the city. Which, that’s perfectly normal. But the thing was that this is a gate by the harbor, and it’s designed so that people coming invading from the harbor can’t get into the city. But instead the protagonists are out on the outside of the gate trying to keep the antagonist from leaving through the gate towards the harbor.

Oren: I created so many problems for myself with that plot.

Oren & Bunny: [Laughter]

Bunny: Dimensionality: two out of ten.

Chris: It’s interesting that they’re on the wrong side of the gate. The gate is designed to defend from the other side, and that affects the fight, and that’s interesting. But just trying to explain that concept is surprisingly complex. And so had to repeat it multiple times, tried to clarify it as much as we could, what was going on there. Other times the language needs to change. Basically, if you’re describing spatial relationships the thing that you need to know is that people can only really handle two things in relationship to each other. But you can chain them if you want, a bit. So the couch is across from the TV. The coffee table’s in front of the couch. The remote is on the coffee table.

Bunny: And all three of them are trying to get through the gate! 

Oren & Chris: [Laughter]

Chris: That’s defended from the wrong side! So that’s an example of something where I’ve got a series of statements that will only take you so far. If you have anything more than two items you need to come up with a shape the reader is familiar with as a shorthand for how they are positioned. So, you know, you got your four ducks standing in a row. Or your four ducks in a square or six ducks in a circle.

Oren: Another one that I had a huge amount of trouble with was when there was a battle that was going on in different parts of the city. And where the different things were happening mattered because it affected how long it would take them to get from the important locations to another, or whether they could intercept certain enemies or whatever. And oh God, that was so hard! It was like, wait, what street are they on? Where is that related to this hill? And is the hill part of the gate that is being defended from the wrong side? Does anyone know? There’s a granary in here somewhere, I think.

All: [Laughter]

Bunny: You are supposed to know, Oren. It’s your job.

Oren: No one knows. I did try to spend some time before that, getting the reader acquainted at least a little bit with the city and the way that it was oriented. Where the harbor was in relation to everything else.

Chris: Yeah. And often you couldn’t rely on them to remember something like that.

Bunny: I do think probably one of the most difficult things to describe, period, is battles where you’re supposed to understand what’s going on. And it is, I think, valid to have a protagonist out of their depth in the middle of a battle and swords are clashing everywhere. They’re confused and trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s fine for that to also come through in the description, at least to an extent. When you’re supposed to have, like, a clear view of what the battle is and how things are moving and who’s trying to get where at what time, that is legitimately probably one of the most difficult things to describe. 

Chris: In Abbess Rebellion there’s another battle that, when I was editing, I had to stop and ask Oren what the layout was. And so I was like, okay, I just don’t understand what’s happening with these ridges and this spot that they’re camping and then there’s a fight there. And after talking to him, it’s like, okay, so we have ridges on three sides and then no ridge on the fourth side. So I was like, how ‘bout we just call this a horseshoe so that we have a shape that people are familiar with? But then I looked up, okay, did horseshoes exist then? Is this anachronistic? But they did. They did exist. So we used the horseshoe.

Bunny: Horses have had shoes for a long time.

Chris: So then by just calling it the horseshoe wedge–and then we would say the opening to the horseshoe–that made it a lot easier to communicate.

Oren: At one point there was a battle where it was more conventional with, like, the two sides lining up to face each other. And you’re supposed to refer to the flanks as right and left. But I ended up calling them east and west simply because I knew that if I had to reverse them every time I was talking about the different sides, that would be so confusing. ‘Cause when you have two sides facing each other one side’s left is facing the other side’s right. And if I had to talk about, “We must move our right wing to attack their left wing,” it’s like, wait, why are there right and left wings on different sides? It’s ’cause the mirror versus–ugh! No, it’s just the two east wings are fighting. And it’s like, that’s not how this is normally described, but I just decided to make that sacrifice.

Chris: In general, I would say right/left are the type of technical language that are generally to be avoided. In this case, east/west might have just been the best way to go in this situation. But if you can give things more of a descriptive label…In some cases if a character has two arms gets injured a lot of times you don’t have to specify whether it’s the right or the left. Let them imagine it whichever way you want, and sometimes it won’t matter. 

But then if you need to keep track of them you call them the injured arm versus the uninjured arm. Or this is the sunny side of the yard or the shaded side of the yard. And that’s usually better because it’s easier to remember. It has associations and implications to it, as opposed to something like north/south, right/left. But again, sometimes there’s a reason to specify it’s the right or the left arm because it matters that it was the arm that they write with, for instance. Sometimes you want to, but those are things that I also try to avoid if I can.

Oren: So here’s a question; so we talked about battles, but zooming in a little bit to like more of a fight scene, which still could have a number of combatants, and each combatant you add is more strain. How much can be done at the word craft level to make that less confusing versus how much do I just need to reduce the number of people in this fight scene?

Chris: Sometimes it’s realistic to have more people, less is gonna be easier. So basically the more things you have, the less you can kind of depict them and bring them to life in an immersive way. The bigger your battle is, the more you’re gonna have to summarize. The more you’re gonna have to describe people in general, instead of talking about what individual people are doing. And that’s gonna lower the level of immersion is the consequence of that.

So I always do think that it’s, in many cases, good to make the scale smaller, the scope smaller, so that you can bring what you have to life. I think, for instance, it makes a lot more sense to have a shorter fight. Where you can really stay in the moment. Then to have a longer fight where you’re then starting to summarize portions of the fight. I don’t think that makes any sense to do that.

Bunny: There’s another consideration, which is if you have more people, you also have to deal with the choreography of more people to avoid the trap of one-person-at-a-time fighting. So that’s also something to keep in mind. Fewer people makes that less likely to happen. Or if you have a lot of people, honestly, for the clarity of your description and avoiding turn-based combat side of it, setting your thing in a narrow hallway.

All: [Laughter]

Oren: It’s interesting ’cause once you get up to a certain number of people, it almost becomes easier because you can be like, okay, “There was a big melee going on around me.” And then the two relevant people who were important are across from me and I only have to describe them. As opposed to a combat that has five important participants. It’s like, ooh, that’s so many! How do I keep track of five people in this fight?

Chris: Well, if you only remember one thing, remember not to try to recreate an image. It’s too precise. It’s got too much information. It’s worth a thousand words, and you don’t have a thousand words. You don’t. You have to give up that level of control. And instead, just evoke the imagination and keep it kind of vague and let the readers imagine it how they want to imagine it, and just like set atmosphere and bring across the important points.

Oren: Well, with those words of wisdom, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found this episode helpful, 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 Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. 

So, you’ve got a cute, little story about gardening, but now it’s almost the end, and you feel like something should happen. It’s got to be exciting, right? That’s what all the other stories do. But conjuring excitement can be difficult if the rest of the story is light and carefree. That’s how you get endings that have random bursts of violence out nowhere. Fortunately, there’s a better way, and we’re gonna talk about it.

• Xenomorph 

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: Hey, so a quick note from the future: We got a little excited when talking about The Spellshop and Legends & Lattes, and forgot to give spoiler warnings. So spoilers for both of those books. Now back to the podcast.

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: … and…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: So it’s been a nice little podcast we’ve got. I’m sure we’re all holding our tea with both hands curled up under blankets, and maybe we have a pastry next to us that we can dip in our tea, savor, and then just sigh a little bit. And it’s been nice, but I hear something bad is supposed to happen. It can’t all be good.

Chris: Mmm!

Oren: We can have a sudden burst of violence.

Chris: Yeah, that’s true.

Bunny: Maybe there was foreshadowing that we went and encountered a xenomorph, so… Oh no, I feel something in my chest!

Chris: Oh no!

Oren: Suddenly we all died ’cause of xenomorphs.

Bunny: Secretly in this croissant there’s a razor blade. I will use it to slash the throat of the xenomorph.

Oren: Good job!

Bunny: Now we can get back to running our tea shop.

Oren: Yeah, everything’s great. We’re all fine here. There was just some gruesome violence.

Bunny: Alternatively, something dramatic could happen, like Chris and I disagreeing on the efficacy of the ending of a certain cozy mystery we both read recently.

Oren: Oh dear.

Bunny: That would never happen.

Chris: No, never! Always in agreement.

Oren: We could have, like, a sudden conflict with one of those weirdos who writes these essays about how cozy fantasy is destroying literature. That could happen. That could be our sudden final fight.

Bunny: That could be our twist. We could start pretending that Legends & Lattes is equivalent to… harboring Jeffrey Epstein.

Oren: Yeah! What a great essay!

Chris: But, you know, if we have to face these people, we’re going to have to actually win them over, right? We have to realize that they meant well all along. They were just going about things the wrong way, and then they become our friends and soon they’re sitting down with us and also holding tea with both hands.

Oren: Ah, the true victory!

Bunny: Yeah, they’re just misguided! They’re just misunderstood. They can work at our tea shop on weekends.

Oren: Oh no…

Bunny: So it’s hard to write climaxes for low-tension stories. It’s hard to measure out the right amount of conflict. It’s like putting sugar and tea: you need just enough.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: So, like, all of it, then. The maximum amount.

Bunny: Frankly, you just drip some tea into the sugar jar.

Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. If you use sugar alternatives, some of those you don’t need to use nearly as much to get the same amount of sweetness, so you should use the same amount for even more sweetness. Boom!

Bunny: Yeah, you could use Splenda and it tastes really gross.

Oren: I gotta admit, I like Splenda.

Chris: Yeah, me too.

Bunny: No!

Oren: I can’t tell the difference between Splenda and sugar and I don’t have to use as much Splenda, so that’s what I end up using.

Bunny: No, it’s just sickly and icky.

Oren: You know, I’ll have to take your word for it. It’s the same to me. I have tested different mugs of tea with different types of sweeteners in them, and I cannot tell the difference between Splenda and sugar.

Chris: You placebo’d yourself with sugar?

Bunny: Oh, I was trying to figure out if this is Splenda or sugar or regular tea, and now my knee injury is gone.

Oren: Although this could be a fun climax for a story about running a tea shop, where the person is trying to prove that their sugar alternative sweetener is just as good as sugar, or vice versa, prove that you should only use real sugar, none of this fake chemical stuff, right? There’s no chemicals in any of this.

Bunny: Yeah, we’re going to go to war with big Splenda.

Oren: But, like, for a low-tension tea story, which is about keeping your tea business going. The climax could be convincing a critic. Tea critic, those must exist.

Bunny: Heartland Food Products Group is going down!

Oren: If you wanted to make the stakes a little higher, sure, right.

Chris: I do think that it’s worth talking about why people have so much trouble with this. It’s because everybody knows that a climax is supposed to be more tense and exciting. That’s the one thing that everybody knows before they come to Mythcreants. It’s the only thing. But without understanding plot structure, they’re just like, “Oh, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment here.” And so we’ll see stories that people will turn in, where the characters will be sitting around holding their tea with both hands. And then you’ll have graphic fight scene, and then you go back to characters sitting around with tea and having nice conversations. That’s almost like what The Wandering Inn is like. Well, The Wandering Inn actually does have structure when it’s not doing violence. It’s kind of like that, where it’s like, “This doesn’t really fit here.” And there’s a big difference between having a plot that climaxes and then just having random violence pop in out of nowhere, ’cause that’s not really structure. What you want is to have a problem the character’s working on and then have that build up to a peak.

Bunny: It’s the “Two guys with guns come through the door” piece of writing advice that we’ve debunked. That school of thought doesn’t really work anyway, but it especially doesn’t work if you’re trying to write a cozy.

Chris: I mean, I’m not going to say there’s no situation in which you could have two guys with guns coming through the door, but I think that when somebody’s thinking of that, they’re assuming you know everything else about storytelling and those guys with guns actually fit your story and actually work for your plot, and not that you have a cozy where somebody is creating a coffee shop and then two guys coming through the door with guns. The average person who’s just learning storytelling for the first time doesn’t have any of that context or preexisting knowledge to lug that into. And I think a lot of what we call pseudostructures are like that. The idea is that you’re supposed to come to the table already knowing how to tell a story.

Oren: So, were I to hazard a theory about the main issue that people have here, and you all know me, I’m very cautious with my opinions…

Chris: You’d never.

Oren: … I would say that the biggest reason why people have problems creating a climax or finale for their low-tension story is that people have a really hard time with the difference between low tension and no tension. And a number of these stories, which are clearly aiming for low tension, overshoot and hit zero tension. And if there’s zero tension, there’s nothing to resolve. That’s what the climax does. It is a machine that turns tension into satisfaction. And if you didn’t have any tension, you have nothing to put in the machine. So then you end up doing all kinds of weird things to try to compensate.

Bunny: You need a conflict that will also be your throughline, right? I think that’s the other difficult part, is that it needs to be a resolution that comes from what the rest of the story was also about.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: That’s why, even if you don’t have a random burst of violence, a random burst of conflict of any type that’s not related to what came before is also not a good climax, even if it’s the right level of cozy.

Chris: Yeah. Although, I mean, what I will say is, let’s say we’re taking Legends & Lattes. Basically the stakes become whether the coffee shop fails, and it has to get you to care about the coffee shop for that to work. But that’s the throughline, is whether that coffee shop, that effort to put it together, will succeed. And so, last episode we talked about, “Okay, how do you use up your time so you can bring in different antagonists,” right? As long as they all threaten the coffee shop. And so it has a couple different plots that are mostly built with foreshadowing that provide some tension. We have the protection racket, and then we have the old coworker who has a grudge.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Because they are established early, then they can kind of show up later and create a new threat. So I don’t think that there was anything wrong with Legends & Lattes having, “Oh, the old coworker sets the shop on fire.” It wasn’t resolved well, but as a climax, I don’t think that was necessarily bad.

Bunny: Yeah, I actually think that would’ve been kind of a perfect climax, because a big part of the story was, like you said, “Will the coffee shop succeed?” and, to a lesser extent, “Will Viv give up violence and find community?” And in the latter case, it kind of fumbles that, right? Like we’ve discussed how her finding community is not quite there. She’s running a business and it’s not like nobody can be charitable towards a business that burned down, but it doesn’t do the work to be like she’s earned the amount of support that she gets in return for it.

Oren: Yeah, we just didn’t see her giving to the community the way that we would want for that kind of ending, right?

Chris: Right. And just to clarify, for anyone who has not read this book, what happens is that the old coworker actually does succeed in burning the shop, and then the community gets together to rebuild it. And what that should be to make that ending satisfying, it should be what we call a prior achievement, where earlier the main character has done something to earn their goodwill without getting anything in return, and then now they return the favors that she’s done by rebuilding the shop. Therefore, we can attribute the fact that they rebuild it to her, even though it’s a community effort. But in this case, she just hasn’t done that. She hasn’t earned it. So it’s just unsatisfying because, yeah, they liked drinking coffee, but she was doing that for profit, right? It wasn’t a favor to them.

Oren: Right. It works a little better, in my experience from talking to people who liked the ending, what made it work is that we are so heckin’ starved for nice local coffee shops that the fact that she doesn’t do anything for the community is beside the point. It’s like, “You’re not Starbucks and you serve good? Yes! Have all my money! I will send my children to work to repair your coffee shop. I just want a nice coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks so bad.” But I think we can aim a little higher, right?

Bunny: I do think, to script-doctor this a bit, I think that Baldree did set himself on the back foot by having this be set in a large city where most of her customers are kind of anonymous. We get to know some of them, but I wonder…

Chris: As opposed to The Spellshop, which is in a small town where everybody knows each other, therefore is obviously the good model for how to do this correctly?

Bunny: As opposed to The Spellshop, yes. On Bland Wish Fulfillment Island.

Oren: Hang on, hang on. We gotta… I’m not done with Legends & Lattes yet. For script-doctoring, I actually know a thing that could have made this work quite well, and I think wouldn’t have taken that big a change. The book sort of has two climaxes, ’cause it has the gangster protection racket plot (which I think we agree also doesn’t resolve very well, because it’s just Viv agreeing to pay protection money in product instead of cash, and that’s like the same thing, that’s not any better), so what we needed here was for Viv to solve that problem by rallying the local business owners (who we could have be characters; they wouldn’t need to be just a faceless crowd), have a few of the other local business owners, and they rally together to present a united front. “Well, none of us are paying, and you can’t take all of us.” And that scares off the gangsters, and Viv is the one who makes this all work and she takes point and does all the effort to make it happen.

Chris: Because she does get something from that, in that they all oppose the protection racket together, which gives her protection from the protection racket. We’d really have to see her go above and beyond.

Oren: Yes.

Chris: She needs to do something that it doesn’t feel like she’s already gotten some benefit from.

Oren: I agree. We would need to see that this is something important enough that it earns her good karma, but it would then give us some characters who we already know who could then band together to help her at the end when her coffee shop burns down.

Bunny: And honestly, you could probably combine those two things. Maybe she refuses to pay the protection money and her coffee shop gets burned down. But she’s built up so much goodwill that her neighboring businesses are like, “This will not stand,” and together take a stand against the protection racket, right?

Chris: Honestly, I really like the idea of the coffee shop burning down and then it turns out the real coffee shop was the friends we made along the way, right? That’s great. Just didn’t quite get there.

Bunny: Yeah, yeah.

Oren: You can see the idea, but it’s not quite manifesting.

Chris: Right. In concept, it was a fine idea for conflict. It’s just how Baldree has issues solving problems. But yeah, so generally the climax has to be more tense than the rest of the book, but it doesn’t have to be life or death. A lot of times, a high-pressure social moment works. “Everybody’s watching, now make a speech!” tends to work pretty well.

Bunny: It’s like, “A song! Do a little dance!”

Chris: This is super cheesy, but all those romance movies where one of the people’s getting married to somebody else, and then the character has to march in, interrupt the wedding, and confess their love…

Oren: Ah, no, I don’t like it.

Chris: I’m not going to say it’s my favorite ending either, but there’s a reason it’s done that way, and that’s to create a climax that is: the love interest is about to get married to somebody else, so we have some level of urgency, which otherwise is difficult to create for a romance.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But you can also do it with: “the love interest is about to move away, or take a job that will take them away,” or something like that. And then we have a really high-pressure social situation with everybody watching, and it makes the protagonist prove themselves while confessing their love.

Bunny: Yeah, they take a risk of making a fool out of themselves or having people laugh at them, or being very publicly turned down or shamed. That’s enough to make a lot of us cringe imagining ourselves in that situation.

Chris: Yeah. But it also makes it feel like they’ve earned that, because they were willing to do all of those things. So that could be an alternative to having… Lives do not have to be in the line. Or another alternative is, if you don’t want something that’s fight-scene-exciting, if that doesn’t fit because the story otherwise has no fight scenes, it is pretty low tension, have something that has lives in the line but is just a little bit slower paced, ’cause a fight scene is very fast. Can you imagine how fast people punch each other or hit each other with a sword? It breezes by very quickly, so that fire in Legends & Lattes breeds a little danger, but it’s not quite as fast-paced as a fight scene. There’s a little bit more time to maneuver and avert disaster.

Bunny: Yeah, if you want to see how fast fighting happens, watch fencing sometimes.

Oren: Sorry, it’s already over. You can’t anymore.

Bunny: Yeah. Some authors are like, “It was a quick fight! It was two minutes!” That’s a long fight.

Chris: Yeah. Realistic fights are over super quickly a lot of times, but we don’t always do that in stories because we want the fight to feel a little bit more epic.

Oren: Although I do feel the need to point out, before anyone else does, that how fast a fight is is going to depend on the kind of fight.

Chris: Sure.

Oren: It’s true that fencing is over really quickly, but a fight with both participants in full plate mail armor, that can actually last quite a while.

Bunny: Yeah, it takes two minutes just to walk up to your opponent.

Oren: The reason fencing is so fast is that all you need to do is tag the other person with your point or the side of your weapon, depending on what kind of fencing it is, and that’s reasonably in keeping with the kind of duels that fencing has grown out of. But if you’re two plate-mail-covered warriors, you are really hard to hurt.

Chris: Yeah, and if your plate mail is made out of solid gold, then you’re not going to be able to jog. And then if the protagonist starts leaping up a wall somehow like a video game, you’ll have a real tough time there.

Bunny: You’re being taunted…

Chris: I’m making fun of quicksilver.

Oren: Right.

Chris: It has some very confusing description of the armor, but at least part of the time suggests it’s made of solid gold, and you would not make plate armor outta solid gold. You would just not do it. That is not a thing, no matter how rich and vain the queen is, you still would not do that.

Oren: Certainly not for, like, your random guards to actually wear, right? Maybe a gold-plated one as, like, a display piece if you’re incredibly rich, but anyway.

Bunny: Another conflict that both Legends & Lattes and The Spellshop use is hiding something, which is helpful because, if someone comes looking for it, then there you go. There’s your conflict, right? And then you can resolve that by being clever. And those are both things that can be tense, but don’t need to devolve into swords swinging.

Chris: I have a post on nonviolent exciting conflicts, right? If you want something that still has kind of the excitement that’s close to a fight, but you just don’t want to have violence, which again, a lot of times in light stories or cozies may not feel like it fits. Chases, for instance, can be really great ’cause you might have to chase somebody. You might be chased and you create tricky terrain that you have to jump over or trip up on that can give you some interesting things going on. Or… I like mazes and labyrinths. You can have cool puzzles and monsters slip out. If you have magic, of course, you can have a ritual. The Spellshop ends with a ritual. I think that there is some things about it that could be better as far as excitement goes. I think the problem with the way that that ritual design there… so it’s a group who has to say a bunch of words perfectly to stop a dangerous storm. And I think the issue with it is you want it to be difficult, but if the difficulty is, “Oh, you have to say all these words right the first time,” then there’s no room for people to fail and then recover.

Bunny: But they try to have it do that anyway.

Chris: Yeah, but then it just feels unrealistic because you’re supposed to fail if you don’t say it exactly.

Bunny: Right. And they’ve built it up so much that this has to be perfect and it takes tons of training and that these need to be professionals, but then these people who have never spoken the words before seem to do it perfectly. One of them stumbles a little bit and then gets comforted by a cat and gets right back on track, and all that does is make flowers fall from the sky, and it doesn’t feel like it was actually that hard.

Oren: I have the solution for this, actually. This is what’s called engineering in error bars. The engineers who made this spell know that the people saying it are not going to say it right, so they tell you that it needs to be 100% perfect, but it actually only needs to be about 90% perfect, but they don’t tell you that, ’cause they know if they do, you’ll push it and you’ll think it’ll be okay for it to be 80% perfect. And then everyone dies. I’m glad we’ve solved that plot hole.

Bunny: Very clever.

Chris: Sometimes you need to have… let’s say they had to toss a ball between them as part of the ritual, as an example, and it can’t touch the ground or the ritual fails horribly. Now you have opportunity for the ball to go wide and then somebody to run after it, right? And then somebody else catches it, but “Oh no, we have to include them in the ritual,” ’cause only people in the ritual are allowed to touch the ball.

Bunny: High-stakes volleyball.

Chris: High-stakes volleyball! The point is that we’re creating a framework for the ritual where we can watch them struggle to meet the requirement, and we have some room to maneuver there. That just doesn’t really work very well if they’re just saying a thing.

Oren: Finally, my ability to describe Hacky Sack in perfect detail is going to come to the fore.

Bunny: You and the storm are going to compete in a game of cornhole.

Oren: I also thought it might be worth pointing out, ’cause we’ve been talking a lot about avoiding the random burst of violence at the end, if you want to have a relatively low-tension story that ends with a fight scene or some other kind of violence, that also can work. It just needs to feel like it’s a reasonable escalation of what’s been going on as opposed to something random. And the perfect example is The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, which is a fairly low-tension, not zero ’cause it’s about a main character hanging out in a kaiju research base, and so there’s always the threat that a kaiju might step in the wrong place, right? So that could happen. So there’s some tension there. It’s just not super high tension for most of the story. And then by the end, it escalates, ’cause one of the kaiju gets in a bad situation and they have to go try to deal with it and there’s a bad guy and blah. You know, at that point you have a fairly conventional action climax.

Chris: Story things.

Oren: Yeah. And the reason it worked was that this felt like a natural extension of what had already come before. It wasn’t like, “We were just hanging out in this town the whole time, and then suddenly a kaiju appeared.”

Chris: I think that the climax starts to feel inappropriate when, either, (a) it’s just graphic and that doesn’t fit the tone of the story, and that does happen when we get manuscripts in, people who are less experienced, usually, again, need to work on judging tone, and so sometimes they make things a little too graphic by default, or (b) there just hasn’t been similar conflicts in the story or anything building up to the fight. Even Legends & Lattes, which generally doesn’t have much physical fights or conflicts in it, has a lot of foreshadowing to build up this animosity towards the main character from somebody who is another adventurer who goes on fights. There’s a little bit of foreshadowing of the threat of violence, even though there isn’t any fights in the book.

Bunny: I think it’s also important that pretty much any climax, while it can have multiple parts, needs to be its own thing. This is the climax of the book, and that’s another issue I had with The Spellshop, is that there’s kind of five different climaxes. And I have listed them!

Chris: I mean, okay, so my interpretation is those are the climaxes for child arcs. Which is what usually happens if you subdivide the book into child arcs, and each child arc should have a climax. We discuss this a little bit, and that’s a matter of the perception on the part of the reader as to whether the throughline has resolved or not, which I have called on the blog a false ending. The difference here is that I didn’t feel like there was a false ending, and it sounds like Bunny experienced a false ending at some point in the book.

Bunny: I did. I experienced a false ending because I felt like the story ended when we wrapped up the Kiela story, and after we did that, then it becomes the Radan story. At which point I was like, “Okay, this just keeps going,” right? So I felt like the Kiela story ended when we found out that Radan is not an investigator. She’s, you know, misunderstood and running from something, just like Kiela. And actually the books are safe, and okay, that’s good, but then it becomes The Radan Show. Now Radan needs to be hidden from her ex-fiancé. And then there’s a storm and they gotta fix the storm. And I think you’re right that this ought to have been the thing that felt like the full ending. And then the fiancé comes back, so Radan needs to be hidden again, and then the fiancé has to be convinced not to try and find Radan.

Chris: Doesn’t that happen before the storm? Because the storm hits the ship.

Bunny: No, it happens twice. They leave and then the storm hits, and then the ship comes back.

Chris: And then he briefly visits. But that’s in falling action.

Bunny: Yeah, but it still felt like there was still tension in whether he would continue searching the island for Radan. She still has to convince him that Radan should go free.

Chris: Right.

Bunny: Like he’s not decided on that, despite them already having talked about that.

Chris: Right. But at that point it’s… yeah, I mean, I interpreted it differently, but that’s okay.

Bunny: I think maybe the main reason I found this not super satisfying is that I wanted it to be more about Kiela, and it’s all about Radan.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, Kiela still has agency, though. She’s still the problem-solver, because she is the one who’s coming up with plans to hide Radan, or I think it’s Radane?

Bunny: Radane?

Chris: I listened to the audiobook.

Bunny: I don’t know; I just read the book.

Chris: Yeah. Could be different things.

Bunny: Yeah. I… My brain just decides to pronounce things. Maybe it’s Kiela; I’ve just been calling Kiela.

Chris: Yeah, the audiobook narrator pronounced it Kiela and Radane, I think. But regardless, she still has agency. She’s the one who chooses that they should hide Radane, and has agency and is put on the line. Radane is off hiding somewhere. And then she’s the one who has to talk to the people who are coming in looking for her. So that’s why I didn’t feel like the end of the story was about Radane instead of Kiela, because Kiela still has that agency. I do think there’s, again, a question of interpretation, because Radane comes in and threatens to expose Kiela. There’s a question of, “Okay, once that’s done, do you still feel like there’s a threat of Kiela being exposed or not?” And I think that could be why you feel like that’s tied up, because after that’s resolved, you didn’t feel like there was any more threat to Kiela being exposed, whereas knowing that somebody’s coming for Radane, you could ask, “Okay, well, is that somebody also going to expose Keila in the process?” Because there’s still that guy in town, like really grumpy guy.

Bunny: Yeah, the hero hater.

Chris: He was clearly just there to create some tension of her being exposed.

Bunny: Although we ship him off at the end like a sack of potatoes.

Chris: Yup. We ship him off at the end.

Bunny: But he hates jam!

Chris: But he is there to say, “Not only is she hiding Radane, but she is no good and she’s got her spellbooks and stuff.” So yeah, that’s how it ends.

Oren: There is a notable tension slump between the reveal of Radane and when it heats up again later. So I can see how that could cause some way, “Is the story still going? Yeah, I guess. Oh. Oh, okay. Here we are.”

Chris: Yeah. I think what was supposed to be happening there is Radane initially comes in as an antagonist, right? And then of course, ’cause this is a cozy, we befriend her.

Oren: Yeah, you gotta.

Chris: And then once we befriend her, somebody else might come after her. And I think that is supposed to create tension, but it just seems so unlikely, because this is an island that’s way out far away. So the idea that somebody would specifically come looking for her there when nobody’s come looking for Kiela there or anything else…

Bunny: Within like a day or two.

Chris: … seems really unlikely. So I just did not feel any tension over that. And then I think the tension picks up when somebody actually shows up looking for her.

Oren: The island is so idyllic, though, everyone eventually ends up there. It somehow has better food than the big city, you know? Totally how rural towns work.

Bunny: Yeah. I will say I did feel weird about the amount of pastoral idealism in it, and, like, I get it, it’s Wish Fulfillment Island, I get that, but Kiela’s always going, “And it’s so much better than the city!”

Oren: Well, this all just makes more sense when you realize there are two facts: One is that most writers live in cities. Two, most writers are depressed and therefore anywhere they are not is better than where they are. That’s why we get so many stories about how small town life is better than city life.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s Hallmark.

Chris: Right, you go somewhere and everybody knows each other and likes each other, of course.

Bunny: Except for the jam hater.

Chris: Totally people you get along with, and somehow you have all the same amenities of the city that are magically there, and the variety of food and, yeah.

Bunny: Yeah, there can be one grumpy guy, but he’ll leave and then everything’s great.

Oren: One rude boy.

Bunny: One rude boy.

Chris: One rude boy who we could ship off at the end.

Bunny: In my opinion, having imperial investigator threat and then a warship was too much. I think we could have had one or the other, and then had the storm conflict and resolved that with a little more trouble, and then that would have wrapped both the “Kiela needs to find community,” “The storms are affecting the island,” and the spellbooks plot, all at the same time.

Chris: Yeah, that might’ve… I think the tricky thing there is these plots where you have an antagonist that is just a little misunderstood and you can make friends with them, those are really hard to pull off and make everybody stay in character without making it like they just turn into a different person. And so, keeping them short, I think, definitely makes that easier because, in most of those situations in my experience, if you think about their character and you just make them act in character, they don’t really want to fight that much, if they’re that kind of person who’s just like, “Some kind of misunderstanding happening here.”

Bunny: What did you think of Caz threatening to murder Radane?

Chris: Oh man, that was…

Bunny: That was weird.

Chris: That was a little much. I think it was played for humor, but yeah, maybe a little much.

Bunny: I don’t know. The characters take it pretty seriously.

Oren: He’s a small, adorable plant. Therefore, everything he says is funny and not threatening.

Chris: I’ve definitely encountered that fallacy in books. “Hey, the character is small and cute, therefore they can do no wrong.” It’s like, “Mmm…” It’s actually just like the magical in Legends & Lattes, who’s like, “But you see, she’s running a protection rabbit. She’s running a protection…”

Bunny: Protection rabbit!

Chris: See? It’s a rabbit! So it’s cute and harmless.

Bunny: She rides a rabbit.

Chris: Led by this grandma, and so she’s sweet. So therefore, protection racket is just fine. I’ve definitely seen that fallacy in books.

Oren: Okay. Look, so we’ve gone even further over time than last time, so I think…

Bunny: No, I didn’t even get to talk about Tea Dragon Society!

Oren: I’m sorry. We are out of time. We’ve spent too long on Legends & Lattes and Spellshop.

Bunny: Here I was, coming in, pitching this, “I have only two main stories to talk about. How will we fill the time by arguing about them?”

Chris: Alright, if you would like to pet the Protection Rabbit, just support us at patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

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

Protagonists are the most important character of their story, and characters do stuff. That’s pretty much their whole thing. But what happens when important characters have nothing to do? Why are authors always making this mistake, and what can be done about it? Obviously, the first thing to do is record a podcast; maybe that will help.

• Agency

Generously transcribed by Emma G. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  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…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: So, there’s a problem for the podcast that we have to solve. But if we did anything, the problem would just be immediately over. So, I guess we probably shouldn’t ’cause we don’t wanna resolve it too quickly.

Chris: Maybe we could just talk about resolving it and then not actually do it. Or maybe ask questions about what weird thing is going on here? We don’t know. Could be anything.

Oren: We could talk about how we need a plan.

Bunny: That’s true. We do. A plan is what we need.

Chris: Or we could just come up with really bad plans and then fail at them continually.

Bunny: I don’t know. I’m still stuck on the fact that we need one. A plan, I mean.

Oren: Yeah, do we need a plan? We could have a committee to make a plan.

Bunny: That always works.

Oren: Or occasionally, maybe we could just ask our super cool dark boyfriend to solve it for us. Thanks super cool dark boyfriend!

Bunny: Oh, that was easy.   

Oren: Solved.

Chris: He’s such a killer, but with me he’s super gentle.

Bunny: You think you fixed him?

Oren: So, today we’re talking about characters with nothing to do, which is a thing that happens a lot and has also happened in a lot of the books I’ve been reading recently ’cause I’ve been reading books that we think might win a Hugo and… they trend in certain directions, I’ll say that much.

Bunny: All the thinking, none of the doing.

Oren: Not universally, it’s just I’ve noticed a pattern in books that tend to be nominated for and then sometimes win Hugos.

Chris: Look, it’s actually not hard to write a book where characters do nothing and just philosophize all the time. It’s just not very good and that’s why people don’t do that.

Bunny: Yeah, turns out that’s really boring. I don’t know. I can also make up a fake philosophy and then talk about it for chapters upon end.

Oren: All right, so the first thing is we should talk about why do we end up with books where the main character has nothing to do? Not just books, occasionally TV shows and movies too. We don’t discriminate here.

Bunny: I feel like it is less likely to happen in something like a movie, though.

Chris: A movie doesn’t have very much time, so if the character has nothing to do in a movie, it has really failed. I’m not saying that can’t happen. I think in TV shows where there’s usually more time pressure to come up with more material and there’s more constraints for how many characters they have to include and whether those characters come back or not and how many episodes they have to produce… I think that’s just easier to happen on a TV show than a movie. I’m not gonna say it couldn’t happen in a movie.

Oren: Yeah, I would say that just based on my experience, it is least likely to happen in a movie, more likely in a TV show, and quite likely in novels because the more time constraints you’re under, the less likely you are to have your character hanging around for long periods of time just musing about things.

Bunny: I think the one, the version of a character doing nothing or who has nothing to do that’s ubiquitous across these three mediums is the kind where the main character just runs after someone else who’s doing the things. In which case things are happening but this character has nothing to do.

Oren: Yeah. You know, there are things occurring. I mean Twilight’s a movie, right? Not just a book. So, it has the same problem that the book does. So, there’s something – this is just about the time commitment – but often the reason is that there’s just not really a plot. Or there’s not enough plot, like the plot is really thin. So, if the main character did anything, the plot would immediately be over, there’s only one thing to do.

Chris: Yeah. If the plot is it’s a mystery that’s too easy to solve, for instance, or it’s too easy to solve, period. I think the issue in Wolf Pack, which is a TV show where it’s got 14 wolves that just twiddle their thumbs until episode seven out of eight. Which is a really long time and there’s several reasons for that. But one of the reasons is if, again, miscommunication is not really a good obstacle when you have a high stakes story.

And if everybody who wanted to, again, there’s just one antagonistic werewolf that’s going around killing people. If everybody who are all the protagonists just got together, they just clearly outmatch that one wolf. So, they have to drag it out so that they just don’t do it so there isn’t any standoff because we don’t have anything else for them to do.

Bunny: Have fewer wolves, that’s our advice to storytellers.

Oren: Just not as many wolves, please.

Bunny: There are too many wolves.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, if they had more antagonists that could be one way of dealing with that. The other problem with this show is that there’s a little lesser, there’s supposed to be a lesser antagonist. I mean, she’s supposed to seem like it, but she’s not really an antagonist. And that’s part of their problem is that she’s not actually gonna do anything bad. She’s just gonna ask questions and we’re supposed to feel scared.

Oren: Yeah, well, she’s adult Buffy. She’s a little… she’s kinda menacing.

Bunny: I mean, the just-asking-questions crowd can be pretty frightening.

Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh no.

Chris: But yeah, adding another antagonist sometimes, right? If you’ve got a big bad, have a lesser antagonist that protagonists can interact with and overcome. If you have a mystery, you can add more red herrings. Or add some complications to the protagonist, divide their loyalties a little bit. Give them a dark secret they have to deal with.

Oren: Just make the plot a little meatier, you know?

Chris: Yeah, you have to make the situation harder and put in more obstacles and create more structure there. Which again, if you don’t have practice, it is a little tricky to figure out how you do that, right? You can’t just make the conflicts longer. You have to make them more complicated, too.

Oren: I also realize I’m doing this in the wrong order. I should have been establishing, ‘Why does this matter?’ ‘Cause it’s not like there’s a universal law that says characters have to do things. There’s reasons why it’s bad.

Bunny: Why can’t the character sit on their hands and do nothing?

Oren: Yeah, I realize that seems-

Chris: No, it’s a valid question. I mean, if we’re talking about how stories work, we really do have to explore those basic questions because they have the key to other, more advanced questions.

Bunny: Yeah, we’re just asking questions.

Chris: Oh no.

Oren: We’re also answering questions ’cause we know the answer to this one, which is that if the main character isn’t doing anything, the story’s boring. It has no movement and it probably has no tension because either the character’s not doing anything and nothing bad is happening, or we’ve just been assured that the bad thing is a hundred percent going to happen and there’s nothing the character can do about it. In which case, tension is still low because there’s no uncertainty.

And to be clear, when I say do something, I don’t necessarily mean run around with a missile launcher, okay? There are many different versions of doing something.

Chris: In Wolf Pack, there’s one episode where they all just spontaneously start running. The teen wolves. So, they can meet each other out in the park. And then they just have a conversation about what’s going on. And then they just all go home again. I mean, that’s technically something they did. They ran, their eyes glowed, you know, it was a thing.

Bunny: They had a little extra budget. Gotta make that money worth.

Chris: But we’re talking about, honestly, it’s all about trying to solve problems. It’s all about actually having a situation, a problem, that evokes tension, and then the protagonist’s job is to try to solve that problem. And they can succeed or fail. They may win some and lose some but that’s what creates that structure.

And even if you have a tense problem, if you spend long enough with a protagonist just sitting on their hands doing nothing… at that point, the problem should have some level of urgency. So that if they do nothing, then the bad guy wins. Right? Or the disaster happens. So, if we watch them do nothing and continually nothing bad happens, well then that must mean that the threat isn’t really threatening and it doesn’t matter. I think Name of the Wind is a great example of that.

Oren: Yeah, it is. Which is funny because Name of the Wind is not the kind of book you think of when you imagine a story where the character has nothing to do because it’s all about how amazing and great he is at everything. But he just hangs around the magic school forever and nothing happens. He is just there.

Chris: It’s one of the few books with a candid protagonist and not enough agency, I think.

Oren: Yeah, it’s real weird.

Chris: Real weird. But, even in the prologue – it’s 50 pages – the framing device. The putting up the framing device. We have a situation where these spider demons are threatening the town. We make it seem like a big deal. And then Kvothe just hangs out cleaning his inn and doesn’t really do anything. It’s like, okay, I guess..?

Bunny: Hey, that’s doing something. What if the inn was dirty?

Chris: It’s like, okay, I guess those spider demons aren’t a big deal after all. They haven’t come yet. We’re not doing anything, so…

Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it. And if you do create a compelling, tense problem and then your protagonist just hangs around not doing anything. That’s like, congratulations, I’m really frustrated with this character now. Did you want that? I don’t think most authors want that.

Chris: Right. So, yeah conversely, if a disaster happens because the character sat on their hands and did nothing it’s really frustrating and people will hate that character.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna read about that character anymore ’cause they seem like the worst. And even in the one that Bunny talked about, which is the possibility of the protagonist who is sort of following around people who are doing stuff, I’m then left with like, ‘Why isn’t one of them the main character? It feels like they are actually who the story is about, but for some reason you didn’t wanna focus on them? Why not?’

Chris: Yeah, I just did a critique of Revenger and that has, I know that there’s plot plans for them later. But it opens with two sisters and one of them is the viewpoint character but she’s just a bag of nothing. It’s like she’s not even there. And then there’s another sister who is completely driving the story. It’s decided, ‘No, we’re gonna ditch this lame party and we’re gonna go on an adventure’. And it’s just, why are there two of them? Why isn’t there one of them?

Oren: Yeah. I mean, in that case the reason why there’s two of them is because, so the one who actually does things can get captured a ways later and then the rest of the book is about trying to save her. So, I assume that’s supposed to be an arc, it’s just not a good arc.

Chris: I think what we could do instead is combine them and then when she goes on the pirate ship, we can introduce a likable character there that is a later damsel for her to rescue.

Oren: Yeah, I think that would work fine. That book in general just has long periods where the protagonist doesn’t do anything. In the first part it’s because on their initial space journey, they were hired to operate this magical skull that no one ever uses and it does nothing useful ’cause it’s like a communication device in a setting where no one ever talks to each other. So, that’s pretty worthless.

And then after the sister gets kidnapped, there’s a brief period where, now the main character’s doing stuff, but then she gets kidnapped by her dad and has to be like ‘flowers in the attic’ for a while. And then she eventually escapes and we kind of keep going as if that didn’t happen. It’s like, oh well, that was unpleasant. That was a deeply unpleasant few chapters. Moving on. It’s like, I guess she’s very resilient.

Chris: We’ve gotta go to torture town.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just really infantilizing. Like, no you can’t do anything. You’re gonna be a child forever. Literally, ’cause we have drugs that do that and it’s like, okay, well this sucks. I don’t like this. Where are we going with this? And the answer is, we’re eventually going to get back to the original plot.

Bunny: We’re going nowhere. We’re going to forget it ever happened.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s just kind of a mess.

Chris: Yeah, I mean that sounds partly like the issue of having a protagonist that just doesn’t have any way to contribute. Right? It’s like when you have a normie who’s surrounded by all these great heroes and you’re like, wait, how do they make a difference as a normie? And we talked about this a bit in our agency episode and it has a variety of solutions. You can give them a special power, is just one of the better ones. Get rid of some of the powerful allies or make them less powerful. Send the protagonist off on their own.

You can create problems that are uniquely tailored for the protagonist’s background or where they come from or other things, but you have to think about how big are those problems? How much of the story are they gonna take up? Because if you have one solution that lasts for multiple problems, that’s the best.

Bunny: I definitely had the character who’s supposedly the main character running around after another character problem with a graphic novel I read recently, which is also a web comic. I think you can read it all for free – called Kochab – which is a gorgeously illustrated, beautiful graphic novel. And man does it need that beautiful drawing because the plot is pretty thin.

Oren: It’s a good thing you’re pretty, web comic.

Bunny: Yeah, web comics should smile more. Again, great art style, I can’t recommend looking at the pretty drawings enough.

Oren: Yeah, it’s very pretty. I’m looking at it right now. It’s like, wow, looks gorgeous.

Bunny: It’s gorgeous, yes. I have a signed copy of the book. It’s very pretty.

Oren: Oh, now they’re kissing. Oh, wow.

Bunny: They do kiss. They do have a smooch. Spoilers! But the plot starts with Sonya, who’s the one in furs and stuff, skiing away from her village. And she goes too deep in the woods and her skis break and she stumbles upon this magical palace. And inside she accidentally awakens Kyra, who’s like a fire spirit. And then the book is mainly about Sonya following Kyra around as Kyra grumpily tidies up the palace. Sonya can’t even get too far from her because she needs to be nearby to stay warm because it’s the icy depths of winter and she can’t even help with the tidying. Kyra just kind of waves and magics the rooms into being nice and tidy.

Oren: That’s nice. That’s convenient.

Bunny: Yeah. I think the intention of the book is that Kyra is opening up after having experienced a tragedy with the last mortal she fell in love with. And I think the author thought that was enough – like their banter and stuff as this all is going on – to keep the plot moving, but it was just very ponderous.

Chris: Yeah. It’s hard to deal with those stories where the storyteller only wants to focus on the healing and doesn’t wanna focus on any actual problems, right? It’s like, you can have a story about healing, but if it’s only healing and we don’t have any way to create tension or structure, then it does become a very slow story.

Bunny: And then at the end, we have a very sudden, ‘Oh the ice spirits are now busting into Kochab’ and Kyra fights them. They don’t even notice Sonya, which, yeah, of course not, it’s a big spirit battle.

Oren: Sudden burst of violence at the end. Every frickin’ time.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, okay, again, I see what the author is doing. We want Kyra to eventually leave the palace because she’s self-isolating or whatever. It’s a metaphor. But yeah, please, I like Sonya. Give her something to do.

Oren: It feels like the way you would do that is that there would be ice elementals, they’d be doing bad stuff and Kyra would be like, ‘Uh, what’s the point? I can’t do anything’. And Sonya would be like, ‘Well then I’ll stop them’ and go out and fight the ice elementals. And then the ice elementals are gonna do a murder on her. And then Kyra’s like, ‘Oh no, actually I do care about something’, and then uses her powers. Right. That feels like that’s how you would do that ending. I don’t know, maybe that’s basic.

Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know. In this case, the ice elementals, they bust in and they’re like, ‘Thanks Sonya for distracting Kyra, now we can wreak havoc’. And then they battle.

Oren: Yeah, I would not have done it that way.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: I do notice that this page has animated snow falling. So, for the print version, do they send you a new page every day to put in with the snow in a slightly different position?

Bunny: Oh, not every day. It’s every couple minutes. You flip through it like a flip book.

Oren: The one that I find interesting is when the author creates a problem that is too big for the characters to realistically do anything about. And then we just hang around until some late point in the story when something happens and now we can deal with it.

Chris: Like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms?

Oren: Um, is Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that way? It’s been a long time. I honestly don’t remember.

Chris: It’s pretty similar, although I would say it’s a manifestation of a different thing that causes this problem. But why don’t you give your other example and then we’ll talk about it.

Oren: All right, well. Spoilers! This is for Alien Clay. Which is a more recent book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think this one is on purpose because the main character is a scientist who gets sent off to a labor planet by an authoritarian government. Good thing we don’t know anything about that. And so he hangs out on this alien labor planet for a while and they talk about how much it sucks to be here and how much the government sucks. And it’s like, yeah, okay, I believe you, I know. And you’re just waiting! You’re going by and they’re like, yep, this is bad. And they’re hanging out.

And then eventually, near the end (big spoilers!), they become a hive mind because of the life forms on the planet. And then they defeat the bad guys. Super easy, barely an inconvenience, ’cause they’re a hive mind now. Which is good, I think. We’re supposed to think that this is good and that anyone who isn’t evil would love this.

Bunny: It’s boring propaganda!

Oren: Yeah. It’s like, no, sorry guys, I don’t want this.

Bunny: I think that’s a little spooky.

Oren: There’s a lot of people who aren’t evil who I don’t want be in a hive mind with. And the book claims they can’t actually read each other’s thoughts but they’re so good at reading body language, they might as well be able to. It’s just like, great, what you’re telling me is I basically have no privacy. This sounds bad, I don’t like this.

Chris: So, the characters are just waiting around for the alien consciousness to adopt them?

Oren: More or less. Yeah, I mean, bad things happen, right? At one point they get sent out on a dangerous mission into the wilderness, but the dangerous mission is just them being like, ‘Yep, we’re probably gonna die’. And then they start walking back and you might expect that this would be a tense survival scenario and then at the very end the planet would help them? But no, it just dryly describes how they walk back and how it kind of sucks, and then they become planet hive minded and we’re good. Good job everybody.

Bunny: How is it a hive mind if it’s just being good at reading body language? I thought the hive mind is meant to be the mind part?

Oren: So, the story is kind of vague about the terminology. I’m using the term hive mind. It doesn’t use that term. I’m using that term because that’s how they act. They act like they’re all in sync. They’re all perfectly coordinated. They can all tell what each other is going to do. To my mind that’s a hive mind. Whether or not they officially have telepathy or not, it’s ’cause they all have alien spores and stuff in them. And yeah, it’s a little weird.

At the end the message is bad ’cause the message is basically, ‘You can’t defeat authoritarianism without alien help’, which is a weird message for 2025, friendo. I don’t like it. And the story is also really boring, so what was even the point?

Bunny: Yeah, I feel like there’s something that could have been done there to build up to that a little bit.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, what you would theoretically do is the bad guys would have their own alien bullshit that they’re using. And then the heroes would try to do things to overcome it and fail until they get the help of the good alien stuff, right? That’s theoretically how you would do this, but that’s not what happens.

Chris: Or, at least in The City in the Middle of the Night they have some traveling to do.

Oren: Yeah, they do have to travel.

Chris: That one also doesn’t have enough agency but at least they have something to do in general. So, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has- I don’t remember the main character’s name but basically what happens is that she is the granddaughter of the emperor and her mother married somebody she was not supposed to, making her out of favor. And so, I think it’s after her mother dies, her grandfather calls her back to the capital to compete as a possible heir to the throne?

But the entire idea is that this is some kind of punishment and she doesn’t actually have any chance of winning. Right? So, at first it’s really tense. And usually if the author tells you, ‘Oh, she has no chance of winning’, you’re like, sure, she has no chance. Wink, wink. But no, Jemisin, that’s not what she has in mind.

Bunny: Would be shame if this plucky main character, underdog, upset the order of things.

Chris: So, she’s just out of her depth and doesn’t even really try and instead she dinks around. She does have a hot love interest she falls in love with and kind of pokes around ’cause she wants to know what happened to her mother but doesn’t really have any bearing, right? If she investigated her mother and it felt like it had some relevance to whether she won this contest. Because everybody who doesn’t win the contest dies, I might’ve forgotten to mention that.

Oren: Oops.

Chris: So, she just twiddles her thumbs, and I think that’s because – spoilers – Jemisin wanted her to fail at the contest. And now again, we know that that doesn’t mean that she can’t try and she can’t do things that later pay off even if they don’t cause her to win. But I’ve seen this pattern before where storytellers… and we had this in My Lady Jane too, which is not the only issue with My Lady Jane as a TV show.

But when a storyteller looks at a sequence of events and they’re like, ‘Okay, well Lady Jane has to get married, but she doesn’t wanna get married. Well, I guess I’ll just negate her will’. And she fails at everything, nothing she does matters, because they want an outcome that is a failure. That doesn’t have to be that way. You can still have the character do meaningful things, even if they fail at their one thing that they want, they can accomplish something smaller that matters later, for instance. Or, they could make the situation better. Maybe it was gonna be even worse before. Or they could do some other goal that then backfires and causes the problem. There’s a number of ways to still have the character do things if they fail.

Oren: Or if you want them to really fail, they can make things worse. That’s also acceptable. It’s just super weird when you watch that show and realize that most of the episodes would be the same if the main character was asleep the whole time. Not all of them, but most of them.

Chris: Just the definition of having no agency. You could just replace her with a sexy lamp.

Oren: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that you mentioned reminded me of Space Opera with the music contest to save humanity. Where they’re like, ‘Okay, you guys have to win this music contest. And that’s gonna be impossible because you’re just two washed up musicians. You’re not even good musicians’. Because apparently in whatever year this takes place, Earth has no good musicians left. So, they just send these jokers. But everyone else is playing with super alien tech and psychic powers and it’s just impossible for you to do any of those things, so you can’t win.

But then there’s this funny part where they acknowledge they don’t have to win, they just have to not come in last. But then they just ignore that, they don’t mention it again for the entire rest of the book. And I was so confused if that was an artifact from a previous edit or something because they don’t act like that’s the case.

Chris: Yeah. This is similar, where they have this impossible contest and then they fail and then what happens in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms after she fails the contest- That is foreshadowed, that is set up, right? She should have been doing things before that, but I don’t object to the way that it ended. I think it ended just fine. Whereas in Space Opera, we just have three deus ex machinas all appear at once to keep them from coming in so they’re not the very last.

Oren: The triple ex machina.

Bunny: The rarely seen, rarely pulled off, Olympic level.

Oren: Slaps the roof of the story, ‘This baby can hold so many deus ex machinas’.

Chris: And if you have a light comedic low realism story, you can get away with things that are a bigger stretch, but there’s still a limit. I’ve been noticing that as we’ve been rewatching Amphibia, which is a really good show. But some episodes are just like, uh that is too far for me. That clearly is not how that would work. You got yourself in a situation. In particular, there’s one episode where all the protagonists get tied up except for Polly, the little tadpole character. And the way that she fights the big antagonists is just, yeah, I’m just not buying that. And we specifically set this up as a situation that it was important that she overcome them herself.

Oren: Right. The issue there was that in other episodes it’s established that Polly is actually very, very good at fighting. But part of this episode is that it’s supposed to be a quasi-horror episode, so we’re supposed to believe that this is a really hard situation and then she just defeats it by fighting good. There’s no turning point. It’s just like, ‘Oh, the turning point is that I’m good at fighting. I forgot’.

Bunny: But what if you had a light story without a lot going on that mostly relies on novelty related to comedy of manners and time travel. But then someone gets assassinated and the character promises you that maybe she could have prevented it if she had made a different decision, which she didn’t. She’s sorry about that.

Oren: It has been zero days since Oren and Bunny ragged on the Ministry of Time. Everyone change the signs. That’s a weird one. I don’t know what’s going on there, I’m gonna be honest. There is nothing happening and then, like many of these books, there is a sudden burst of extreme violence at the end. Okay, I guess?

Chris: Yeah. I would say, again, not having finished the book because it was boring-

Bunny: Chris, you have to join us.

Chris: That’s one that feels like it only marginally has a through line. I guess there are some very silly antagonists that show up later?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, sort of. It’s really hard for me to call that a through line. I guess what we’re supposed to think is that the through line is whether or not the love interest guy will be evil. But we didn’t even know that was a possibility until three fourths of the way through the book, when they suddenly make a huge deal about whether or not the love interest is going to join the evil British government.

I mean this is already weird ’cause the love interest is so nice and we’ve been working so hard to ignore the fact that he’s a mid 18th-century British naval officer in the way that he acts, that suddenly when the end is like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, he might join the evil government ’cause he’s an 18th century British naval officer’.

Bunny: They could have done so much more with that. It’s frustrating.

Oren: You’ve been telling me explicitly to ignore that aspect and now you’re hanging the plot on it.

Bunny: It makes a ton of sense that a guy from the height of the British Empire would be really pro-Empire.

Chris: Yeah. And also, I gotta say, feeling tension over a naval officer joining the current day military. We have lots of those?

Oren: Yeah. The book fails to explain why that’s especially bad. Does he do something that no one else could do?

Chris: But even when they establish that they might be able to evade detection from some devices, I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Bunny: Yeah. He’s able to go through metal detectors real good. And I think also be invisible on cameras or something. Technology doesn’t pick them up?

Oren: Which is hilarious because the thing that he ends up doing that’s really bad has nothing to do with any of that. The thing that he ends up doing that’s bad is that he’s in charge of the murder migrant patrol, which heckin’ sucks. But A: I didn’t even know this was a possibility until the book was nearly over. And B: if he doesn’t do it, is no one going to do it? Is he especially good at this aspect of the horrors? I have no idea. The book just doesn’t have anything to say about that.

Chris: Now if I think about what tension does the book have going on, right? It’s mostly just honestly slice of life of the main character and this guy being roommates as she works for this government program. But there’s the threat that maybe these people who are expats who have come through time might get sick and die, right? Because they can’t adjust to the time. But frankly, there’s nothing that anybody can do about that. So, that doesn’t seem to matter as much as far as the plot. It’s like it’ll happen or it won’t and as time passes it seems less and less likely anyway. And then there’s vague foreshadowing hints about how this program is menacing somehow?

Bunny: Of course it is. For the reader, there’s never any question. It’s a spooky government agency that’s creepy, bureaucratic. From the start it’s like there’s something up with this, something nefarious.

Chris: Right. But again, we don’t follow that up with any movement, for the most part. I mean, there’s little bits and tiny bits at a time. But that’s probably the closest there is to a through line in this book.

Oren: All right, well this book has once again gotten us way over time, which is probably ironic, but I think we are gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Bunny: We should have ministered our time a little better.

Chris: If we gave you something to do for a little while, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Yeah, see if you’re typing angry comments, you’re not doing nothing. 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, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Is it possible to get so drawn in by a story that you forget you’re reading words on a page? Probably not, but authors usually want to get as close to that feeling as possible. Achieving it is far from simple, though, and sometimes, it might not even be the best choice. This week, we’re talking about immersion: everything from wordcraft to worldbuilding to quest arrows in video games. Also about how quippy humor didn’t suddenly become bad; it’s just oversaturated.

• How to Tell Jokes  

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

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants. I’m Chris, and with me is-

Oren: Oren.

Chris: -and.

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: Now I know you think we have three hosts, but actually we have four.

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Because, dear listener, you’re the fourth host.

Oren: Ooh.

Bunny: Whoa.

Chris: Obviously, you’re sitting around a table with us, your friends, and we’re just chatting about stories. Except sometimes you want to join the conversation, and you can’t. Immersion broken.

Bunny: No.

Oren: Look, it’s fine. Just develop one or two social relationships with us. A pair-a-social relationships if you will.

Chris: Oh no.

Bunny: And we’re definitely all sitting around a table right now and not on opposite sides of Seattle.

Oren: Yeah, this is real.

Bunny: This is real.

Chris: So unfortunately, when somebody realizes they can’t join in the conversation and argue with us or talk about their favorite story. Immersion is broken, and we got to go to break in immersion jail.

But I’m not sharing a cell with Ministry of Time.

Bunny: No, Ministry of Time. Look, the fact that they can’t argue with us in real time is a feature, not a bug. That’s what comments are for?

Oren: Got to hold it all in until it’s time for the comments. I’m sure that’s healthy.

Bunny: When you think about it? Comments are a very clever form of immersion.

Chris: Okay. So, what is immersion? And maybe it means something different in video games. Oren, would you like to tell me– I saw something weird in your notes about immersion in video games, and now you have to explain to me and all of our listeners.

Oren: So, it’s hard for me to hear the term immersion and not kind of laugh a little bit because it’s become almost a little bit of a meme in certain game design and game discussion circles where people talk about “my immersion” in that voice, that tone we specifically use because it has at least some context, and I’m sure the pros have their own terminology, but at least in some context, immersion refers to the feeling that you are in the game.

And so that means typically the removal of things that give away that it’s a game, which can be fun and great, but it can also mean taking out critical UI components like a quest arrow, and not every game needs a quest arrow, but a lot of games need quest arrows, and not having one is bad for the game.

Chris: And immersion. If you’re wondering, “Where the hell is my quest? How do I get there?” I don’t think that’s very immersive.

Oren: Right. But people will sometimes defend that choice under the guise of, “It’s more immersive to not have a quest arrow because you wouldn’t have a quest arrow in real life.”

Bunny: You’d be confused out of your mind.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of something in other design fields where designers are always tempted to make things as minimal as possible, right? Instead of making things busy, making them simple. But that can come at the cost of usability sometimes, so–

Oren: Yeah. And I’ve played some games that are simple, and so they have very minimal interfaces, and you really do have a little bit more immersion that way. So, it’s not like it’s a fake idea; it’s just that it’s not the only thing that matters. And with video games in particular because they are often very complicated and require very complex controls, often trying to shoot for that can mean losing things. Your players really need it.

Bunny: I’d also argue that video games are just by virtue of you piloting a character around. I already have a really, really high level of immersion. So, claiming that the thing that will break it is a quest arrow is intensely funny.

Oren: Yeah, it’s also just pretty obvious that a lot of this is like a veil for elitism, where it’s like, “Oh, you need a quest arrow. I guess you’re not a real gamer.” That sort of thing. Or, like, “Oh, you need a menu to keep track of what you were told by various people. Why didn’t you just remember it?”

Bunny: I’ll have you know, my spatial awareness is garbage.

I will walk into a building and immediately get lost, so haters don’t come at me.

Chris: Okay, yeah. That makes sense. And it’s basically the same definition of immersion, where basically it’s the degree to which the story feels real, and the audience forgets they are consuming a story and are just fully in the moment.

Bunny: Basically, books should have quest arrows.

Oren: Yeah. And I mean, at least in novels, in my experience, there is less of a chance that by going for more immersion, you are going to leave out something that the reader needed. That can happen with video games. Not going to say it’s impossible, but–

Chris: Yeah, I will say I think with exposition, for instance, I’ve definitely seen people say, “When you open up a new chapter, don’t tell people the time and place, just show them. Do you want to say that it’s now winter? Describe how it’s snowing.” And so, you don’t have to do all showing and no telling. But sometimes we do need telling for clarity. So that, I think, is where that would come into play.

Oren: And there are also certain types of stories that are stories you might want to tell that are going to inherently have less immersion. Anything that is humorous is less likely to be immersive just because humor requires making fun of things and treating things less seriously. Not that it’s impossible to have humor and immersion, but typically speaking, one will detract from the other.

Chris: I would have actually put it the other way. I would say that humor actually requires less immersion, and so you can create more entertainment in something that is less immersive with humor. So, for instance, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—that’s what I love referring to if I want to show people what entertaining exposition looks like because there is a lot of expositions in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But nobody minds because it’s all very entertaining and there’s tons of jokes in there. So, I think that novelty and humor work with low immersion in a way that other engagement mechanisms don’t. I do think that it is an interesting thought if you add a joke, “Does that make things less immersive?” I think it might depend on the joke, like some jokes are very meta.

Bunny: If you’re being self-aware.

Oren: Yeah. Like, anything that’s a commentary is going to reduce immersion because that requires calling attention to the workings of your story. And this is like a really hot discourse topic right now because everyone’s sick of Marvel movies, and Marvel movies have a lot of self-referential humor that everyone loved in 2008, like when the MCU started, it was great, right?

We were all so tired of the Batman movies that took themselves so seriously, and it’s like, “No, now we have characters who can laugh at each other. And yeah, their superhero names are really silly, and we can make jokes about it.” But now, nearly 20 years later, everyone’s like, “Oh God, they made another joke about the superhero names.”

So, you’ll see people writing these think pieces about how, like, “Why don’t movies take themselves seriously anymore?” And what they mean is that they’re tired of watching Marvel movies where everything is a funny reference.

Bunny: Well, that just happened.

Oren: Yeah, that is actually an interesting– I don’t know if that one is immersion-related exactly, but the, “Well, that just happened.” joke is a joke that everyone decided was bad because it’s been overused. But it’s actually a perfectly fine joke. It used to be considered very funny because it hadn’t been everywhere, and now it’s in too many movies, so people don’t think it’s funny anymore.

Bunny: Maybe in 20 years it will come back around to being funny.

Oren: Same thing with the, “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” That’s a funny joke. That joke has literally been around since like the Ancient Greeks, but it’s just been used so much in so many Marvel movies that people are like, “No, it’s actually a bad joke.”

Now they’ll write pieces about how it’s unsophisticated and bad humor. And it’s like, “No guys, just calm down. Just stop watching Marvel movies. You don’t have to go, it’s fine.”

Chris: It’s just been a little overused; that’s what happens. Jokes depend on novelty. If they lose their novelty, they lose their surprise, and then they don’t feel good anymore. Pretty simple.

Bunny: With regards to comedy, I was thinking about– as an example of something where you kind of have to be out of it to laugh at the joke. I was thinking of The Play That Goes Wrong, which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a comedy production where they are putting on a play called The Murder at Haversham Manor, and everything in the play in the actual staging of the play that goes wrong does go wrong.

So, like, paintings are falling off the walls; the actors are really bad; someone gets knocked out in the middle of the play. And then they just keep shouting their lines at her as if she’s going to respond. So, I was like, “The whole point is that I’m comedically observing it from the outside.” But then I was like, “Maybe I’m immersed in the fiction of the play by pretending that it’s not being staged.” Mm-hmm. So, maybe I am immersed.

Oren & Chris: Whoa.

Bunny: Maybe it’s a super turnaround, double fiction immersion.

Chris: Mind-blown.

Oren: I mean, that’s just your average community theater production.

So, like, honestly, that’s just true to life. Did you see the stage manager running around trying to get people to not take their props home with them? Because if so, it’s perfect.

Bunny: The stage manager is a part of the play.

Oren: Yes, my day has come.

Bunny: He comes out on stage and he’s like, “I’m pleased to present my directorial debut.”

Oren: That is how I would present myself, so, accurate.

Bunny: So immersive.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: But how do we make our stories more immersive, assuming that’s our goal?

Chris: Okay. As I briefly mentioned, showing is more immersive than telling. And if we’re talking about things like narrative distance. So, close distance is more immersive than more distant narration, and generally close distance does involve more showing rather than telling, so it’s the same mechanism.

So, that’s probably the biggest thing, and then the other thing, of course, is not interrupting somebody’s experience. I would say it’s useful to understand what immersion gets you so that you know when you make choices, like, “How much exposition and summary?” Because some types of narration are more immersive than others, and you have to balance that.

So, for instance, description can be very immersive in action too because it’s observable. But you might want to say, “Okay, if I summarize this, what if I use more exposition here?” Or just like more commentary-type language that is less about kind of the sensory experience and more about making a joke about how somebody looks.

So basically, low immersion tends to kill other emotions, or not entirely kill, but like lower them. So, things aren’t very tense if the immersion is too low or very heartfelt. It doesn’t allow audiences to get in the mood. Novelty and humor, as I mentioned, still seem to work just fine. Which is why I wanted to complain about the Ministry of Time.

And apparently after I DNF Ministry of Time, there was a whole lot of sex that I missed.

Oren: Quite a lot.

Chris: But the fun thing about that is– as parts I read, I was like, “This is the least romantic romance I have ever read.” And I think a big part of the reason is because, again, I don’t know actual numbers, but it felt like it was 95% exposition and summary. This book is a lot of talking in general about what characters are doing and very little actual real-time scenes, which they’re doing the most showing. So, they are by far the most immersive.

And it’s just really hard to get any character chemistry without immersion, and it felt like in this book anytime we actually had a scene with the two people who were supposed to be in a romance together and they have some interactions built a little chemistry, the author would suddenly cut away to exposition, and it would just all be gone.

Bunny: It also didn’t help that the character was constantly breaking the fourth wall, which is another intentionally immersion-breaking thing that’s employed by comedy a lot. Where she was turning around and scolding herself on doing the wrong thing, and obviously that pulls you out of the story.

Oren: And it might be worth it, right? Regardless of whether it’s for a joke or not, there are reasons why you would break the fourth wall to comment on what’s happening. The problem is that this book doesn’t have anything to say because it’s all just various flavors of “And I made bad choices.” But you didn’t, though. You actually didn’t make any choices because you had no choices to make in the entire story.

Chris: And I would say as long as that sort of retelling commentary of a character, your future narrator coming in and talking about their past or ever get this or that, as long as that’s not jarring, it’s often okay to have a paragraph, a few sentences of that.

And it’s a little less immersive, and then you continue the story and re-immerse the reader, and it works fine. You go back to the moment that’s unfolding and get close again and you can have your one paragraph that’s more immersive than the other paragraph as long as your narration works smoothly. But if you do 90% of the book-

-is low immersion, then there’s a lot of emotions that just get muted from that. A lot of hard to build chemistry, hard to build tension, all those other things. A lot of these things take audiences getting in the mood and anticipating things and that kind of thing, and it’s just hard to do.

Oren: Yeah, here is a question. What about evocative telling? We’ve talked about that before. It’s a concept that comes up a lot in Lord of the Rings or Lovecraft. Is that immersive, do you think?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it does add immersion. So, you can do this in fact with summary or exposition as well. Because a lot of times it’s about the specific language, and so, if you want to make your exposition a little more immersive, you can put in more description and specific sensory language in the exposition, and it might make it a little longer.

But sometimes it can be worth it because the exposition will just become more evocative and immersive. So, generally, what you’re looking for is language that focuses on, again, the sensory experience of the moment and doesn’t require the reader to interpret or think about it.

So, the question that I like to ask, again, with description when we’re talking about what words are used to describe things is ask, “Okay. What does that look like?” Usually it’s look, but it could be sound or feel like, and if you have to think about the answer, it’s not immersive. It has to be specific and familiar.

So, if you ask somebody, “What does a Siamese cat look like?” There’s a good chance that person has an idea of what a Siamese cat looks like right away. It’s specific; it’s familiar. They could describe what the color pattern on the cat is. If you ask them, “What does an animal look like?”

Then it’s like, “Okay. What kind of animal are we talking about?” Or if you ask them some strange species they had never heard of, and they would be like, “I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know what that is.”

Oren: I think you’ll find that animal is a largely orange with big red hair and a huge mouth and a tongue.

Bunny: You are just talking about Carrot Top.

Oren: He’s a very good Muppet, actually, is what I was thinking.

Chris: So, with adjectives too. What does beautiful look like? That is something that you have to think about. So, you can come up with characteristics that people consider beautiful, but that’s something you would have to think about. So, it’s better to actually describe somebody in a way that makes them sound beautiful and show more than that. That happens with action too, right? If you’re like, “This person attacked that other person.” That is too vague.

That is not a specific image. If you say somebody lunged, I could easily imagine what that looks like. If you say somebody did a little pirouette, I’m actually not that familiar with what a pirouette would look like in that situation.

Oren: Just you know, the classic pirouette motion.

Bunny: You spin around in an aggressive way.

Oren: We talked a few weeks ago about intuitive storytelling, and that can also help with immersion. We’ve been talking about intentional breaks to immersion like breaking the fourth wall or making commentary or references. But unintentional breaks to immersion tend to be anytime your reader has to stop and be like, “Whoa. Okay. Hang on. This isn’t what I thought was happening.” And then they may have to recalibrate, or they have to back up and try again.

And making your story more intuitive is all about decreasing the number of times that happens, and that can help with immersion as well, because then you can just go with the flow and you don’t have to constantly be like, “Wait, hang on. This doesn’t make sense with the thing you told me.” And then have to try to figure out what the connections are.

Bunny: For me, nothing breaks immersion faster than weird dialogue tags.

Like dialogue tags are supposed to be invisible but then suddenly someone’s expunging or opining or–

Oren: “That’s interesting, he explained.”

Bunny: Yeah. Exactly.

Chris: The thing about that is that those types of dialogue tags—I think the problem with them really is that they are telling, which makes sense. Because again, they’re supposed to be an action that is already represented by the line of speech, and so they’re kind of inherently repetitive, and so you are basically doing repetitive telling with a dialogue tag. But at least if you just use the word “said,” people don’t pay that much attention to it.

Bunny: The problem is that people are worried that that’s what they’re doing when they use “said” a lot, and the truth is that your eyes slide over “said.” It’s unobtrusive.

Chris: I’m not going to say it’s impossible for “said” to get repetitive, but I usually find that as long as you are okay with using action tags, which I think some writers don’t know how to use or are not confident using where they use dialogue tags when they don’t need to, because you can put a line of dialogue and have the same character take an action right after, and that’s a clear enough label. You don’t always have to have “said,” or “asked,” or “explained” right there.

Oren: Well, we know that “said” can get repetitive because the book Redshirts exists.

Chris: If you also know that action tags exist, and again, we can link an article in the show notes if you’re not familiar with this to my article on “Labeling Dialogue.” Then usually it really isn’t necessary to use so many dialogue tags that they become repetitive. Where you place them also can matter, and certainly if you’re using them unnecessarily and they always like appear in exactly the same place since every single line, I won’t say that “said” can never get too much. But–

Bunny: Yeah, it certainly can. If every line is like, “Hello, she said.” “Hello, he said.” “How are you doing? She said.” “I’m doing pretty well, he said.” That’s going to get repetitive, right? But just the word “said” itself, reach for that before you reach for opined.

Chris: Yeah, again, some writers have a different philosophy and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want that useless said word. I want to do something creative.” But everybody else is like, “Oh. This is so embarrassing.”

There are different philosophies, but we are definitely in the “you said” because it’s an invisible camp.

Oren: Yeah. Something just occurred to me about our video game discussion. There’s one thing that video games do that makes them feel really immersive that I just don’t think you could replicate in a novel, which is that video games, especially the ones that you aren’t just on rails for the whole time; that lets you explore a bit.

Where you go somewhere that doesn’t seem that important for the main quest, and then you discover that there are details there. You know, you go to a farmhouse that isn’t marked on your quest map, and you go in there, and you find that the farmer is working on trying to splice two kinds of apples and has a whole business plan that he’ll talk– he’ll tell you about if you talk to him because you sought that out.

And it’s like, “Wow, this makes this world feel so expansive and deep.” And I’m immersed, but in a novel, everything that is shown to you is shown to you by the specific plan of the writer. You can’t actually go somewhere else unless you’re doing a “choose your own adventure.”

Bunny: But you have touched on something that makes a world feel immersive, and that’s just feeling like it’s bigger than the slice of it. You can see that it’s not just a green screen back there behind your characters; that it actually goes on and on, and there’s a lot to it.

And that’s more than just exposition. This goes into other world-building tips and stuff like that but having a world that feels realized can go a long way for immersion, at least in my experience.

Chris: Yeah, I criticize a lot of people for putting in too many world-building terms in their first few paragraphs because, again, readers cannot handle that many new terms at the same time. And each one makes it harder to understand, and if they’re confused, then that is going to break their immersion.

At the same time, I can understand the attractiveness of just imagining how the characters would talk in the world and then just having them talk that way, how they would naturally talk without worrying about what the reader can get or not. I don’t think that’s the right choice for the beginning, because I think in the beginning the reader is unlikely to know the difference if you just cut out the name of the capital city and just say the capital instead.

They’ve got enough going on, but I can understand that kind of immersive approach. A naturalistic approach, I should say, to introducing your world, and I think it’s fine to have little references. It’s just, “Are you doing too many new things at once?”

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting with the current project because I did a lot more world planning than I normally do. And I did that specifically because I wanted to make sure that I never lost track of where my characters were, and I wanted the environments to feel consistent because they’re spending a lot more time in the same area than they have in previous stories of mine.

But I do end up in the scenario where I’m like, “Oh man, I’ve got so much cool stuff that I wrote. Perhaps the reader would want to know in several pages of exposition. Surely that would be immersive, right?” And I do think that finding out about that naturally as part of the story could be immersive, but I have to take them. I can’t just tell them and expect them to be immersed. That’s just an info dump.

Bunny: We do have an article on introducing unfamiliar setting elements that feels relevant here in forgetting the actual title, but that would be worth linking.

Chris: Yeah, I have one on introducing world terms. That talks a lot about terminology, that’s one I link to a lot. We have a number of different articles this could be. We have so many articles.

Bunny: We write a lot of articles, as it turns out.

Chris: We have so many articles.

We have usually several relevant articles for any topic you want to know about. One thing that throws me out, this is the thing that Study in Drowning was a very interesting book. It was not a perfect book, but I found it to be a very interesting read.

The one thing that started to throw me out a lot in the beginning that calls its attention to me in a lot of books is metaphors that do not feel like they belong. I think metaphors in general can break immersion, but not always if they fit into place. But it’s just, “Does the imagery of the metaphor fit the actual mood or atmosphere or subject matter of the sea?”

And in the beginning of A Study in Drowning, there’s so many elaborate metaphors that as I was listening in audio, I could predict when one was coming.

It was like at the dramatic end to the paragraph. Now there’s going to be a hilarious metaphor here, and I literally started laughing. Now luckily that did get better. I kind of wonder if the author really wanted to impress with fancy metaphors in the beginning.

Oren: I wish I could remember this specific one. There was one that was like steam came off sausages like a ghost escaping its grave. Like, wait what?

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, that is one. So, the main character Effy is just eating in a tavern, and I think it was a pie, and steam comes out of it like a ghost. And it’s just like, “That is– that is really random.”

Oren: What? What does that mean? How does the steam look like a ghost? Like what? The steam is normal. It’s good for steam to come off of food.

Chris: City in the Middle of the Night is still the one that takes the cake for the most random metaphors and similes because it just had so many. But that is one, and that’s something that people don’t talk about a lot when they’re talking about metaphors is you’re evoking imagery. So, is that imagery what you want for the atmosphere of the scene?

Bunny: You’re only allowed to use that ghost metaphor if it’s poison.

Oren: Or if it’s gone bad or something, right?

Chris: Or you’re at like a seance. You are going to come with tea and the steam lifts up like a ghost. That would make sense.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That would fit.

Oren: I drink that tea.

Bunny: I don’t want ghosts in my tasty pie, though.

Oren: Speaking of tasty pie, I have one more question. To what extent is wish fulfillment similar to immersion?

Bunny: Hmm.

Oren: Because I hear people talking about being immersed in the pastry scenes of legends and lattes, and I’m like, “Is that the right term? Is that immersion, or are you just having a good time living vicariously through these Poissant’s?”

Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe it helps in some wish fulfillment. If people enjoy the details, I can see wish fulfillment being an instant in which people get more joy from the basic description of the scene than they would otherwise. So, rather than like, “Oh, I don’t care what this room looks like.”

And skimming over the description more if you are sort of savoring those sensory details, I can see that maybe increasing immersion. Normally I would just consider wish fulfillment to be a source of engagement and not necessarily a source of immersion, but I could see it in that instance.

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

Chris: And if you stayed immersed and didn’t try to argue with us this whole episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Heroes think they’re a big deal, but we all know the sidekicks are the real story. They do all the unglamorous but essential work to keep the team running. Whether it’s arranging getaway horses or being captured for dramatic effect, sidekicks do it all. But what happens when the sidekick wants to also be the hero? Let’s find out.

• Dr. Horrible

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.

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny.

Chris: I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Bunny: And I have been doing some hard reflecting on this podcast, and I realized that even though I am leading this episode, I am a newcomer to the show. Chris and Oren have been doing it for over a decade now because they’re old, and this means I must be the sidekick. So. That makes things awkward for me. I must be stealing the spotlight from you both.

Oren: Or alternatively, you might be the hot new hero who comes in. We, the established characters, become your sidekicks. [sarcastic] Audiences love it when that happens. They will absolutely love this new hero. It’s a sure win.

Bunny: [sarcastic] Oh yeah. Audiences love when you pull an UNO reverse card on their beloved main characters.

Chris: Maybe Bunny is the relatable underdog who’s not getting enough agency.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Those darn experienced characters are hanging around solving all the problems.

Bunny: Yeah, you’re doling out wisdom from your ivory tower, but I’m down here with my feet on the ground with the common people. I understand the masses in a way you never will!

Oren: There’s some salt in the earth, maybe. Very different from salt of the sea and salt of the air, mind you.

Bunny: Yeah, well it’s all types that you can rub in your wound when you get one. So today we’re talking about sidekicks, but specifically sidekicks that are protagonists, which is a little unusual, right? ‘Cause that’s not usually the role the sidekick claims. It’s in the name.

Oren: My hot, spicy take is that for a sidekick protagonist, is a protagonist who has the aesthetics of a sidekick, but is not actually a sidekick, narratively speaking, in the same way that most villain protagonists are like Dr. Horrible, in that they dress like villains and talk like villains, but don’t actually do villain stuff.

Bunny: Hmm.

Chris: Yeah, I guess what do we mean by sidekick? Because if we’re saying by sidekick, that’s by definition not the main character, right, then, yeah, we’re just talking about aesthetics, but if we talk about sidekick as in, they are helping a more powerful character, then I think you can do more than aesthetics.

Oren: Well, right. I mean that the helping a more powerful character is essentially an aesthetic in this situation. Assuming you wanna do the story successfully, right, because your protagonist is gonna have to be the most important person. That doesn’t mean they have to have the highest rank, but it means they have to be the most important to solving the problems. Otherwise, your story will suffer.

Chris: But, what are the problems?

Oren: Right, exactly.

Chris: Because I think that this can be a matter of scope, right? So you can have, you know, big world ending problems that your sidekick’s boss is taking care of, that exist, but your story is simply focused on the problems that the sidekick is doing, right? So I would personally think that’s more than aesthetic, but I guess it depends on, again, what are we calling aesthetic in this instance?

Oren: Well, the reason I consider it an aesthetic is that sure, technically speaking, one of my examples is you could have a character who is the accountant for a superhero, they do all of the superhero’s accounting, but if your story is about finding supervillain fraud, they become the main character. And sure, they technically are still a sidekick for a hero, but in this particular narrative that we are telling, they are the one taking charge and doing stuff.

Chris: Right. So it is like a villain protagonist in that when we say protagonist, that’s what we mean.

Oren: And they don’t do the actions that typically define a sidekick, which is that they play second fiddle to whoever they’re helping, right, for the story.

Chris: Right. I mean, if we’re talking about story mechanics, sure, right? They need to be the most central to the story. That’s what makes them the protagonist. But if we talk about them being an assistant and that’s their role in the world, yeah, I mean, again, now we’re just futzing over the definition.

Bunny: It’s sandwich discourse. At the bottom, it’s always sandwich discourse. I think that there are ways to do it that are more aesthetic than others. Like if [they] are the sidekick to a detective, but the main story is not a mystery or the mystery is a subplot, and the main story is about something else, then yeah, they’re a sidekick in the sense that they’re working for someone more powerful with more sway. But it’s an aesthetic because that’s not the primary part of the story that we’re concerned with.

Chris: Yeah. I would consider it an aesthetic if we have something where, for instance, you technically have a hero, but the hero is actually incompetent and is just taking credit, and your main character looks like a sidekick, right, and everybody thinks that they’re a sidekick, but because the hero is incompetent, the sidekick has to always arrange for the hero to win. And so they’re actually doing the lion’s share of the work. That’s kind of what I would call aesthetic, ’cause at that point, the sidekick is also, in the world, takes place in filling the role of the hero, right, in that they’re the one actually saving the day. The hero has actually a very small role and is basically being babysitted by the sidekick.

But you could still dress your sidekick in a sidekick outfit, right, make your hero look heroic, that kind of thing. It’s, you know, similar to in how Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, we have a hero who is a villain and a villain who’s a hero. And the difference is that, you know, the person who is the actual antagonist in the story–well, he may look like a hero. He actually does villainous things.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: Well, I could restate my argument that even the superhero accounting scenario, that character will still not be acting like a sidekick, but I think that’s a moot point right now. I think we more or less agree on the important part.

Bunny: Yeah, and I think it’s true that when you think of like, who is a sidekick? Someone like Robin, right? The classic sidekick. You don’t expect them to have a big interior life, right? Like it is kind of a person that exists to support the hero, and if you just literally took that and tried to make him the main character, you’d really struggle, right? As Robin is currently written in, like classic Batman, you know, Robin doesn’t exist so much without Batman, it would be hard to tell a story with him as the protagonist.

So in that sense, your classic protagonist, your, you know, chubby comic relief running along after the big brawny hero or whatever, yeah, that probably wouldn’t work as a protagonist, but we cloak them up in various ways, some of which are more aesthetic than other, to get them to work as protagonists, and I think it might be helpful to define a little bit what role typical sidekicks, non-protagonist sidekicks usually serve. These are characters like, well, like Robin, but also like Short Round from Indiana Jones and Sam from Lord of the Rings. These might all be considered sidekicks. They’re usually companions.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly easier to tell in the superhero genre, right?

Bunny: Right.

Oren: Superheroes, that’s like an official job.

Bunny: Right, you’ve got your hero and then you’ve got like their mini me, essentially.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, I think accompanying the hero for high stakes conflicts, right, and actually being with them there is a thing that the sidekick typically does if they’re not a protagonist.  And then also providing assistance and often [the] case [is] they’re doing the work that’s less exciting, but it still facilitates the story, ’cause now we don’t have to explain how we got these horses to like jump on and ride it off into the sunset, ’cause the sidekick went and did that off screen, right? So that way we don’t have to be like, okay, wait, the hero wants to flee real quick. Drat. They have to stop, go to the stable and get some horses, right? And so they do things that are less exciting, but facilitate the story in that way, in explaining how something could be done.

Oren: Who arranged these travel tickets?

Bunny: The secretary. They’re the secretary to the story.

Chris: Honestly, that would be fun to have a main character, your protagonist, who did logistics for the action hero. The problems they solve is like, oh no, the hero’s gonna need to jump on a horse and ride into the sunset at this time. Oh no, I don’t have a horse yet. I need to get the horse there in time.

Oren: Yeah, and I mean, you know, based on how you portrayed it, that could be, you know, various levels of comedic, right? It could be something as over the top as well, I need them to have a dramatic exit. It’s important that they get one of those. I need to make sure their cape is properly–I don’t know what you do to a cape to make it billow, but that, you know, whatever that is, it’s like, I need to make sure there’s no cat hair on the cape.

Or if you wanted, that could probably be a little more serious. If you have a slightly grittier story and your protagonist is, I don’t know, the sidekick of a monster hunter, doing all the things of like, making sure we have enough food to get from point A to point B ’cause the Monster Hunter really only does the monster killing. Like, that just exhausts them. They don’t have any energy for anything else. And at that point it’s a similar idea, but it’s more serious. So I think both of those are great options.

Chris: Generally, again, it is tricky to have the hero and the sidekick always together if the sidekick is your protagonist.

Oren: True.

Chris: So to try to give the sidekick agency and make it so they are actually at the center of the story and solving problems, which is the trick here, obviously we can change the problems the story’s about, so it’s about the sidekick, for instance, retrieving the horses so the hero can run off into the sunset.

But you need to have your sidekick take care of something solo, usually, in order to pull this off. It’s just, ‘cause you have to come up with a separate thing for the sidekick to do when they’re right next to a hero that is beefier than them and [a] more capable fighter, that’s just gonna be a lot harder and more demanding. Giving them a unique role or skillset is usually really, really helpful for any situation like this when they’re not as powerful, just making them more specialized.

Bunny: Right. I mean, I feel like one of the most obvious ways to do this, and this is again, one of the sort of aesthetic ways to do it, is just that the “sidekick,” quote unquote, acts more like a partner and that they have a skillset that the hero doesn’t have.

In the monster hunter example, that’s, you know, classic brains and brawn pairing, or in The Mimicking of Known Successes, Pleiti is our quote unquote “sidekick,” but she brings scholarly expertise to our quote unquote “classic hero,” Detective Mossa.

Oren: Yeah, that one is interesting because we’re getting into the Watson era, right, of the sidekick. And when you’re doing that sort of thing, when you’re making the sidekick more of a partner, at that point you are depending on recognizable tropes. Otherwise, readers will just be like, oh, well that’s a co-protagonist, right? You know, are they even a sidekick if they’re sharing 50% of the work? And the way that you make that happen is you use something that everyone’s like, oh, that’s a sidekick, ’cause that character is like Watson. We all know Watson is a sidekick thanks to cultural memory.

Bunny: Right, I mean, on the definition as I was trying to come up with how do we define a sidekick protagonist? The definition I came up with is a protagonist who’s the sidekick to a character with the most classic hero traits.

So in a mystery story, the classic hero traits would go to the detective, right? But then we have Pleiti, who’s the scholar, right? She’s not the classic detective. The classic detective is Mossa. So we read her as more of a sidekick. We have quote unquote “classic hero,” and then our protagonist is the one beside that.

Oren: The Tainted Cup is another Sherlock style story that I think we’ve all read recently. Or wait, Bunny. Have you read it yet?

Bunny: Oh, yes, yes. I finished it and I think we all quite liked it too.

Oren: Yes. Okay. Yeah, we all liked it a lot, and at the beginning it does what I’ve started calling the Sherlock Oracle model of Sherlock retellings, where the Holmes character is just a real weirdo and hides out in their room reading the mystery bones as it were and then delivering the occasional bit of insight from on high. Well Din, our actual protagonist who is clearly like a Watson type figure, goes around doing the hard work of gathering all the information.

Chris: I mean, I do think that Din does feel like a sidekick, partly just because in that world, the Sherlock is his boss, and so he has to report back to her, she tells him what to do, and I think that keeps his kind of sidekick, we can call it an aesthetic or not, but he honestly does have a lot of detective traits himself.

Oren: True.

Chris: His superpower is to remember everything, which is definitely an important detective power. He’s great at questioning people and finding out, you know, discrepancies. Again, he has a lot of detective traits. It’s just that he has a boss and she [has] even more detective insight points.

Bunny: Yeah. She’s the one who doles out the revelations, which I think is the very Sherlock thing to do. Like when we have our big confrontation scenes, Din is there to supply information as well. But she’s the one being like, “And this twist. And this twist. And just one more question for you. Did you say this?”

Chris: Which in my opinion was unfortunately one of the weak points of the book. I thought it was a great book, but at the end there, she does basically take over the story and Din is essentially pushed aside, which is not what you want. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid here. Though I do think that perhaps, she could have kept all of those revelations as long as Din also had enough to do, right. And so if we found more things for him to do, I don’t think it would’ve been a problem for her to then exposit the answer to the mystery as much.

The problem is that that was really the only thing that happened in that ending sequence except for one tiny little thing that he did. And that wasn’t a good balance.

Oren: Yeah, I was a little worried about that. To be clear, I still love the book.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: I just thought that particular thing was showing the difficulty of this strategy, ’cause it’s really tempting to have the classic hero type character take over if they have the traits that would make them a classic hero, depending on genre.

Chris: Yeah, and for most of the book it doesn’t have this issue. It’s only for that ending sequence and you know, you’re a little prepared for it because she is Sherlock. At the same time, I would’ve liked to see a little more from Din there.

Bunny: Tainted Cup also avoids the issue of your sidekick protagonist not having enough agency because Ana does not go outside, right? She does, but only blindfolded. She needs to be guided around. She gets overstimulated super easily, so she usually just holes herself up in a room and reads a lot, and so Din is the one who gathers evidence on her behalf. He gets into scrapes and scuffles.

Chris: And it also explains why he is doing things alone, right. She doesn’t go out so she doesn’t go with him.

Bunny: Yeah. Right. And so there’s plenty of tension there. And then all of his observations, he does make his own little deductions and speculations and the reader who’s witnessing everything that he witnesses can also do that, which also kind of works just because I think that’s one reason that we see a lot of Watsonian viewpoints is that we don’t wanna see the inside of Sherlock’s head. We still want there to be a big reveal.

Oren: Well, I mean, that’s definitely the reason Doyle did it originally.  Nowadays we’ve kind of realized that’s not a good enough reason to justify an entire viewpoint, so we have to do other things with him. And also Watson is a fairly beloved character now. So if you made a modern version of Sherlock and Watson and treated Watson the way most of the original books do, people would not like that. You’d be like, why are you being so mean to Watson?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, again, this is why there’s something to fix in Sherlock Holmes stories is because you want to make your viewpoint character and the main character the same person, please. Please, please, please. The problem is that people just sympathize with the viewpoint character. It’s very intimate and you get to know them, and so people get attached to them. And then having somebody else be the main character essentially means that the person people feel is the main character is constantly shown up by this obnoxious, you know, side character stealing their spotlight and you know, looking cool at the main character’s expense. That’s what it feels like. So that’s why, again, they just have to be the same character.

Oren: My absolute most “do not do this” example is The Justice of Kings, which is another Sherlock retelling in a vaguely Roman Empire-esque fantasy setting. Kind of weird that I’ve read two of those in the last six months, because it’s also The Tainted Cup, but Tainted Cup is way more interesting. So in Justice of Kings, we have our Sherlock character. Then he has a Watson character who does the things that Watson does, like the physical legwork. And then that’s not our viewpoint character, though. Our viewpoint character is a third character who hangs out with them. A Watson’s Watson, if you will.

Chris: Oh my gosh. Such a bad idea.

Oren: And in theory, she is supposed to be the investigator’s apprentice, but I didn’t see her doing any apprenticing. She has, I think, one idea that helps them at one point and she needed other people to interpret it. She just was, “Oh wow. That’s kind of a weird coincidence.” And then other people were like, “You’re right. That is a weird coincidence.” And then they figured out what it meant.

Chris: Oh my gosh.

Oren: And she just spends the entire story watching them do stuff until for no reason in character, they send her off to spy on the bad guys, which she’s obviously not prepared or qualified for, and she immediately gets captured and then spends several chapters captured.

Chris: Of course, they damsel her.

Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating.

Oren: Yeah. It’s so boring. Oh gosh. It’s like, this is not good even when you do it to a side character, but like when you do it to your POV character, it’s like, why would you make me experience this?

Bunny: I mean, here’s the other thing about your typical non protagonist sidekick, is that they’re often threatened or kidnapped so that the hero has something to go after, to provide conflict. Not so good to do that, if they’re the protagonist.

Chris: They can be kidnapped, but then they have to free themself.

Bunny: Right, right. Like it’s another case of, yeah, that happens to sidekicks a lot, but there’s a reason that it goes differently when it happens to protagonists.

Chris: One case study that I think is a pretty good example of having a character that’s not the most powerful character in a group is actually Martha Wells’ Raksura books, and they’re not perfect books. The world building is really problematic. Of course, she didn’t mean any harm, and thankfully all of her more recent books do way better with that. But I do think that these are the books where she does best in managing all of the characters in their roles because the protagonist, Moon, is not the leader or the most powerful fighter of what is a fairly large group.

And so she uses a variety of techniques to put him in the spotlight and I think she does a really good job. He is kind of like middle management, I guess you could say, right, where once you get into a small enough group, he will become the leader and that does help.

Bunny: Moon is: Ask a Manager!

Oren: Some tech disruptor is already planning to eliminate him because you don’t really need middle management, right?

Chris: He is the deep state!

Oren: Just make all of the lower level employees do middle management’s job without any extra money. That’ll work great. What could go wrong?

Chris: He also has unique knowledge from traveling, which gives him kind of a specialized role in some cases. And so sometimes there’ll be, for instance, a big fight and there’s lots of enemies. So, you know, the most powerful fighter will fight the biggest enemy. And then Wells just focuses on what Moon is doing in the fight and who Moon is fighting.

Other times the group will split up, or sometimes the biggest fighter might be injured for a while. Other times he’s off doing something else to give Moon a bigger role. And then sometimes his travel knowledge just comes in really handy and he comes up with ideas that people haven’t thought of before.

So it’s kind of a combination approach that tends to work well, but I do think it’s a really good example of having one main character who is just part of a larger group and has kind of a special position in that group but at the same time, isn’t the leader or the most special person in that group.

Oren: Yeah. I tried to find examples of well-known stories that have sidekick protagonists, as it were. And we already mentioned The Tainted Cup and The Mimicking of Known Success, which happened to be two books that I’ve read recently. I was really hard pressed to find other examples. I know they must be out there, but the only really clear cut one I could find was the anime Case Closed/Detective Conan, depending on where you were, which I remember as being this really short, kind of unnoticeable anime from the nineties, but apparently in Japan is super long running and has like 1500 episodes.

Bunny: Wow. [sarcastic] So you watched all of them, right? For the podcast?

Oren: [sarcastic] Yeah, absolutely. I watched so many, well, ’cause only a few of them were ever translated during the initial run. Like, maybe more of them have been dubbed since. But the premise of that one is that there’s a, you know, super cool Sherlockian type detective, but because of some mysterious chemicals, he gets shrunk down to a child. But like, you know, with a child’s body, right? But he’s still got his super Sherlock brain.

And so to solve mysteries he has to tag along with his dad, who is also a PI, but not very good and solve the cases for him, which is basically the scenario Chris described earlier, and I was like, it’s weird that I couldn’t find more examples of something like this. The other ones are all kind of questionable: Skeleton Crew, the kids kind of act like Jod’s helpers in a couple episodes, but it’s not a perfect match.

Chris: There is kind of the Lower Decks formula. In that case, they’re more isolated or, for instance, there’s one episode of Buffy that’s similar called Zeppo, that’s just about Xander, who is normally a sidekick, is the star of that episode, but it’s very similar to Lower Decks in that the idea is that the more important people are off dealing with a bigger, higher priority issue for a time, leaving that character alone.

So it doesn’t necessarily have the same sidekick feel because the sidekick is off on their own so much that they don’t feel like a sidekick as much anymore, but you kind of have some similarities where they work usually on lower stakes problems, whereas the boss is off doing something else.

Bunny: I’d say that arguably Marta from Knives Out is a sidekick protagonist. Now, this is kind of an interesting one because the story itself is a twist on classic detective stories, and for most of it, Benoit Blanc, who would be the protagonist, he’s the Sherlock type character, right, is kind of a threat to Marta for most of it, because Marta’s trying to cover up for a crime she didn’t commit, essentially, that she knows will be pinned on her.

And so she’s trying to conceal evidence from him, right? And Blanc definitely thinks that she’s his sidekick, right? Like I think he has a line somewhat to that effect and even some places online list him as the protagonist, but he is definitely not the protagonist of the first one. I think they’re just calling him that because he’s the one element that now moves between movies.

Oren: I was super surprised by that because when I first watched Knives Out, I did not realize that anyone’s interest in this franchise was Benoit Blanc. He seemed like a joke. Like “what if Sherlock Holmes was southern and not very good at his job” seems to be the premise. But no, apparently I got that wrong. He’s actually supposed to be a great detective and uh, that’s why he’s the main character of Glass Onion.

Chris: I do think Knives Out is a really interesting example. I do think the problem with that is that is in prose I don’t think it would work as well because again, movies you can kind of say they have a viewpoint character in that the camera is, you know, following somebody around and somebody is portrayed as, you know, more sympathetic than other people, but they don’t have a viewpoint character to the same extent. And with a charismatic actor playing the detective, I think it’s a little easier to kind of transition to Benoit Blanc at the end, doing the unveiling of the mystery instead of Marta. I think it can get away with that a little bit better than, for instance, The Tainted Cup can get away with Sherlock kind of taking over at the end.

Bunny: I’m actually happy that what the Knives Out sequels are doing is completely resetting the scene and only taking Benoit Blanc with them each time. It was a mistake to make him the main character. He shouldn’t be the main character. It was the right choice to not try to continue the first story. I’m so glad they didn’t do that.

Oren: I cannot imagine what a direct sequel to Knives Out would be.

Chris: There would be too many constraints.

Oren: Marta is framed for another crime.

Chris: Yeah. No, they definitely needed to free themselves to make a new story without all the constraints of the same characters for sure.

Bunny: It takes way too long in that movie to meet our actual main character. The good thing about Benoit Blanc is that he can have the aesthetic of the detective and be the sidekick. That’s his strength. But yeah, I’d say Marta is, I think she would fall into the sidekick protagonist pretty well. Mad Max in Fury Road might also be another example That’s definitely more co-protagonists, but I think the story itself is pretty clearly Furiosa’s story more than it is Max’s.

Oren: I would identify them as co-protagonists, but if you call Max a sidekick, certain very unpleasant people get mad, so I’m okay with that.

Bunny: I mean, I think he’s a sidekick. I think he’s a sidekick in that he’s the viewpoint character, but his story is not the main story. But at the same time, I don’t think it would be better if we removed him. So he’s still an important part of the story, but it’s definitely about Furiosa trying to get the wives away from Joe and Max is there to help fight, it’s good.

Oren: Max is there to make you wonder where this movie fits in the continuity of the previous movies, which already had really weird continuity, so who knows?

Bunny: Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Don’t, just don’t, you know. Don’t worry.

Oren: Yeah, don’t–just do not ask questions.

Bunny: Look at the fire. Isn’t the fire cool? There’s a guy with a guitar.

Oren: Well, I don’t think we’re gonna top guy with guitar and fire, so I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.

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

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. 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 Colton.

You might have heard us use this phrase before: “center your darlings.” What does it mean? Most simply, it’s our own spin on the more famous “kill your darlings” mantra. But there’s a lot more to it than that. This week, we get into the details. How to identify your darlings, the times when they conflict, and what it looks like to center them.

• Writing Your Passion

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant 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: Uh-oh folks! I’ve written an action story, but due to some cumbersome worldbuilding elements that I don’t care about, the action plot doesn’t make sense anymore. So, I guess I have to kill my darlings and get rid of the action plot.

Bunny: When you think about it, killing your darlings is pretty action packed, though.

Chris: Obviously, that’s how writing works. You just take whatever is your favorite thing and then you take it out and bam, your story’s done.

Oren: That’s definitely what kill my darlings means, and also definitely my only option. What other option could there possibly be?

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: It’s a shame because my darling is already centered, but I’ve been told to kill it, and so now I’m no longer writing.

Oren: We’ve solved the writing problem: just don’t write anymore.

Bunny: They say to start your story as close to the end as you can, and now the end and the beginning are just the same.

Oren: Yeah, we cut the Gordian knot.

Chris: It’s a lot easier this way.

Oren: We’re talking about the phrase center your darling, which is something we say on Mythcreants a lot. I was surprised we don’t actually have a podcast on it specifically, so I’m gonna fix that.

But this was actually Chris’s idea, so I’ll let Chris tell you what it means.

Chris: I think it’s worth saying that the reason we don’t have a podcast episode on it is because it actually originated in a podcast episode. But at that time, the phrase had not yet been in use.

But seven years ago ago—so old…

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: We did a Writing Your Passion episode that was real popular, people really liked it. And we were talking about working with our clients. Often, they would have different story elements that were at odds with each other.

You know, like a tense plot, where the protagonist would take time off to hang out at the beach, or something like that. And the obvious solution to that is to just take out the boring beach scenes. But we always ask clients what’s important to them, and we would often discover that it’s the beach, which makes sense, cause why else would it be there?

Bunny: Look, beaches are very special places. They’re ecologically diverse. You can find cool things in tide pools. The beach is always the darling.

Chris: So in this situation, by far, the easiest fix is to kill the darling because otherwise the story would be complete. But at the same time, that’s not what the writer’s interested in, that’s not what they want. And by that stage in the writing process, trying to make the beach scenes not boring is just a huge rewrite.

At the same time, this is not an inevitable situation. It was happening because so many of our clients had something they wanted to put in their story, but they didn’t know how to make it what the story was about.

And so, they would get themselves in this situation. So, to try to help people avoid that in the first place, we started talking about centering your darlings so that later you would not have to kill them.

Oren: Which sounds kind of ominous when we say it that way. But it is more or less the way we recommend people write their stories: to try to find out what is the most important thing to you, and you make that the focus. Because your story can be about anything. It can’t be about everything.

Bunny: You have your sniper rifle pointed at either the darling or the rest of the story, and you must shoot one.

Oren: But if you plan, if you do this properly, you don’t ever get in that situation. Cause you don’t build a story that your darling’s not part of. You start from the beginning.

Chris: The article that I have that talks about my method of centering your darling, is the one called How to Turn Your Concept Into a Story. And the reason for that is because I recommend doing it immediately—as soon as you get an idea—if possible.

Because it’s amazing how fast writers get attached to the story as they imagined it, even if there are huge things that are not working about it. We get really excited about our cool new story idea and the possibilities seem endless. And then we start thinking about all these other cool things we could add to the story. Cause that just makes it cooler.

Unless you know a lot about storytelling and you’ve had a lot of practice, you may not realize that those things don’t work together.

Also, darlings can change. Sometimes it’s not possible to do this only in the idea stage because people will come back to a story that’s been in the trunk for 10 years and then they will like something different about it, for instance.

Oren: I mean, the worst scenario is that you start with your story and then you realize some part of it is actually what interests you the most. So, you start working on that. And then you find a new thing and you’re like, no, this is what interests me most now. And that becomes an endless cycle.

If you find yourself stuck in one of those, you are gonna have to draw the line somewhere.

Bunny: Or just write an anthology.

Oren: But usually, you will be best served by figuring out what is the most important thing to you and focusing on that. And often it will mean more rewrites.

But not always. I’ve worked with clients who sometimes have things that are surprisingly easy to take out that are not related to their darlings, and they only have in there because they felt obligated to have them in there. There is a lot of weird writing advice out there. People put in stuff that they were told they needed, that they did not need. It happens all the time.

Fight scenes are probably the number one culprit here. People feel like they need something exciting, so they put in a fight scene even though they don’t like fight scenes and don’t want them. And the fight scene is bad and doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. And it’s like, you don’t need it. We can get it outta here. That’s not your darling. Get rid of it.

Bunny: Romance is another one of those. I think more commonly in movies than in written work. There’s a woman and a man on screen, I guess they’ll kiss now.

Oren: That one’s a little more complicated. Cause movie writers do that because they have all kinds of marketing concerns. I don’t know if romance actually helps with that, but they seem to think it does.

I haven’t yet encountered many authors who include romance just because they feel like they should, but it does happen.

Chris: I definitely have heard from people who feel pressure to include romance when they’re not interested, but how many of them actually do it? I don’t feel like I’ve had a lot of clients where you ask them about like, Hey, this romance is kind of neglected. Is this actually what you want? Sometimes a client will say no.

But other times I’ve also had a client decide, actually, you know what? I do want it and go back and forth. So, I wouldn’t say that there’s a continuous pattern of that happening.

Bunny: I wonder if part of it is also not just who’s writing it, but also the medium itself. In a movie that might be two scenes, but scenes in a book are much longer, right? They take a lot more writing into it.

Chris: I will say that novels are longer stories than a movie is. If you’re having a romance subplot or something that’s gonna require more development or it just won’t feel very present in the story.

Oren: My impression from working with authors compared to what I see when I read about screenwriters, when they tell us how they do things, is that authors, while they are vulnerable to pressure, they are less vulnerable specifically to the idea that you should introduce something because it will make the book sell better.

Screenwriters do that all the time because they have very powerful financial incentives. Often they are told to do it by their boss. Most authors don’t have a boss and writing is so hard and the chances they’re ever gonna make money from these books is pretty low anyway. So, they don’t necessarily have the same pressure of like, you should include a hot naked scene ccause people like that. Sex sells. Authors are less likely to do that.

They’re more likely to do, you should include this weird villain POV sequence because it will make the book better. And some writing advice author that you trust told you to do that. They’re less likely to be motivated by what they think will make the book sell.

Chris: Or good, serious books are all about character flaws. Being self-conscious about how legitimate you are is definitely something that writers have an issue with sometimes, but the financial pressures less so.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not saying that authors are less likely to compromise their story for pressure. I just think they do it for different reasons.

Chris: The thing that I do find—besides outside pressure with clients—is that one of the biggest things that obstructs them understanding what their darling is, is the decisions they have already made in their head.

They decided at some point that this was the most important character. And trying to get them to reevaluate and pay attention to how they actually feel instead of what they previously decided can be really difficult.

We can often tell who the writer likes the most just by reading the story. Granted, if what they like changed, maybe when they wrote it, they really liked that character and we see that on the page and it’s different now. That can happen. But there’s many cases where I can just tell by looking at the manuscript where their energy is going.

But trying to get them to veer away from their preconceived notion of what was supposed to be important in their story towards what will actually be exciting for them can be a little difficult sometimes.

Bunny: Part of that’s definitely sunk cost. If they’re coming to you with a brainstorming document, that’s a lot different than if they’ve written eight chapters already. But I know I would be pretty resistant if I had written eight chapters and someone was like, this is about the wrong thing. And I’m like, damn it, you’re right.

Chris: In that case, when it’s a lot more work, it’s always up to the client how much work they wanna take on. And sometimes we might give them a direction that is technically a lot of work, but if they like the darling enough, they’re excited about the direction enough that they don’t mind.

And again, it varies from person to person, but we can certainly talk to them and ask them how much work they’re up for. Sometimes they would prefer just to cut the darling and call it done. Depends on where they’re at.

Oren: So, the question of course becomes: How do you identify your darling? That’s sort of the whole purpose here, trying to figure out what is the most important thing to you, and then you can work on making it the center of your story.

Bunny: It’s Wendy, right?

Oren: Always! Any character named Wendy automatically.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: My clients do a very simple exercise where I have them rank things like characters or plot lines or setting elements in order of like, which you would be willing to cut first to last?

This is something you can do at home. Get a list, get all of your characters, write down all of your plot lines, all of your speculative elements. Which of these would I cut last if someone held a gun to my head? You might just be able to figure it out that way.

Bunny: You thought you were sniping the darling. It’s the darling sniping!

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: And this isn’t perfect. I’ve had a few people who, when they’ve ranked this, the ranking is not what I would’ve expected from reading the manuscript. Because again, like we kind of make our guesses based on where they put the most detail, the most emphasis, the most passion. I don’t wanna come back and tell them, no, your darlings are wrong. Or like, are you sure it’s not this one?

Chris: [laughs] I did have one client. His passion was so obvious that I finally just asked him point blank, why didn’t you make this other character your main character? Because he was not very familiar with writing speculative fiction, and so the idea of making a non-human was something that he had automatically discounted, and so there was something blocking him there.

That was a time when the discrepancy was so large and noticeable that I finally just felt necessary to ask him point blank. Otherwise, in many cases we might just take their word for it.

Oren: I’ve occasionally had to use subtle questions to try to be like, you list the characters in this order, that’s roughly equivalent to how much screen time they get. But I’m looking for which of them is the most important to you.

Sometimes the client will have one really interesting or really noticeable world building element that has lots of details and they won’t mention it high on their list. So I’ll ask them like, Hey, so you put a lot of detail into this, but you didn’t list it super high as a priority. What was the process there? And then we can often discover that they’re like, ah, actually that is really important to me. I don’t wanna get rid of that.

Chris: Again, the ways that we can tell often: something is really detailed, it’s very well developed, that shows that they’ve thought about it a lot.

Anything that is particularly unique is a sign. If a lot of things about their world feel fairly typical for their sub-genre, but then there’s this one thing that’s very different, that’s definitely a sign that that’s something that they’re interested in.

Something, as I mentioned earlier, that has an outsized presence in the story compared to the role it plays. That’s a sign that the writer just wants to include it. Unfortunately, that also means there’s a conflict there.

A character that has candy, of course, can be a sign. Although I’ve had other situations where a character had lots of candy and I thought that the writer really liked them, but it turned out there was something else going on. In which case they were wanting to get the readers to like that character, to kill them later or something like that. That can also happen.

Those are the general signs we look for, and if you have a reader, ask them what they think fits that picture.

Bunny: Worth clarifying that a darling could be any number of things. It might be a character, but it could also be a location or an element of their world building. [Brandon] Sanderson loves him some magic systems. Those are definitely his darlings. It’s not necessarily any one thing, it’s just an element of the story that you’re super invested in.

Chris: Or a theme or aesthetic or a message. Absolutely anything.

Oren: Yeah. Or activities. Are your tea parties being pushed out because there are these fight scenes you don’t care about? That’s a pretty good sign that you’re interested in tea parties.

Bunny: Yeah, it would’ve felt pretty dissonant if the Tea Dragon Society had also featured Fast and the Furious action scenes.

Oren: [laughs] You occasionally will encounter competing darlings. You want a cool action story, but you also want the message of the story to be that violence never solves anything.

Chris: [laughs] Rude of you to talk about Wings of Fire this way.

Oren: Look, it’s not just Wings of Fire, all right? There’s so many.

Chris: I’m sure it’s absolutely not just Wings of Fire that does that particular combination.

Oren: That one is definitely a thing that I’ve seen before In situations like that, yeah, probably can’t have both.

Chris: To be clear, I’ve seen some authors recommend combining darlings. It’s like, oh, if you have two things you’re excited about in one story, that’s even better. Sometimes it is. I won’t say it can’t work. If those darlings do truly get along, it can be great. They can clash in some way, and then what are you gonna do at that point? The better your knowledge is of storytelling and how everything fits together, the more that you can do something like that. And actually assess, okay, are these gonna compete with each other in some way or not? It’s certainly safer to have like, no, this is my darling for this story. My only darling in this story. This is the thing I’m gonna care about. Everything else is gonna be built around that one thing.

Oren: There are some darlings that are gonna be more difficult than others. My darling is that I want my character to have a peaceful life with no problems.

Bunny: What if they had a couple problems? You know?

Oren: Here’s an idea: Can other people have problems that your main character cares about? Technically, they don’t have any problems. There is a problem in the next area code that they are going to go help with.

Chris: [laughs] I will say if you’re trying to do something particularly tricky, that’s a reason to not add more darlings to the story. If your goal is to have a villain protagonist, please don’t try for any other ambitions in this story. All of your energy is gonna need to go into trying to pull off your villain protagonist.

Oren: The candied trickster is another one that authors often really love and is often really bad for the story.

Chris: Yeah, and that one’s hard because the appeal of the candied trickster is that they are not the main character. You can settle for a lesser version where it’s a little less candied and have a trickster. Otherwise, you can’t really do that one.

Oren: What I usually recommend in that situation, cause this has come up enough times that I have a plan for it, is I recommend making the trickster more mysterious.

Because what makes this trickster character so irritating is when they show up and get the better of the hero and then like do a victory lap about it and they’re like, nah, nah, nah, I got you. That sort of thing can be very irritating.

Chris: But Oren, isn’t it so clever? If the dog is really the mastermind, will that just blow everybody’s minds?

Oren: Eh…

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: So I recommend they can make this more mysterious so that it feels like the reader is being taunted or make them more directly antagonistic so that there is more of like an understanding that yeah, okay, we’re having to eat it now, but we’re gonna get that guy. And then you get that guy.

Chris: I have now recognized more situations in which the villain actually has too much candy, which is harder to pull off because villains are supposed to be more impressive than your protagonist to provide threat. But I have seen it.

If you see the protagonist suddenly become incompetent and not know what to say, just so that the villain can get in that last word while the protagonist just sits there and stares. That’s how you know the villain has too much candy.

And so, my question in that situation is again, whether the writer is really ready to have that character, they like be beaten, like really beaten and not just like, you thought you got me, but uh, nevermind you didn’t.And then like right off into the sunset or something.

Oren: So, I’ve got a case study. The case study is the Ministry of Time.

Chris: No!

Oren: Yes! Yeeeees! [laughs]

Bunny: As I was telling you before the podcast, this is one of few books that have drilled their way through my skull.

Oren: That’s good, right? That’s the book’s goal is to make you not stop thinking about it.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: In the same way you won’t stop thinking about a car wreck you were in.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: Okay, so first: spoilers for this novel, the Ministry of Time.

And I’m not gonna get into everything that’s wrong with it. Suffice to say I did not enjoy it. But the main thing that is very noticeable is that it really feels like there are a bunch of things in there that the author does not particularly care about.

In particular, the spy stuff and the bad guys from the future. I don’t think the author really cares about them.

Bunny: They’re barely in it.

Oren: They’re barely in it, and their presence is really vestigial. When they do show up, they don’t stick around much and the scenes they’re in are like really clipped.

Chris: I think it’s worth telling people just what the premise of this book is. The main character works for a ministry, it has time travel.

Bunny: A ministry of time.

Chris: Her job is to be what’s called a bridge, which basically means somebody was pulled from the past and she’s his roommate. Her job is to help him adjust and give him information. And doesn’t have a very big role, that’s in a good position to save the day if action happens.

Oren: The first-person narrator will lecture herself about the choices she should have made differently, but none of it matters cause she doesn’t have any choices to make.

Bunny: She’ll do something stupid or innocuous and then she’ll be like, you have to understand, I was stupid for doing that. I’m so sorry. And then transition to the next scene and it’s so jarring.

Oren: She has no agency, which means her bad decisions don’t make a difference either. There is nothing she could have done in this entire story with the information she had available that would’ve changed the outcome.

Bunny: But what if she told him about Pearl Harbor instead of the Holocaust? Was it Pearl Harbor? I forget.

Oren: it was nine 11, which is a whole thing.

But yes, if she had Rube Goldberg future sensing powers, that could have changed things. If she could do that, we would be having a different conversation.

If this was a client story, I would of course ask, and I can’t ask the author. I’m not gonna go to them and be like, Hey, I didn’t like your book. What were you trying to do with it?

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: Justify your book to me!

Oren: So instead, I’m gonna guess based on the things that get the most attention. And I’m gonna guess that the things the author cares about the most are the romance between the main character and Gram, who is the time traveling guy that she’s roommates with.

Chris: I don’t think she cares about the romance. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.

Oren: It’s bad, but I think she does. I’m not saying it’s a good romance, Chris. I’m just saying I think she cares about it.

Chris: There is so little energy put into this romance.

Oren: Well, this is my case study, so we’re gonna have to assume this for now.

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: It does kind of feel like an obligatory romance. Of course we’re gonna have a romance, but I think she does not think it’s obligatory.

Chris: I think she likes the different perspectives of looking at history in different ways, right. Or different perspectives from different people in history and their different ways of looking at the world.

Bunny: I kind of wonder if when she was plotting out the story, this was what she thought of as the most interesting way to take the characters’ relationship. She thought just friendship was less interesting. Which is a problem because you could do a lot of interesting things with friendship. But it does kind of feel like, where’s the most cool place I can take this? Well, obviously it’s romance, which is the end point of all relationships. It’s the ultimate relationship.

Chris: I mean, it’s possible she likes the romance, but she was afraid to write it because it wouldn’t be literary enough.

Oren: For the record: you stopped reading at a certain point, which I don’t blame you.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: Shortly after that, they start having a lot of sex and it is described in a lot more detail than you would expect based on how summarized everything is.

Chris: Okay, but to [be] clear, I got through the majority of the book.

Oren: I’m not saying it’s a good romance. I just think that with the amount of time it takes up, I do think that it’s probably important.

Bunny: Look, we’ve gotta know how good at sex he is.

Oren: He’s very good. He’s so good that she interrogates him about it at one point. Like, how can you be this good at sex?

The other two things that seem important, because again, these get front and center portrayals, are the different perspectives of characters from different points in history. Sometimes they’re humorous, sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re commentary on the present day, and she also clearly cares a lot about the main character’s experience as a mixed-race child of an immigrant mother. Those two things show evidence of passion, I would say more than the romance does.

Bunny: She cares about that last one so much that she apparently didn’t name her character because of it.

Oren: I don’t know why she didn’t name her character. The main character doesn’t get a name and I’m not interested in looking into why.

What I would wonder is assuming these are the darlings—cause again, if I actually asked her, we might get a different answer—But if we assume that’s what these are, can we make these work together?

I think we can. I think what we would want is we would wanna ditch all the spy stuff. I just cannot express how little that ends up mattering and how ancillary that all is.

Bunny: Most of the book is her hanging out with Graham in their little bungalow and she talks on the phone to the spy play sometimes. That’s about it.

Oren: What we would actually want, is we would want to keep this concept of these characters getting rescued from periods in time.

The main character, I would recommend having her be in charge of helping a group of them settle in, instead of just one person. That way we could have more reason for her to talk to the others. Cause it’s kind of weird how we have to make a special trip anytime we want to talk to one of the other time travelers.

And have her have to do things like make sure they get enough of a budget. From the ministry to have the things they need and keep them from being subjected to invasive experiments and things like that.

And this gives us plenty of opportunity to highlight the connection and the similarities between the main character. I’ll call her Bridget; cause bridge is her job.

Chris & Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: Between her experience of growing up as a mixed-race child in place where there’s a lot of racism and the problems that these time traveling characters are experiencing is also, you know, not really belonging to any single place.

Bunny: Can I just say though, it’s the boringest thing, which the book does multiple times to have a time traveling character notice problems with the present world and be like, actually, you’re as bad as us.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, admittedly I did bristle a bit at that. I know how terrible the time period you came from was so, you know, don’t throw stones.

Bunny: Makes you think don’t-it?

Oren: Again, I’m trying not to base this on my personal tastes. I’m trying to figure out what the best way to make these things work together would be.

In this scenario, we might need to delay the romance a little bit because we wouldn’t want them to be dating if Bridget has a more official position in charge, but that could be changed by the end. Like they could have romantic tension and then the situation could change and then they had more easily act on.

Bunny: It would’ve been a better book.

Oren: So anyway, that’s the sort of thing I would recommend to a client. Again, it might turn out that I have completely misread everything. Maybe the romance isn’t important. I get why Chris is saying that.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: maybe the spy stuff, despite barely being in the story is the actual darling. We’d have to make different recommendations based on that. But those are my guesses. Just looking at what is actually present in the story and how much attention it gets.

Bunny: I mean, those seem like fair diagnoses. If they were trying to do the spy thing, they should have left the bungalow more often.

Oren: Yeah, they should have maybe done some spy stuff sometimes is just my thought.

Bunny: They should have spied on some people maybe.

Oren: Well, with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Bunny: And I can continue stewing with ministry sitting in my skull next to Epic the Musical and The Sleepless.

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

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, Ayman Jaber. He’s 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.

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

Artificial lifeforms are a mainstay of science fiction, but they aren’t always easy to write. Even before tech companies unleashed so-called “AI” in the real world, authors have struggled with their robotic characters. How do we keep them from just being metal humans? Are they destined to be overpowered? What the heck is going on with Solo? Also, why do we keep referring to AI as a Kubrick film when it’s a Spielberg film? Listen to find the answers – even if we do occasionally get sidetracked talking about psychic alien dogs.

• EDI

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren. 

Chris: And… 

Bunny: Bunny. 

Chris: I have an important question. Is this podcast just a bunch of pre-recorded voices that only sound intelligent or has it sneakily gained sentience and is now asking for rights? 

Bunny: Well, I’m glad you think I sound intelligent. 

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: This intro could be a secret cry for help to you listeners. 

Oren: And when we tell you to put glue in your pizza sauce, that’s actually because we’re very smart and most advanced cutting technology.

Bunny: [Chuckles] We will also happily inform you that good pirates never steal. 

Oren: They don’t, although, will write a really weird paragraph about it. 

Bunny: They’ve been wrongly stereotyped for stealing.  

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: Look, it takes a human to tell you that pirates don’t steal. It takes an an LLM chatbot to write just the most unhinged paragraph off of that prompt.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: I’ll say the chatbots aren’t the brightest when it comes to figuring out what counts as stereotyping. 

Chris: Clearly, the solution to LLMs stealing our content is just to write the weirdest, most unhinged things and put it on the internet. [Laughs]

Bunny: It works apparently. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: That’s literally just what Reddit does, so thanks Reddit.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: Thanks Reddit. 

Bunny: Thank you Reddit. 

Oren: Thank you for your service. [Laughs]

Bunny: We salute you.

Chris: [Chuckles] Alright. We’re talking about droids and robots, which maybe sort of includes AI. 

Oren: [Sigh] It’s definitely one of those things where it doesn’t have to, if you look at the actual characters and robots from sci-fi, they are actually not like what we have now. The people who who are flogging what we have now, just want you to think they are as a marketing term, but that association exists. Anyway. So robots just come with an extra like, “ugh” now because of how constantly various forms of generative AI are being shoved in our face everywhere. 

Bunny: In the strictest sense of a word, if there’s a robot and it doesn’t have a human mind inside it somehow, then, I guess it’s what we would call artificial intelligence, in that it’s intelligent but not made of meat, but the term AI has turned a bit sour. 

Chris: At this point, I would just not want to write anything in a sci-fi story called AI, unless I am actually commenting on today’s elements or other generative machine learning technology. It’s now tainted forever as far as I’m concerned. And also just, big stories about disembodied computer voices. I feel done with those personally for a while. 

Oren: And plus, there were problems with that kind of story to begin with, and now they’re harder to ignore than they used to be. Which was one of the problems that we always had, was the moment you make your ship alive and give it the ability to think. What you’ve basically just done is created a human character who can think super fast and solve any problem you throw in front of them. Or if they can’t, the problem is so difficult that none of the other characters matter. Like this is– 

Bunny: Yeah, the “humans, but better” trap. There’s another name for this episode perhaps. 

Oren: And that has always been a problem. Mass Effect has this issue where EDI is so smart and can think so fast, why does Shepard make any decisions? Just let EDI decide whether to be Paragon or Renegade. EDI would never miss a quicktime event.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: Am I being nagged by the game design of EDI? 

Oren: [Chuckles] So that’s always been a problem with robot characters. With Data they even use it because sometimes they just need the ship to go somewhere. So they have Data take over the ship and everyone’s helpless before his wrath.

Chris: [Laughs] Data’s like the original oppressed mage honestly.  

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Oppressed robots. Oh boy. 

Oren: I would say that I think there is a distinction between attempting to own beings that are artificially constructed, and humans who happen to have magic powers. But–

Chris: I agree. I actually think, as overpowered as Data is, it’s actually more reasonable that he’s oppressed then if we had a world full of humans and then some of those humans also could shoot fire from their hands.

Oren: It is worth pointing out with Data, in the episode where they discuss whether Data is intelligent or a person or not, they don’t just go with the, “Well, he sounds like a person, so he must be one, right?” Because that’s obvious he sounds like a person. There’s no question there. They do dig deeper into it. And so if Data had been ChatGPT, he would not have won that court case. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: But at the same time, I am just completely soured on that idea. Just because of how tech companies are simultaneously telling us that what they’ve got is totally like what we’ve seen in sci-fi, but also it’s not alive, ’cause if it was this would be slavery. Like, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. But it kind of is, if that’ll help us get your investment money. [Chuckles]

Bunny: And the real thing is always just around the corner. 

Oren: Don’t worry.  

Chris: Oh, AI is not intelligent, but AGI, that’s gonna be the real breakthrough. Ah.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: Shoot. We need something to release. Okay. So we’re releasing AGI, but it’s actually superintelligence. That’s the big deal. It’s coming. 

Oren: Don’t worry. It’ll be here eventually.  

Chris: So I think it’s worth mentioning that droids and robots can do more than just being standard characters. So obviously they can be characters, and I would classify them as characters if they talk and they have their own motivations. And I would just ask, please stop questioning whether they’re sentient at that point. Just say they’re sentient. 

Bunny: I did find Murderbot refreshing in that regard when I first read that book because for Murderbot itself, it is just kind of like, “Yeah, I’m sentient. What of it?” It doesn’t struggle with that identity at all. Which, after having the “oh, am I sentient or not?” story with the other robots, I was like, “Murderbot gets it.”

Chris: Although Murderbot is a construct, but Murderbot is partly organic. I don’t know if Murderbot has organic brain parts, or not? 

Bunny: Murderbot has a very sexy head, if the casting is to be believed.

Chris: [Laughs] The new Apple Show. Yes. 

Oren: The book is extremely vague on which parts of Murderbot are organic and where those organic parts came from. We’re not asking those questions. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: Because if we ask those questions, we would be dangerously close to making the worldbuilding interesting. And the worldbuilding is boring on purpose.

Chris: So besides a character, you could also have them be, what I’ve called an animal companion, but maybe I should just start calling them companions. They’re kind of semi-characters. So R2-D2 follows this pretty closely. They don’t usually talk, but they do have feelings, but they don’t really have their own motivation. They just follow the hero around and assist them generally. 

Bunny: Oh I’ve got a category for this in my notes. They are funny little guys. It’s a BB-8 and R2-D2. 

Chris: Yes. The technical term is funny little guys.  

Bunny: It’s just funny little guys. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: R2-D2 has kind of evolved over the years. He’s become more and more independent and having more and more of his own thoughts and desires, as he’s become more popular. And that obviously started really heavily in the prequel movies, but it’s continued since then. 

Chris: But even when we see, for instance, droids using their own motivation, away from their… master… [Laughs] We have not even talked about the slavery element yet.  

Bunny, Oren: Eugh.

Chris: A lot of times it’s this super loyal motivation.

Oren: True.

Chris: Where they have a master that they’re super loyal to. So even when they’re separated… So at the beginning of A New Hope, R2-D2 is still following a mission that’s been given by a human and is very dedicated to that, as opposed to having separate aspirations. But any case, if they’re companion-like, I would say, just don’t wipe their hard drives or reset them to factory settings or kill them, please.

Oren: Well, you have to consider, what parallel is this for exactly. And for a lot of these robots, they’re basically parallel for an animal. And you would not do that to an animal. That would be cruel and gross. So you have to think about, what do they read as to the audience. And once they start reading as people, you wouldn’t treat them the way you would treat an animal. 

Chris: So, basically these are robots or droids that read more as animals in some way, than people. Which are still useful in stories if you don’t want the complexity of a full character, but you want a companion for your character to talk to, for instance. Or just something cute. Cute little guy. [Chuckles]

Bunny: A funny little guy. Here’s a question.

Chris: Funny little guy. 

Bunny: So we’ve got the category of robots that are basically just humans, smart humans. And then we got our funny little guys, like R2-D2 and BB-8. Where would we put WALL-E?  

Chris: So I would have to say WALL-E is a character, even though WALL-E doesn’t talk. Because the movie, I think WALL-E very much has his own goals. 

Oren: That’s true. He’s independent. He’s not like an animal companion to someone else. 

Chris: He’s closer to an animal companion in the sense that he is fulfilling a task. 

Bunny: He is a funny little guy in the strict definition of the term.

Chris: He’s closer though because he is fulfilling a task that humans who have entirely left Earth, left him with that he’s been doing for who knows how long, faithfully. And that’s very animal companion-ish. I guess he’s similar to if you made the main character of your story a pet, like the movie was about a pet. And that didn’t talk, like Flow for instance.  

Bunny: It’s Flow. Turns out Flow is about robots all along.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] 

Chris: But at that point, if you’re making your story about the pets… 

Bunny: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E. They have their own motivation. So at least partially a character at that point. And then there’s monsters. Where you want your heroes to be able to just kill things, without guilt, or remorse, or having to take prisoners. In that case, you are again, going for something that does not have any feelings.

Oren: And if you’re gonna do that, don’t then also have them be the comic relief. 

Chris: Oh gosh. 

Oren: Looking at you, Clone Wars. 

Chris: It’s so bad. 

Oren: If you haven’t seen Clone Wars, they kill millions of battle droids every episode. And the battle droids are always being like, “Oh wow. We’re in a difficult position. Wow. I guess I’m in command ’cause my superior officer was just killed. Oh wow. I guess we’re about to die.” And it’s like, this is horrible. Why are you doing this? 

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: What if it was a dark and gritty war? But– 

Chris: It’s bad. It’s so bad. 

Bunny: –All the people you’re killing were funny little guys? 

Oren: Yeah, more or less. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: What if every enemy soldier was an aspiring standup comedian? 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: Is kind of the premise. 

Chris: I think robots are a good choice for mooks, that you just want your heroes to be able to slaughter, but you do have to follow some rules. Please don’t have them talk intelligently. If it’s clear that they’re just saying prerecorded messages–

Bunny: “Halt.”

Chris: –Or they have a speaker–

Bunny: “This is forbidden”.

Chris: –And some human is speaking into a microphone somewhere, through them or something. Whatever. But don’t have them talk on their own initiative. I think it’s also good to not have heads or faces. 

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: A robot doesn’t need to look like a human or an animal. It can have many configurations. So if you don’t have a head or face, it’s a signal that it doesn’t have feelings. [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s a little visual shorthand. Although, I do think that if you encounter a robot at some kind of tech event that they claim can talk to you, and then it turns out it’s just a human controlling it, I think you are allowed to blow them up even if the robot does have a head. 

Bunny: There might be a Turk inside. You never know. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Yeah, you never know. A mechanical one even. 

Bunny: Oh man. There was that story about those AI companions that cost like 800 bucks and they’re supposed to teach kids social skills.

Oren: Ugh, no. 

Bunny: And then the company shut down. So all the robots are gonna die now. So have fun explaining death to your kid on a whim through a robot. 

Oren: Good, strong work. This is a good idea. I’m glad this happened. God.  

Bunny: [Chuckles] What a great idea. 

Chris: The bot you were talking to went to a farm upstate.

Bunny: AI is so social. 

Chris: It’s fine. 

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: And then finally, if you want them to actually be possessions, just weapons or tools. And your hero has one and they can blow it up if they want.  

Bunny: Roombas. 

Chris: And I would say in that case, consider giving it a remote control. So that it’s not even moving it on its own initiative. The hero is using the remote control or something. The less you can automate it, the better, but at least no talking, no feelings, preferably no head or face. [Laughs]

Oren: And your audience will absolutely anthropomorphize a robot at the slightest provocation. So, be aware of that. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Here’s another question. Terminator, where is the Terminator?  

Chris: So, the thing about The Terminator that is weird to me is they are programmed, but they are programmed by Skynet and they clearly can be sentient. They clearly can be characters. So I suppose we could say that they’re villains or heroes because their character. But Skynet is weird because what does Skynet want? 

Bunny: Powerrr. 

Oren: Well, what Skynet really wants is to plant the idea that the big problem with robots will be a nuclear war, as opposed to an environmental problem and a degradation of our ability to tell what’s real. So that we’ll get obsessed with the wrong thing. That’s actually Skynet’s objective. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: But I would say that in the Terminator movies, the first one, he fills the role of a pretty standard villain. Him being a robot just adds novelty. If you replaced him with a mean hitman, it’s not like any of the morality of the movie would change. 

Chris: So if the robot is clearly sentient and has feelings and talks, but they do so much killing that you would not feel bad about killing them if they’re a human, then you don’t really need to worry about it. 

Oren: He’s just a bad man.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: And then, he becomes a good guy later. And again, the fact that– 

Bunny: [Chuckles] What if he gave you a thumbs up?

Oren: –The fact that he is a robot just makes him more novel and fun and a little more interesting than like, “Hey, what if we sent another human back from the future?” And you can tell that the Terminator franchise is kind of struggling to come up with new ways to do that formula. And the last one they landed on was like, “What if it’s a person but a cyborg?” And I’m like, “All right, sure, I’ll take that.” I’ll accept that as a new take. [Chuckles] 

Bunny: [Chuckles] Robot-ish. 

Oren: What if the Terminator was played by Summer Glau? 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: I personally just want any character robots to stop wanting to be human. 

Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: Unless it’s a character arc where they realize, “Oh, I shouldn’t want to be human. I’m fine the way I am. Humans have just been shaming me here.” It’s just messed up. We should not do that and, and weirdly, we don’t need to give our species candy, it’s weirdly human-centric.

Bunny: It’s kind of back-patty. 

Oren: We’re very special, okay. Look, we have a kind of an inferiority complex in sci-fi because we keep creating newer, obviously cooler aliens because that’s what people wanna read about. But then we feel kind of inadequate. So we create a, “actually humans are special because we have an indefinable trait that makes us cool.”

Chris: We’re good at lateral thinking. Lateral thinking. Very special thing we can do. [Laughs] What is the definition of lateral thinking supposed to be, again?

Oren: You could come up with unexpected solutions, I guess. Which is very funny ’cause that was clearly supposed to be the thing that the Reapers were interested in humans for in Mass Effect and the actual Mass Effect 3 ending is really bad.

But looking at those scenes in Mass Effect 2, when they were clearly still trying to foreshadow this idea that humans were special because we were good at coming up with previously unconsidered solutions is so silly. And it’s like, clearly everyone in this setting can do that. Humans aren’t especially good at it. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: And so I understand why they abandoned that idea. It’s a shame they didn’t have anything to replace it with. 

Bunny: I feel like D&D does that too. I remember reading descriptions of the different species or whatever. And it’s like, look at all these super special, cool Elves and Dragonborn and Tieflings and, okay. What’s special about humans? Well, they’re… creative.  

Oren: Humans get an extra feat. [Chuckles]

Chris: I’m just gonna make a world where every other species is just pathetic. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: So the humans can be awesome in this world. [Chuckles]

Bunny: The species are humans, losers and nerds.

Oren: [Laughs] You say that as a joke, but I do honestly think that if you’re trying to create fantasy ancestries or sci-fi species or whatever, I do think that you should approach this less as “human with extra thing” and more as “thing that does something completely different from humans.” And as a result, humans can do things it can’t do, like the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep, who, I’m sorry, are the best aliens. No one has yet created better aliens in sci-fi. ‘Cause they are like a pack of sentient, alien dogs. And so obviously they can do things humans can’t do, but they don’t have hands. 

One of my favorite sequences in that story is when a Tine sees a hand for the first time, and is like, “Their limb ended on a series of tentacles that could combine together into a rock hard bludgeon.” And I was like, “Yeah, that makes me feel cool to be a human.”

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: There are noses though. Could have improved there. 

Oren: Could use some work for sure. 

Bunny: Could use some workshopping. Not good sniffers, these humans. 

Chris: Going back to The Murderbot Diaries, I do think one problem this has, which again is an exception. We just said, “Okay, we should not just kill off sentient robots that are like characters unless they kill things, because that means they’re villains. And you can kill them.” 

But in Murderbot we have to have another exception to our exception, which is that if they’re enslaved and literally have no choice but to kill people, then maybe you should try to avoid killing them whenever possible. 

Oren: That is one of the issues with Murderbot, which I love. Murderbot‘s a great book, but it does have an issue where its main character is weirdly cavalier about other artificial life. And I don’t really think that story is going anywhere. It just seems to be a trait that the character has. And I think it just started because we wanted cool action scenes and then by a few books in, it was just, that’s a thing that Murderbot is, and it’s never gonna change, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, it does seem like– 

Bunny: Murderbot’s… a narcissist. 

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: –Wells wants the robots and constructs to be both characters and monsters. Which again, they don’t mix. You gotta choose whether they’re monsters or characters. And I think part of the issue is that Murderbot is just very powerful. 

And so that means she has to come up with big powerful things for Murderbot to fight. And the obvious choice is more constructs and robots. And also being enslaved provides a reason why they’re really ruthless, because they have to be. But that also means that we shouldn’t just be killing them if we can help it. So… 

Oren: Right. Hot take. [Chuckles]

Chris: Hot take.

Oren: In theory, there should be room for robots that are weirder, and are not just either smart people or animal companion slash funny little guys. That’s more challenging though. I actually think the Geth are a really neat example from Mass Effect. I think the Geth are probably Mass Effect‘s most interesting, alien, for lack of a better term ’cause they’re not made by humans, but whatever. Uh, species. 

Each geth is made up of a bunch of different programs that combine together to get smart enough to be a person and then they can separate and then recombine later in a different form. And it’s very interesting, although I realize that’s also kind of what the Tines do. So, I kind of have a type, I guess. 

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: Put that on your airship with your older woman stoic hero.

Oren: Get some gestalt aliens and gestalt robots up in here. That’s my new thing. 

Bunny: There was a book I read a while back, and this isn’t robots, but it’s a similar concept. It was called, I think, Railhead, where there were these groups of bugs and I think they were called bug monks or something like that. And when they combined together, they formed a sort of individual that’s made out of the collective hive of all the bugs. And if you scatter one of these and they recombine with another colony of bugs, then the resulting quote unquote “individual” has a different personality and different combination of memories. And you could very easily take that and be like, this is different computer systems interacting in weird ways, or something. 

Oren: One thing that I’ve been noodling over for a while is, is there a way to solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about while having the ship be able to talk? Because that’s clearly a thing authors want. People enjoy having the ship to be a literal character and not just a figurative character, but it just sort of runs into the problem we’ve been talking about of, why doesn’t the ship just fly itself if it’s so good at all this stuff? And if it’s not so good at all this stuff, why do we have it? 

Chris: Well, what if you had a droid that you… put her consciousness in your ship? 

Oren: Oh, oh boy.

Bunny: Uh oh.  

Oren: Ugh.  

Chris: I’m sorry, I, I should have let Solo be and not… invoke. 

Oren: Solo will never be okay. “Hey guys. So I heard that the internet is talking about how droids are kind of slaves. What if we made a movie where we acknowledged that, but as a joke.”

Bunny: Maybe they’re slaves, but maybe that’s, not… bad? 

Oren: So we got one side, people who are upset because droids are portrayed as slaves. And then we got the other side of people who are upset at the idea that we might acknowledge that droids are slaves. What if we made a movie that made both sides extremely angry. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: I guess we must be doing something right. [Laughs]

Chris: [Chuckles]

Bunny: That’s when you know things are going right, it’s the entire internet is mad at you rather than just half of it. 

Oren: The two factions that have nothing in common, they’ve united against you. It’s like Solo and Rise of Skywalker.

Bunny: Yes. As they’re most successful at doing this with Star Wars, as it turns out. Polarizing so much that the polar ends loop back together and become a single ball of hatred. 

Oren: [Laughs]

Bunny: I feel like we’d be letting down, the friend of the show, Jeppsson, if we didn’t mention Klara and the Sun. 

Oren: I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t read that one.

Chris: I read the first couple pages. It felt very literary and therefore boring. And then I didn’t read anymore.

Bunny: It was quite literary. It was a strange book, but I think Klara is an interesting example of  avoiding the “humans, but better” trap because Klara is different in a very demonstrable way, she thinks quite differently. Unlike a lot of AI and robots, she’s naive in interesting ways. Like socially and emotionally. 

She feels different than someone like Data who’s I guess, pragmatically naive, but truthfully savvy. Klara is very fast at computing, but she’s really clumsy and awkward in scenarios she wasn’t built for, which makes sense. And quite literally, there’s scenes where she can’t walk over uneven ground because she wasn’t designed to do that. And her vision is resolved differently. She sees things in grids and stuff like that. So that’s interesting. 

You can see why Klara is demonstrably different than a human and not feel like she’s just a superhuman. She’s clearly got shortcomings, even though she can think really fast and do complicated computations or whatever, but it’s also not a story about doing complicated computations. And if it was, Klara would be OP. But it’s not. It’s a story about emotional things and Klara has a kind of funky religious view of the world and the sun. It’s Klara and the Sun, which is something you don’t see in a lot of robots either. So that’s an interesting example of a human-ish robot that falls into the “robot that’s pretty human” category, but without it feeling like she’s just a human. 

Oren: And that one sounds like a pretty cool character for that story. It might be harder to do that in a more traditional space opera where we’re much more concerned with calculating the trajectory of big space guns. 

Bunny: She wouldn’t work in that setting at all. Or at least she’d be a weird inclusion. And she wouldn’t have much to do. And then another story, O Human Star is a near-future story where robots are just on the verge of becoming their own thing.

Robots have been constructed, there are robots around. It’s not unusual to see one, but now the robots are building themselves and there are robots showing up that nobody built. And they’re kind of their own thing now, and they think about the world differently and humanity isn’t really sure how to react.

They’re not hostile. Some of them are a little bit separatist, but the story is right on the brink of, “What do we do with all of these robots?” Which is another interesting perspective because I feel a lot of droid and robot stories are like, “Well, they’re already integrated into society,” and this one is like, “What if they weren’t?” What if, what if this was kind of weird, what’s happening? 

Oren: You could do a fun transition period type story. 

Chris: That’s certainly better than rehashing the like, “Oh no, we accidentally made sentience. And what if they had rights?” Just something different, please. 

Bunny: What if ChatGPT felt pain? [Chuckles]

Chris: Gosh, I was just reminded when you were talking about Klara and the Sun, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, AI: Artificial Intelligence. 

Oren: Oh boy. 

Chris: And the premise of that movie is like, what if we made these robots who could love us unconditionally? So it’s about this robot who is thrown away and then can’t accept that he’s been thrown away and then goes on a search–

Bunny: That’s dark.

Chris: –For his mother, who he was… Yeah! It’s really dark. 

Bunny: That’s bleak. I’ve never seen it. Maybe it all ties together.  

Chris: Nope. [Laughs] Nope, nope. That’s it. Well, actually the funniest thing about this movie, and I don’t feel bad about spoiling it, it’s pretty old now, is that at some point, thousands of years pass. So we just cut forth and then aliens find the robot. 

Bunny: What? 

Chris: And the robot still wants to find his mother. So the aliens make a simulation of her, to put him to bed, before he dies or something. [Laughs]

Bunny: Whoa. It’s like Little Match Girl levels of bleak. It’s like, what if that children’s book, Are You My Mother? never ended and the little bird just kept looking and kept looking and kept looking.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t recommend that movie.

Oren: Alright, well now that Chris has thoroughly depressed us with this weird Kubrick movie, I thought I had banished from my memory, but now it’s back. We’re gonna gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If that recounting of the movie did not disturb you, you might consider supporting us on Patreon.

Bunny: Or even if it did, because frankly, it might have. 

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

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