Every good hero deserves a moment where they ride into the sunset, but ride on what? From horses to bears to weird space dragons, mounts quite literally carry our main characters through the plot, and today we’re talking about our very favorites. That turns out to be more challenging than we thought, since a disappointing number of stories do little to develop their steeds other than having them add +1 to speed and stamina. With luck, we can find those that do better.

• Bat Flight Speed 

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

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

Wes: Wes

Oren: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: Now, saddle up, partner, cuz it’s time to ride into the sunset! But on what you might ask. What is your personal steed, the best mount for you in all of speculative fiction?

Mine, the most gentle, most mild-mannered horse you can find, because I can’t tell horses what to do and they know it. So, if I get up in the saddle and the horse has any opinions of its own, we’re just going wherever the horse wants to go. So, I need you to get me a horse who is just the chillest. The most chill horse you can possibly imagine, and then I might be able to get it to go somewhere.

Wes, what’s your preferred mount?

Wes: This is assuming I can just ride it: I just want to ride a bear. They’re fuzzy and adorable and they’re also terrifying monsters. And I want to ride one.

Oren: Bear Cavalry. Yeah, I’ve played War Hammer. I know all about Bear Cavalry.

Wes: Exactly. They’re super handy.

Oren: Chris, what do you got for us?

Chris: I would like to ride a giant bat.

Wes: Awesome.

Oren: Yeah. That’s great.

Wes: Is part of your deal with using a giant bat as a mount that you have to also sleep upside down, strapped to it?

Chris: Look, it’s just easy to find a stable cuz you don’t need it on the ground. You just find a place for them to hang.

Wes: Yeah, that’s smart.

Chris: They can fly, they’re very manoeuvrable, and they should be fuzzy too.

Oren: Depending on the kind of bat, they also might just be very fast. Apparently, bats are some of the fastest flyers in level flight. Falcons get all the attention because they can dive really fast. But if you just want to go like cross country, bats are often your best bet.

Chris: Yeah, they thought that bats were really slow and then they put some trackers on them and found out that some bats go much faster sometimes than they thought.

Oren: There’s apparently some contention around the current bat speed record, which is very fast, but also there’s questions about how it was measured. I’ll let the bat scientists figure that one out.

Chris: If we’re talking about mounts, does the Mount need to be an animal companion or can it also be a character?

Oren: Well, I’m not a mount prescriptivist, so I think that it’s flexible enough that often the mount is a character. Not always, but that’s pretty common.

Temeraire is probably the example that comes to my mind the easiest. Cuz Temeraire is a big old dragon and he talks and he’s his own character. But Laurence also rides on him, as do a bunch of other characters, cuz he’s very large. He’s still a mount, even though he’s also another character.

Chris: Admittedly, when I tried to think of mounts that were cool, I came up a little disappointed. It’s not as many as I thought. And a lot of them are dragons. People just really wanna ride dragons, the mount of choice.

Oren: The reason why I think it’s harder to come up with examples is that in a lot of cases the story will be like, and this is Billinar and he’s the greatest horse cause he’s real big and real fast at running. That’s the weapon problem, they’re trying to make your character’s signature weapon neat because it has +5 to attack and damage.

Chris: Rude of you to call out Shadowfax that way.

Oren: Shadowfax is a little more memorable than your average Lord of the Rings horse because he is established to be the Lord of all Horses.

Chris: Yeah, but he just does everything that other horses do.

Oren: He does. I’m not saying he’s great. I’m just saying that the fact that he has a title makes him a little more memorable because that gets people thinking like, what does the Lord of Horses do exactly?

Chris: That is the only reason I can remember him at all.

Oren: Because of the memes, because the memes.

Wes: But it’s kinda the exact same thing with Narsil, the sword, right? Is there anything special about this sword? No, but it’s a sword-y sword. It might be the sword-iest of swords.

Oren: I can remember Bill the Pony much better than I can remember any other horse in the Lord of the Rings books, with the exception of Shadowfax. And the only reason I remember Shadowfax is because of the memes asking what it is to be Lord of all Horses.

But no, you know what the best fantasy horse is? This one’s not a character. It’s Torrent from Elden Ring. I love my horse from Eldon Ring. First, he has like a pair of antelope horns for no reason. I don’t know why he has those, but it just makes him stand out.

Chris: And the other horses don’t.

Oren: Apparently not, you don’t see a whole lot of other horses, but I don’t think they do. So, I don’t know why he has those, but that’s a thing. But you can see him from the side. He’s clearly all horse. He just has antelope horns for some reason.

He’s also very mechanically useful. He’s got the double jump feature. Without that exploration in Elden Ring would be basically impossible. And he opens up all new kinds of combat. So mechanically, he just makes a big difference once you get him. Story wise, he picks you because he believes in you.

Wes: Aw.

Oren: And you know how rare that is in Eldon Ring? Nobody believes in you in Eldon Ring. Even your maiden, Melina, she doesn’t really believe in you. She picked you because there was nobody else. But Torrent, he thinks you’re cool. He thinks you have what it takes. And it’s just, yeah, Torrent, I don’t think you’re a great judge here. You’re a horse, but I really appreciate the gesture.

Chris: So should we talk more then, about what a cool mount should have? You’ve listed the things that I was gonna say.

For instance, distinctive features. If it’s another horse, how do you tell it apart from all the other horses? In this case, Torrent has some horns. We don’t have an explanation for the horns, but they do make the horse distinctive. Obviously, an unusual species is good, making the mount distinctive.

The next thing is personality. Does it do anything other than exactly what the rider wants? Does it have any things it’s scared of or any strengths or inclinations or other behavior that kind of sets it apart from just a vehicle you are driving?

Oren: The personality really is what makes your mount different from a motorcycle. If you look at stories that wanna make the vehicles more prominent, they give the vehicles personalities to make them more like mounts.

Chris: It feels like the mount still exists when the protagonist is not riding them.

Oren: Torrent doesn’t have that. He literally vanishes when you get off his back.

Wes: But he still believes in you.

Oren: He lives inside this little whistle I have.

Chris: Animals need care.

Wes: That’s a good point, Chris. Don’t forget that your mount is a living creature and you can’t just put it in the shed like a sword. You can just put the sword down and not treat it. Good mounts are not treated as inanimate objects.

Oren: If you build up the attachment in a mount, you can’t just trade it in for a better one the way that you would a weapon, because you’ve built attachment to it. Supposedly, the character really is supposed to care about this creature, at least they probably should if you’re trying for that kind of relationship. And so if you’re just like, no, I’m trading it in for a better model. No.

Looking at you Avatar! Not the last Airbender, blue people avatar. He has that whole thing about bonding with his one special dragon and then he’s, actually, I need a bigger dragon, and we never see what happened to his original one. It’s just gone.

Chris: But the Game of Thrones dragons, because it is important to the plot where Daenerys actually has to manage their food supply. They’re more than just political tools.

Oren: And it takes a long time in reading terms before they become adults that she can ride. In universe, that’s a ridiculously fast growth rate. That’s the thing that’s pretty common in fantasy, is that giant creatures that you’re gonna ride also grow super-fast.

Chris: Anything that’s young grows at an astounding rate.

Oren: But the Game of Thrones books are so long that even if you read them back-to-back instead of having to wait a million years between when they were published, it still feels like it takes quite a while for Daenerys’ dragons to mature to the point where she can actually ride them. Of course, she has them for four or five books. So that helps a lot too, right? That builds more attachment with them.

I also think that when you are writing a mount of some kind, you should also give some thought to what it actually allows your protagonist to do. And even a horse has a lot more functionality than just going fast. Being on a horse means you’re higher up and you have more momentum, so you can see farther and you have an advantage in fighting. And your horse, if it’s properly trained, can even fight with you.

If you get a more exotic mount, like a fantasy creature or even something like an elephant, that’s gonna change, right? What your mount can and can’t do will be very different. So that’s just something I’d recommend keeping in mind when you’re thinking of effects this will have.

Wes: That’s kind of part of the novelty factor with cool items that let you do things that you can’t otherwise. And a mount compliments you by providing options for you to do things that you can’t otherwise do. My bear mount can climb really well, and all I gotta do is hold on.

Chris: I think Appa, who is a standout mount in general, is really good for that because he facilitates the plot by just allowing them to go from one end of the world to the next much faster. They can even sleep on him, but he does eventually need to sleep himself, and he’s big, but he does not fight. He’s too scared.

Oren: Except for sometimes when he does fight, mostly he doesn’t cause he’s OP.

Appa is an interesting example because generally the writers of Avatar are very good at remembering that Appa exists even when he’s not being used for transport.

So, it doesn’t feel like he just disappears in a pokéball whenever they get off of his back. Although it is also notable that he can fly. So, when they do need him to not be around, he can just lift off into the sky. And that’s a little more convenient than a standard, very large mount would be.

Chris: It’s notable that in other stories, Appa might make traveling too easy, but Avatar the Airbender relies on a lot of traveling to make the plot work. We wanna zip around and tour the whole world and see all the temples, etc. And so that’s really valuable.

But in another story, they had an issue in Dark Crystal just because some of the female characters can fly and they needed to travel for distance and they needed it to be hard, so it would’ve been very bad if Appa had been there.

Oren: You do really wanna calibrate the kinds of transportation that you have to the sorts of things your character needs to be able to do, and you don’t want to give them a big old flying mount if they can just fly over all of their problems.

Temeraire has the same issue and they generally handle it pretty well. But there are a few instances where there’s a bit of a contrived, we’d better sit down over here so we can get ambushed, get supplies.

Wes: This is, we don’t really ever know what to do with flight. We want things that fly cuz they’re cool, but then we’re like incompetent.

Oren: But same thing can happen in reverse and that’s why Pabu [Naga], I think is his name, the polar bear dog that Korra has, is basically a non-entity and it’s because he’s just not capable enough. So, he can carry Korra faster than a person can walk and he can swim. But Korra’s a water bender; she can already cover ground much faster than that just by herself if she wants to.

Chris: And she does spend much of the time more stationary than Aang does.

Oren: And if she does need to go somewhere, she has access to all of these advanced vehicles. We literally don’t need this dog for anything. It’s not like they couldn’t have found a way to make him important, but it would’ve been much harder and they were clearly not really interested.

So, he seems like he’s gonna be important and then he just fades away as the story progresses. Except for one time when he shows up and knocks down a big set of iron bars. And is he strong enough to do that? That feels like more of an Appa thing, but I don’t know.

Chris: My personal opinion is that the very best mount is Llyan from the Prydain Chronicles.

Oren: The big cat?

Chris: Yeah, the bard rides a cat.

Oren: Yeah. I love the big cat. Yeah, no, giant cats are great.

Chris: He’s about to get eaten when he realizes that he can play the harp. And the cat likes the harp.

Wes: That’s right. Oh, it’s so good.

Chris: So, the rest of the books, he’s just riding a cat that has a will of its own.

Oren: Cat’s distinctive, it’s got its own personality, it’s not overpowered because he can’t really fly. They’re often so overmatched by their enemies that having a cat mount who will help them fight is pretty handy sometimes.

Wes: Cat-type mounts don’t show up a lot. Does anybody even ride lions and tigers?

Oren: In real life? No.

Wes: Oh yeah.

Chris: The believability of getting a cat to go where you want it to go.

Wes: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But that’s why it works well in the Prydain because the cat enjoys the music and is, okay, I am choosing this. I’m allowing this to happen.

Oren: It’s not fully sapient, but it’s smart enough to make a kind of deal: Sure, I’ll carry you around as long as I feel like it and as long as you play me music that I like, but I might eat your friends.

Wes: I guess the other kind of cat mount, I love it, but it also freaks me out, is in My Friend Totoro: the cat bus.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Wes: Oh man, that thing is so weird.

Chris: Do we really wanna step in here?

Oren: What’s important is that the inside of the cat bus is also furry. The fur extends inside. Don’t think about the alternative.

I think it was Children of Blood and Bone that also had cat mount. Yeah. I think the protagonist had a big old kinda lion-type creature that they rode around and that was fine. It wasn’t super memorable just because other than being a cat, it basically functioned largely like a horse would.

This isn’t its fault, but it was unintentionally funny: They’re all surrounded by the guards and the guards are about to kill them, and then the brother shows up on his big cat mount. The action scene just pauses as it describes him riding up, and then them getting on, and then them riding away. What were all the guards doing?

Chris: Look, it would’ve been very rude of the guards to attack them while they were escaping, okay?

Oren: It wasn’t their turn.

That happens a lot in the later Animorphs books. Not really related to mounts, but the bad guys pausing while the heroes gradually leave. That’s a hard thing to do when you want your protagonists to run away from a fight is you realize that, oh yeah, the bad guys could just chase them.

I also like how you can occasionally get cool mounts in sci-fi with living ships.

Chris: Yeah, you gotta ride in those space whales.

Oren: And the most obvious example that people are probably familiar with is the one from Farscape, which is certainly notable. Moya is the name of that one. I remember not really liking that one cuz it’s been a while since I’ve watched Stargate [Farscape]. But I remember feeling like Moya, oddly, her personality came off as really inconsistent because sometimes it felt like she cared about the people on board and then sometimes she was just doing stuff that would kill them and they’d be like, oh, that’s just Moya. Sometimes she just tries to kill us. And I don’t know, that felt a little weird to me.

A book that I’ve read recently that I really liked is called Sisters of the Vast Black. And they’re a bunch of nuns and they hang out on a living ship, which is also their convent called Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. Which is just a fun little ship and you get to know its personality and its quirks.

And the mechanic is also a vet, which is just neat. It decides it wants to mate with another ship and they keep it safe while that’s happening and that’s just a fun little sequence. Story does get much darker later for warning for anyone who reads it, but that part was fun. I liked it.

Wes, do you have any favorite mounts you wanna bring up?

Wes: So what about like underwater mounts? Those I don’t think get a lot of attention because swimming and if our protagonists actually take any action in the water, they’re probably capable anyway and/or part fish.

Oren: I think the reason you don’t have a ton of underwater mounts is just that by the time you’re giving a human the ability to act underwater to the level that they need to do most adventures, it’s also assumed that they have a swim speed.

The Aquaman movie recently has whales that the characters ride around in. In the most recent Black Panther movie, the Namorians, I forget their name, but Namor is their leader. They have whale troop transports, which very politely just drop the troops off and then swim away so that we don’t put the Wakandans in a position of having to kill whales.

Chris: Avatar Way of Water, of course we gotta upgrade to the new water animal just to help them go faster and they ride along and they have whales that they talk to. But those don’t really feel like mount so much as they’re friends, but they have like smaller underwater animals that pull them along.

Wes: The lack of underwater mount, like in our stories. It’s just that, I guess, water’s just not accessible no matter how we really spin it. I know we have talked about it’d be cool to have more like ocean-based stories. It’s harder maybe to conceptualize. It’s easier to think giant eagles are cool mount. They can get you where you need on land, but it’s okay, I’m underwater now. I need to go into the abyss and am I gonna ride in a giant angler fish?

Oren: Yeah, I’m into that.

Wes: Actually, yeah, that sounds cool.

Chris: If we change people enough, if we have a story where we want people to fly or a story, we want people to swim, we stopped using mounts as much because now we’ve given the people transport capabilities they need themselves. So there’s just less reason to have mounts.

Oren: To have underwater mounts, you basically need a situation where your characters can live and do stuff underwater, but not super fast. Basically, the same dynamic that we have on land. We can walk around and do stuff. We don’t need mounts to move, but if you wanna move fast, a horse is pretty handy. So you would need to do that.

And there’s no reason you can’t. I just noticed that most authors tend not to, most authors by the time they create mermaids, they’re like, but also the mermaids should just be able to swim fast enough that there’s not really any reason for them to have mounts.

Wes: Mounts also transport heavy things and water makes that easier.

Oren: Although again, it’s just a question of how much. It’s easier to move stuff underwater, but how much easier? So, you could do it. It would require a little more extra effort.

I have some fun, honorable mentions that aren’t super great but are fun. My favorite is Fuunsaiki, I believe is how you pronounce it, is the horse from the anime G Gundam. And he pilots a Gundam, which is a horse and is human, is on a human shaped Gundam and gets onto the horse Gundam, which is piloted by a horse. That’s the kind of show this is.

Chris: And so, does the human Gundam ride the horse Gundam?

Oren: Yeah, absolutely. And it has to use the reigns, the giant, like Gundam reigns.

Chris: No wireless technology.

Oren: Can’t just tell the horse where to go on your cell phone. That’s not gonna work.

Chris: At what point are we just replicating the entire world and giant-mech-form? Why don’t we just put everybody in robot suits?

Oren: There are some Gundam shows where the giant robots actually feel like giant robots as opposed to people with smaller people inside them. G Gundam is not one of those.

There’s also Yakul, the red elk, which looks like an antelope. I tried to find out if the red elk was like a real animal. If it was, I couldn’t find it. But I was always confused when they called it a red elk. Cause it doesn’t look anything like an elk that doesn’t have antlers. It’s got horns that is taxonomically inaccurate. I thought it was pretty cool.

Wes: One that comes to mind, might rival my bear choice, are chocobo. I like birds that you can ride who are also cute.

Chris: What is that from?

Wes: Final Fantasy introduced the chocobo mounts, which are like ostriches, but way better.

Oren: What if an ostrich was big enough to ride?

Wes: What if an ostrich is big enough to ride and super cute and came in a variety of colors?

Oren: In Final Fantasy VII, you spend a lot of time grinding chocobo races.

Wes: You really do.

Oren: Assuming that you wanna do the extras, right? If you just wanna beat the game, whatever, you don’t ever need to. But if you wanna beat the big optional bosses, you’re gonna need to do a chocobo grinding.

Wes: There’s something fun about flightless birds that function as mounts. I think that’s a cool concept. And I know that chocobo is a bigger, more popular version of that for anybody who’s played Final Fantasy games. But I’ve yet to see another one.

Oren: There’s a cutscene in Final Fantasy X. That really shook me for a second because it shows a bunch of armored chocobo knights riding into battle, and I was not expecting to see the Chocobo. It’s like a badass animal. It’s Final Fantasy X, but as far as I’m concerned, the modern new Final Fantasy game.

Wes: That’s right. Can’t quite keep up.

Oren: That’s when I stopped playing.

Chris: We also have Maximus from Tangled.

Oren: Do they ever actually ride Maximus?

Chris: I don’t think the other protagonists do. So Maximus is the steed for the captain of the guard. So Maximus starts as an antagonist. It’s more like Maximus is the rider and the guard is like decoration because Maximus is the one who’s actually doing all of the clue finding to follow the protagonist around trying to catch them. But then I think when Maximus goes on their side, if they ride him, it’s not for very long guard.

Oren: The guard captain is basically a hood ornament that Maximus has to make it easier for him to get places.

Chris: Doesn’t have to explain himself, as long as he just has a human on his back. Everybody will attribute everything he does to the human.

Oren: All right, I got one more from the very first Animorphs book.

This felt like the players doing a clever idea that the GM was just not ready for, and so arbitrarily said didn’t work. So what they do is they’re like, okay, we know where the Yeerk pool is, that’s where the yeerks keep all their hostages when the yeerks are not in their heads. So we’re gonna raid there and free a bunch of people.

So, Cassie says, I know, I will morph into a horse and then I can carry some of the people out. That’s a good idea, Cassie. Good plan. Applegate’s like, actually, I can’t let you do that because if you free anyone, then my masquerade wouldn’t make sense. For a number of reasons, That doesn’t work. All the people you try to free either fall off or die.

Chris: Oh, that’s terrible.

Oren: Except for one woman who they managed to get out with and then that woman is never mentioned again. No idea what happened to her. But I did think that was a creative bit of thinking on Cassie’s part. I appreciated that.

Chris: Since this series is about the horrors of war.

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Do you maybe think that this is supposed to be an analogy for the terrors that prisoners of war go through and in a middle-grade story about kids transforming into animals?

Oren: Yeah. It’s very dark and serious, let me tell you.

I think that’ll about do it. Now that we’ve gotten the horrors of war into our fun horse podcast, I think we’re gonna have to call this one to a close.

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

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

First we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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

As much as you love your hero, maybe they shouldn’t succeed at absolutely everything they try. A little failure once in a while can add variety, not to mention tension and believability. But what should actually happen when your protagonist fails? How do you keep the story moving and prevent the audience from getting frustrated? We’ve got answers in this week’s episode – plus more description of time loops than you might expect. 

• How to Use Failure In Your Story

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren

Chris: …and…

Wes: Wes.

Chris: Unfortunately, we’ve already failed to record this podcast several times, but it didn’t move anything forward. It didn’t really make a difference. We just had to try again. You know, you’ll never know or hear about it.

Oren: It was very frustrating, though, let me tell you that.

Wes: The emotional cues made it seem like we were accomplishing something though.

Chris: Just didn’t feel like anything we did made a difference.

Oren: But yet it seems like it should have, though. Cause we spent a lot of time on it.

Wes: A lot of time on it.

Oren: Maybe we could say we personally grew as people.

Wes: Because something has to happen if we waste that much time.

Chris: Maybe we got clues as to why we kept failing.

Oren: It was cause we kept forgetting to hit the record button and eventually we noticed.

Chris: Or maybe we were just on a time loop. When we had to do something very specific in our podcast before we were able to move on.

Wes: Like Sisyphus, we are bound to podcasting.

Chris: So this time we’re gonna talk about protagonist failures. Basically what happens when the protagonist fails something they try to do during the story. And there’s several storytelling concerns that generally pop up during failures. So we figured we’d give you some tips so you could avoid failing at failing. Cause if you can’t succeed at failing, what can you succeed at?

Oren: All right. I, for one thing, I’ve read Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, and I know that protagonists should never fail because that’s not a Chad thing to do, and apparently that’s what protagonists are supposed to be according to Save the Cat!.

Chris: Does he really say they’re never supposed to fail?

Wes: Wait, does he also call them Chads?

Oren: He does not, no. Those were some creative licenses. What he actually talks about…

Chris: I would believe it if you said it, because some of the things in there…

Oren: No, but the section he actually has that gives me the impression he doesn’t think protagonists should ever fail is that he has this whole thing about how the protagonist always needs to be in charge. And he means that literally, like the protagonist needs to be the highest ranking person around. Like he can’t be lower on the org chart than anybody else. And it just feels very like, my character must be the ultimate Gigachad at all times or I won’t feel good about it. Which is weird cause that’s definitely not a lot of the movies he’s describing. If I started naming the inconsistencies between the things he says you should do and the movies he says do them, we would be here literally all day.

Chris: Sounds like the other thing Snyder says, as far as “I have a vague idea of some storytelling concept, but I actually haven’t thought through how to give people advice on it. So I’m gonna do something that is, like, roughly correlated, but really just is missed.”

Oren: Yep. No, that there’s a lot of that in Snyder’s book. He occasionally can see that there is something going on, but he doesn’t really understand why, and so he ends up giving at best overly restrictive advice. The other thing that made me think of the Chad analogy is that he has this weird thing about primal motivations, which are basically all about sex, but he doesn’t say that most of the time. He phrases it as “continuing your DNA.”

Chris: Everything has to be primal.

Oren: Yeah, which is like the creepiest way to say that. So anyway, moving on from Save the Cat!, I have failed to not talk about Save the Cat! again. I keep trying to not do that and I have failed.

Chris: Every time in the time loop Oren does this, it’s, you know how every time loop has like specific events that you see repeated over and over again, so you know where you are in the time loop? Yeah. It’s Oren complaining about Save the Cat!, it’s one of our first events.

Okay, so why have failure? First question, why do we do this? Why can’t the protagonist just succeed at everything? And it’s not impossible to make a plot where the protagonist does succeed at what they try. It’s just harder in some ways.

Oren: Right, usually the reason just comes down to if your protagonist always succeeds at everything they try to do, it will seem too easy, and tension and satisfaction will suffer. And characters who always succeed usually have too much candy, which will also reduce attachment, at which point you’re basically just running on novelty and that’s only gonna work for so long. Assuming you had any to start with.

Wes: Yeah, I was, I’ve been thinking about when you said protagonists should never fail, and I was thinking about action movies and like certain actors who put it into their contracts that their characters cannot really fail. Like they can’t get beat up too hard, right? Cause it could ruin their status as actors and then they go and ruin their status themselves by things they say and do. But I’m thinking about those kinds of movies and it’s like, they don’t fail, but they’re just succeeding at things that don’t quite matter. And I wonder if that’s the same kind of thing.

Oren: Yeah. Usually when actors do stuff like that or when writers have a character that they just can’t bear to see actually fail, what they will usually do is those characters will still fail in some capacity, but it will be… any responsibility they had for the failure will be erased or heavily hidden. It’ll be like, okay, I was trying to rescue this guy from the prison, but I couldn’t because there were 5 million guys in the way and I could only fight 1 million of them.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: That sort of thing.

Chris: Yeah, there are ways. We can talk more. But yeah, there’s ways to have the protagonist fail, but still make them look tough. Or make them not just, there’s a difference between failure and the ability to just snap your fingers and have everything be the way you want it to be, right? Which is partly where agency comes into play. But as far as successes, you can, every time your protagonist has a success, it generally means you have to do something to restore the tension. Because them succeeding usually means they’re a step closer to victory, or things have gotten easier because they succeeded and it makes it look like they’re more likely to succeed in the future just because they have a good track record. So you have to put in something in the plot to make them head into danger or have something else go wrong or do something to restore the tension.

And I think in a movie length, you could probably continually have the protagonist succeed maybe, and get away with that. But the longer the story is, the harder that might be, especially, and again, there’s a difference between “do they succeed” and “do they succeed easily.” That’s definitely gonna make a difference. So if they fail, that can be easier because you don’t have to do as much to keep the tension up. You don’t have to put in a plot device right there usually, and if they don’t have a constant track record of success, it just can make it feel more likely that they’re gonna fail in the future.

Oren: So this brings to mind an interesting contradiction that I’ve run into where if your character never fails, they often, audiences don’t tend to like that because it feels like the character is invincible or can’t fail and everything’s too easy or what have you. And this is especially true in longer stories like novels or TV shows. But at the same time, I have found that audiences get very easily frustrated with your character making mistakes.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: I have a scene in the novel that I’ve been working on for a million years, and maybe I’ll be done with that soon. Who knows? I have a scene, probably the one that I’ve revised more than any other scene, is the scene where the protagonist makes a serious mistake. And plays into her enemy’s hand and things go really wrong. And I’ve had to revise that scene so many times because people keep reading it and getting frustrated and they’re like, no, “why isn’t she doing this? And that’s the wrong thing. I hate it so much!” And if they like the character, they don’t like it because they feel, they identify with her and now they feel like they’re making a mistake and if they didn’t like the character, they also don’t like it because now it feels like I’ve validated all the things they said about this character not being, like, deserving of protagonist status. I think I finally got it to a place where it’s working, but that, wow, that was a surprising amount of work.

Chris: [sarcastic] Oren, this is just what you deserve for getting your readers emotionally invested in your story.

Wes: How dare you?

Oren: Yeah. I guess it was my own fault really.

Chris: They want the protagonist to win. Geez.

Oren: Yeah. So that is, in my experience, the most difficult kind of failure is your protagonist making a bad choice.

Chris: I will say though, and we’ll talk about, I have some tips for that. But in your case, it was actually interesting because one of the things that you did is you made it, instead of her just losing control, you basically turned it into a moral dilemma. Where she had to make a strategic choice about what was most important to her, and that definitely made the reception better because she was, it was less frustrating if she had a reason to choose that. And decided that she could not in good conscience do what she had been planning to do.

Oren: To a certain extent I cheated, is that I made it not an issue like a poor choice or an issue of bad judgment. I made it a moral dilemma with no good answer. And you know, she picked the one that was most important to her. And that still frustrated a couple of people, but it was certainly easier to get them to accept it than when I was trying to write it as she just made a genuine mistake and did something that she shouldn’t have done. So that was just, that was much harder, and I still think that you should be able to do that. It’s just very challenging.

Chris: Right. And you could consider that a failure if you want. On one hand she did what she intended to do, so we might not call that a failure. At the same time, she still had an objective she did not succeed at because she was not willing to do what it took. Eh, we could call that a failure, even though through a different lens it’s a moral dilemma.

Oren: Yeah. I would call it a failure because she didn’t get the thing she was after, but it’s not a poor judgment failure, right? I made it into another kind of problem. I made it into a less extreme version of the “I could only fight 1 million guys, but there were 5 million guys” scenario.

Chris: Going back to what failures are for, besides tension, which is usually what you’re concerned with most of the time, cause we always have to manage tension, keep tension up during the story. But as you mentioned, teaching the protagonist lessons, right? If they’re on a character arc, a lot of times failure is very instructive. And can help them do better next time. You can set up for a nice payoff later where they fail to do something and that thing is, “oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just do this thing, but I’m always failing.” And then when they finally succeed later in the story, right, we get a good payoff for that. In addition to the lessons, if you wanna send your audience a message, we’ve talked about tragedies before. The idea that at the climax, the hero just fails and we’ve got like a cautionary tale. And those stories are generally not as popular, but they can send really strong messages. And then also if you’re an edgelord.

Wes: Most importantly. 

Chris: Or if you have any other dark themes, right? There could be other things like you want to send a message about dealing with regret or guilt, for instance. That would be a reason to use failures.

Oren: Shall we talk about the potential problems that your protagonist failing can cause in the story? The most obvious one is that if your character fails a lot, the story can just get too dismal. And I’m not just talking about The 100.

Chris: The 100 does surprisingly good with its failures, though.

Oren: It does. The 100 avoids the other problem with failures, which is that if by default, often when the character fails, it just means they didn’t get the thing they needed for the plot to move forward. And so now you’re just stuck and all right, now what? There’s no, you don’t have movement, and so it just feels like the story is paused for a while. You try to find a way around whatever the roadblock is, whereas The 100 is very good at using failures to also advance the story, just not in a way the protagonists wanted.

Chris: The 100 uses the Plan B trick a lot. There’s different ways to keep the plot moving, but that’s one. Cause you need to have the failure make a difference, right? It should never just put the characters back where they started. So you have to figure out a way that this failure changes the trajectory of the plot while still keeping it moving. And one way is, okay, the heroes have a plan B. They try their safe option, that’s been eliminated. Now they have to get desperate, and then it’s nice to add something in addition to that. Because of their failure, the villain is onto them. So basically, they have to face a consequence every time they try and fail. That’s important for tension because if you have heroes that can just keep trying over and over again and it costs them nothing, tension will drop. This is why in a time loop story, usually pretty quickly after we get past the novelty stage, some kind of urgency is gonna be established. There’s gonna be some limit for how many times the loop can happen, so that tension stays up. Because having a situation where we can just trial and error, just brute force this and do it over and over again, will kill your tension.

Oren: Yeah. If it feels like they have infinite time to solve a problem, then they’ll solve it eventually.

Chris: So every time your protagonists try and fail, they do need to face some kind of consequence for that.

Oren: And this has been a problem in old school RPG design for a long time now. And fortunately, the state of the field outside of the really big games like D&D has mostly figured this out. But for a long time RPGs had this real problem where you failed a roll and then what? You just, okay, you just didn’t get the thing you wanted, so you’re just standing there. Do you try again? What do you do at that point? And it’s really frustrating. Basically, nobody enjoys that experience. I did have one person try to tell me that, no, it’s actually fun because then you try to come up with a different plan. But that’s not my experience of that.

Chris: No, players give you their first plan. That’s the plan they thought of. They really struggle if you take that away and make them think of another one.

Wes: Yeah, whoever would say that it should go that way clearly just hasn’t played a game where you can roll low, roll a failure, but accomplish something and then have the game master introduce a complication, right? And it’s suddenly, oh, something new to play, like a new puzzle piece to work out. That’s infinitely better.

Oren: Yeah. That’s basically the fail forward, is the catch-all term for that philosophy. And that’s basically the default now in any indie game. It’s very rare to find a new game outside of one of the established lines that doesn’t have some form of fail forward. At this point, it’s weird if you don’t have it.

Chris: So we talked about having a plan B for avoiding that. Going back to where we started and just doing it, trying again. Having the villain do something that the protagonist has to respond to that ultimately moves things forward. You can move the plot forward just by escalating the situation and leading to a final confrontation. For instance, the protagonist fails. As a result, the villain captures somebody. Now the protagonist has to rescue that person. Or something else. The villain moves a step forward. Now the protagonist has to act to prevent the worst from happening. That’s another way to keep things moving forward. And finally, you can also do the silver lining, right? Okay. So we failed at our main objective, but a new opportunity appeared while we were doing that. We met a new person. We got a new clue, right? We got some new ideas. And now we have a different pathway to pursue.

Oren: That’s part of the jagged, ascending line of tension that we’ve talked about in other places where as the story moves forward, it should simultaneously feel like a conclusion is drawing nearer, but also that it will, it is less likely that conclusion will be favorable. And that’s tricky. That’s hard to do. And so when you have a failure, one of your things you have to figure out is, how does this failure move the story closer to a conclusion? Not necessarily the conclusion we, the protagonist and the reader wanted to have, but a conclusion. And with success, it’s a little easier to move it forward, but then you have to figure out how to keep tension going up. So either way, you have to maintain the feeling that the end is getting closer, but also the end is harder than before.

Chris: It’s the weird magician’s trick where the protagonist has to be closer to success, assuming you’re gonna have a happy ending, but it has to seem more dire and desperate than before, despite the fact that they’re getting closer to success. So we could go back to, you were talking about the story getting too dismal. I think it’s good again to remind people that first of all, tension, which is what makes your story exciting, is created by the anticipation of something bad that could happen. And if lots of bad things do happen, that’s not exciting. Just the fact that after something bad happens, tension often goes down, right? Because we’re no longer worried about whether or not it will happen. And also tension requires uncertainty. So if you ever get to the point where it doesn’t feel like the protagonist has any path to succeed or any chance of success, your tension won’t go away. It’s all a part of that preserving hope that Oren has talked about in the blog,

Oren: And to a certain extent, there is a level of taste involved here. Like we try to talk about things that are more broadly applicable. There’s very rarely anyone who’s gonna enjoy your story less because it has a more satisfying ending. That’s not common, but when it comes to how dismal the story is, that is, to a certain extent, a taste question. Because like I said, like Chris mentioned, if you do all the things The 100 does, of making it so that failures still move the story forward and still have turning points, that’s downward turning points. It’s a specific kind of turning point you have at a failure, which I’ll add in the show notes, we have an article on that. You can do all those things and the story will still move and it will have all those things and yet it will still get too dark for some people, but for other people, they will love it because there are people who like really dark stuff. And so, that’s a taste question. There’s not an objective right answer to that. That’s just a question of how dark do you want this and what kind of audience are you looking for? There are probably fewer people who like really dark stuff, but they’re also likely to be pretty devoted because more stories are written for the wider group that doesn’t like super dark stuff.

Chris: So let’s talk about agency and turning points. Since that’s another tricky thing, right? Besides moving the story forward. Another thing that storytellers can have trouble with is, how do they give the protagonist agency. And to review, agency is the character’s ability to affect the outcome of the story. So your protagonists need it, your antagonists should have it too. It’s really unsatisfying if a protagonist is just escorted through the story and they are helpless and can’t do anything. People do not like that. They often blame the protagonist and stop liking the protagonist when that happens. So you don’t want that.

And I think that some storytellers, they want things to go wrong, and they imagine that if their protagonist has any power over the outcome, then they would just fix it. So their reflexive way of having bad things happening is making it so the protagonists just can’t do anything. This can work for one-off incidents, right? If you have something suddenly bad happen, and we would call this calamity, like, oh, suddenly a big meteor strikes. You can have those things happen in the story. They’re useful when they create problems that then the protagonist can work on taking care of. And those problems raise tension, but you also don’t wanna do that a lot. So if you have a sequence in your story where everything is supposed to go downhill for a while, the situation is gonna get worse and worse for a significant period of time. You can’t just rely on stuff happening without giving the protagonist any agency.

Oren: So usually when it comes to downward turning points, they’re the opposite of a normal turning point, right? Because by default we’re assuming the protagonist is gonna succeed, and a traditional turning point typically works by the protagonist showing some kind of cleverness or persistence or selflessness. Those are usually the ones that’ll get you through. There are some others, but those are sort of your workhorses. So for downward points, and I’m just reading off of Chris’ article here, you want to do the opposite. You usually show selfishness, poor decision making or taking the easy path instead of doing what’s difficult. And those are kind of your workhorses for a downward turning point. And you will usually want some element of that, even if you’re doing the thing where “I could only fight 1 million guys.” Because if the only thing, if the only reason your protagonist ever fails is that the bad guy has overwhelming force that’s gonna make it feel like, well, I guess the protagonist is gonna lose cause no matter how badass they are, the villain always has overpowering force. So whatever.

Chris: But I do wanna point out that the most prominent downward turning points happen for villains. Because we don’t have to worry about villain likability. So those ones get really obvious. You have a villain who kills a bunch of people and then, the hero defeats them, but of course your hero can’t dirty their hands killing your villain. Like the people that the villain hurt, they suddenly come back from the dead and drag the villain into the grave or something. That’s an example of a downward turning point because the villain did something bad and then that bad thing came to bite the villain.

So they’re pretty obvious when applied to a villain, but when we apply them to a protagonist, they’re usually much milder. And the goal is to create something that we can say, okay, that was the wrong choice, but it’s an understandable choice. And the punishment for that wrong point, wrong choice is disproportionate, right? So they did a thing that’s only a little bad and then just a huge tragedy occurred as a result. And so even though they have a mistake that they should correct, right, and they have some responsibility for the bad things that happen, it also builds a little sympathy for them cause they didn’t really deserve that much.

Oren: Yeah. A fun example from a recent movie is actually from Shang-Chi. Chris has an example in her downward turning points article using the villain. But there’s also an interesting example in this movie of the hero having a downward turning point. And this is when Shang-Chi, our protagonist, is fighting Wenwu, the bad guy. And they’re, this is the early part of their fight before Wenwu has really started using his magic. So like logically, there are some questions there. It’s like, why isn’t Wenwu just using his magic to win the fight? But he hasn’t started doing that yet, so we’re not gonna ask those questions. Shang-Chi is actually getting the upper hand. And it manages to knock Wenwu down and has a chance to end the fight, but instead takes a moment to gloat a bit because he’s got it. He’s been, this is his father who’s been a jerk to him for a while, and so he has a second to be like, “hey, I’m gonna give you a piece of mind dad,” and it’s sure we can totally understand why you would wanna do that. But it was a bad choice. He should have finished the fight when he had the opportunity. Cause then he gets sucker punched and tossed into a lake, at which point the climax gets noticeably worse. So my point is, Shang-Chi, you shouldn’t have let yourself get tossed in that lake.

Chris: One of my favorites, because clearly a lot of effort was put into balancing this one, was Spider-Man: No Way Home. So Peter has a situation where his secret identity has been revealed. And somebody’s also blaming him for things that happened. So people are wondering if he’s a villain and as a result, his friends don’t get into the college that they applied for. He feels bad about that, so he wants Doctor Strange to cast a spell to make people forget his secret identity again, so that his two friends can get into college, because he’s the reason they didn’t. So he has a selfless reason to start, which would normally make it just fine.

But then when Doctor Strange starts to cast this spell, we first see that Peter didn’t actually do his due diligence by appealing the decision before asking for magic. Which means that he’s taking the easy route a little bit, even though his motivation is selfless. And then while the spell’s being cast, he starts to get a little greedy and make more and more demands of Doctor Strange, which kind of strains the spell and makes it harder. And as a result, the spell does not have the intended effect, and then he has to make a sacrifice later in the movie to make up for that because he is responsible for the bad things that happen as a result of the spell. So is Doctor Strange, honestly. You don’t have to just say yes to the high school kid who comes up and asks for a huge world changing spell, but as you can see, okay, that’s understandable, right? It’s understandable that that happened. At the same time, he could have done better.

But yeah, this is a good place to, if you have a character arc, and you want your hero to learn a lesson, right? That’s often a really good level. Of course, depending on what character arc you have, your hero, again, could potentially do really frustrating things if they just lose control and cause a lot of damage. But if they’re just a little impatient, for instance, or you could have a situation where you show what the right tactic or wrong tactic is in a situation by having your hero first try the wrong tactic. For instance, maybe they tried to persuade a villain to stand down by pretending to buy into what the villain believes, and that’s actually a bad choice because they’re only reinforcing those bad beliefs. And that encourages the villain and then it comes back to bite them, for instance. You can show, okay, no, we need to not pretend those things are good. And that could be a little lesson that you have in your story.

Oren: You can also use some, you can also use a bit of narrative trickery to create some distance between the outcome of the mistake and the actual mistake, which tends to reduce reader frustration. So there’s a scene from the beginning of the second Lockwood & Co book, which does this in, I think, an interesting way where they’re on a job, and this is one of the jobs that got cut for the show just cause it wasn’t super important and they were condensing things down. But they’re on a job and they are digging up what they think is a body, and they’re trying to find the body and they can’t find it. And then a bunch of ghosts show up and attack them and it’s, oh no, it’s bad. And we messed up. We don’t, where’s the body? And then they have to get saved by the rival team who they hate.

And then we discover that the mistake they made was when they were digging, they discarded the marker stone, which was the actual haunted object. Now if during the scene if they had been like, oh, and here’s a suspicious stone that is marking the grave. And they had then just tossed aside and ignored it. The reader would’ve been like, “no, it’s the stone, you guys! It’s the stone! Why are you not doing the stone?” But since we didn’t know about the stone, because the scene starts after they’ve already made that mistake, there’s a little bit more narrative distance and so there’s less of an opportunity for the reader to get frustrated with them.

Chris: Yeah, that’s really good.

Oren: So you can do tricks like that, right? You can also do it in reverse where the protagonist makes a mistake, but the effects of that mistake are not obvious until later. The protagonist is like, “no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go out and fight the bad guys, and we’re not gonna stay in our city and hide.” And it turns out that the bad guys are too strong because of something that the protagonist maybe didn’t know about at the time, or at least the readers don’t know. And so that creates some distance between the initial mistake and the outcome of the mistake.

Chris: And again, the more understandable you make it, the better. Like, for instance, maybe your hero makes a bad choice because they are rushing through something when they should take more care. But you can also give them a reason to rush. So they had to make a difficult decision and they made the wrong choice.

Oren: Okay. I think we have successfully managed to break the time loop. I guess it was talking about creating narrative distance and making it understandable. We just never thought of doing that until now, which would’ve been very frustrating if you’d had to listen to that. But fortunately that happened in backstory, so you don’t have to worry about it. So I think we’re gonna call this episode to a close.

Chris: If this episode was not a failure for you, consider joining our Patreon and keeping Mythcreants going. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, 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.

How do you make magic spooky? You just add blood! At least, that’s how fiction seems to view it. If a story has magic, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will try a blood ritual at some point, and who can blame them? Blood magic is visceral and externalizes the idea of magic sapping a person’s life force. Naturally, this pleasant idea is our topic for this week!

• A Darker Shade of Magic 

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

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

Wes: You’re listening to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Wes: …and…

Oren: Oren

Wes: And before we do vampire voices and things like that, let’s just put a content notice up that we’re talking about blood magic, and we’re gonna be talking about a lot of blood, which is gonna probably mean discussions of, like, gory subject material, violence. Blood magic sometimes involves self-harm and – like body horror stuff in general. So just, it might get gross, but we also get grossed out, so we’re gonna probably not gross ourselves out.

Oren: Probably a little gross, but not as gross as you might want it to be if you’re into that sort of thing.

Wes: [laughing] Yeah, thank you. That’s a good way of putting it. But that said, as gross as it can be, I feel like there’s no shortage of storytellers willing to let their characters and villains use this power.

I don’t know. Once I started thinking about blood magic, I was like, okay, this is actually cropping up everywhere, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m listening to A Darker Shade of Magic right now by V. E. Schwab, but…I’m just like, okay, now that I started prepping for this I’m thinking blood magic is all over the place, so let’s get into it. What is blood magic, Chris and Oren?

Chris: I think it’s magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing.

Wes: [laughter] I love that answer.

Chris: Any magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing becomes blood magic.

Wes: Yeah, it’s like a checklist of like, how much angst do I want in my story, right? [laughing] And also how menacing do I want to be? Okay.

Oren: Yeah. Most fantasy stories, if they have an extensive use of magic or even a limited use of magic in some cases will involve some kind of spooky blood addition of some sort. Now, I, personally, am a veteran of Legend of the Five Rings, which has a whole blood magic system. This isn’t “add some blood to some other magic.” No, we take it very seriously around here. Everything’s blood magic all the time, or at least it used to be. Apparently in the new edition, they changed a bunch of stuff to try to make it, like, less Orientalist, which is good. But I don’t know what that did to blood magic. I haven’t read the new edition.

Wes: Perhaps maybe on just a more maybe, I don’t know, literal level for, I think the video game enthusiasts out there. Blood magic also could be magic that is powered by blood, with blood serving as a component or like a catalyst for other magical effects. Or, blood magic could mean magic that affects blood. Which we get in Avatar, right? With blood bending.

Oren: Yeah, it can go either way, but it’s still always portrayed as like spooky and weird and gross. Except for the one counter example I can think of off the top of my head is Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys.

Wes: That’s right. Yeah. There was blood magic in that.

Oren: They do have some blood magic, but it’s not especially creepy. Now granted, this is at least somewhat a cosmic horror story, and so all magic is weird and creepy. And so the blood magic is not especially creepy, right? Like, they do some blood magic and whatever, and they also do some other magic. And some of that’s way worse.

Chris: When you have Cthulhu in the story, blood starts to sound less intimidating.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Wes: Yeah, but I do remember the main character in that story. The blood components of that magic were tidy in comparison to other stories. Certainly not a huge deal, but still present.

Oren: Because that story was also very much, “Hey, what if we reimagined some cosmic horror tropes as like actual beliefs that these beings have?” And so in that sort of situation, they’re probably not gonna be doing like the really big dramatic slashes across the palm or whatever, because that’s not sustainable. There’s important stuff in your palm! You can’t just keep slashing it, unless you want nerve damage. Especially now we have hypodermic needles. You can just do a little blood draw, and now you’ve got some blood. It’s just…calm down everybody!

Chris: I still cannot forget Ten Thousand Doors of January, where the protagonist, she just has writing magic.

Wes: Just gotta write on stuff.

Chris: She just writes. And she’s been basically kidnapped, and she has a sharp object, and instead of scratching into anything else that she could scratch, or even piercing herself and then using the blood as ink, she decides she has to cut herself, and it’s like, why are we doing this? So it’s not actually a blood magic system. I’m sure it was very symbolic.

Oren: It was very symbolic, I’m sure. That scene also bothered me because until now we’ve been told over and over again that the protagonist can’t do things because she’s just so conditioned to be meek and passive, which was a weird thing to say because I didn’t actually feel like she was overly meek and passive? But that’s what the narrative kept telling us. And then suddenly she’s in a situation cause she’s been kidnapped and taken to an asylum, where all she needs to do is be meek and passive, because they don’t know about her magic there. So she just needs to be meek and passive until she can get her hands on a pen, which they would probably give her just to write her dad a letter or something. But instead, she immediately goes berserk [laughter] and tries to force a pen away from one of the orderlies. And so then they lock her up. Okay, I thought she was supposed to be meek and passive. What?

Wes: Now is as good time as any need to talk about my theory, the why of blood magic that is not just, I don’t know, for edge or whatever. Doors of January is not a good book, but a good example, maybe. There’s a sense that because it’s blood, that casting blood magic is, like, there’s a sacrifice involved, right? And I think that’s just drawing on literal sacrificial history in this realm. And yeah, making January do that to herself is like a self-sacrifice, right? What is she willing to give up to make this magic work? That kind of thing. And it was completely unnecessary, [laughter] but I feel since blood spilled for teaching power, or whatever, I feel like that is the subliminal connotation to a lot of blood magic and yeah, maybe that’s why.

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s difficult. You must suffer in order to do this, and I think a lot of people do like magic that has costs. They don’t wanna just be casting spells willy-nilly, gotta be limited somehow, and blood is like a super kind of cost. Whether you’re sacrificing parts of yourself, or you are sacrificing voluntary or involuntary subjects, depends on maybe what part of the good and evil spectrum you lie on, but yeah, that’s kinda my theory. It all comes down to sacrifice and blood being the power for it.

Oren: I don’t think you’re wrong. I think that makes sense. I think a lot of the time blood magic is an externalization of the concept of sacrificing some part of yourself to do magic. And you can always describe it as, “I’ve drained their essence” or “their soul” or whatever, but that’s less real than blood.

Chris: Dark Crystal does that, but it’s really creepy. But, yeah, I think it takes a little bit more setup, right? It’s much easier to just be like, blood. Knife. Here you go. We can see it dripping, all red and stuff. Than it is to be, “Hey, we’ve got this dark crystal, and now we’ve got this, like, setup, and if you stare at the dark crystal, and then this machine does the thing.”

Oren: Also, if I remember correctly, in Dark Crystal, the machine just scrunches you up, right? Like you just rot and collapse, or something. It was bad, right?

Chris: It turns the Podlings into basically subservient zombies.

Oren: Yeah. So, in that situation, you don’t necessarily need the blood component, but often you want magic where you want the protagonist to have done that, to have given some part of themselves. And in that situation, having it be literal blood makes it, I think, hit harder than it would if you were just like, all right, I gave some of my spirit points away and now I’m very tired. And, but trust me, like on the inside, my spirit has been drained, right? It’s just less real.

Chris: I should point out that The Dark Crystal takes place in a second world fantasy with no humans. And that might make it easier to, “Hey, there’s this strange essence liquid we get from people’s bodies.” [laughing]

Wes: Yeah, good point.

Chris: I do wonder if it was the real word of humans, you’d be like, wait, but what is that? There’s liquid there. What liquid is that?

Oren: That’s some stuff. Don’t worry about it. It’s that bile we’ve been hearing so much about. [laughter]

Wes: That’s a good example. Yeah. And then that provides the answer of just what is magical ichor [eye-kor] or ichor [ih-kor] and however, depending on your pronunciations. I don’t know. It’s just some juice that comes out of things and it’s useful. [laughter] It is funny, though, or like we were talking about, it’s just, “No, I assure you I am fatigued.” But then we have plenty of people that use blood magic who should be feeling faint, at the least, but are not? At all?

Oren: That’s just power creep for you. Okay? Once you start introducing blood magic and more stories start using it, you’re gonna have characters who you want to keep casting spells even after they’ve spilled several pints of blood, and it’s, I don’t know, do you have that much to spare? I feel like you might need a transfusion at this point.

Chris: I think you would know, Oren, because of your vampires. I remember one game – it was actually a really good ability. It just, it did stretch imagination for how much blood these vampires could hold. So what they did is they shaped things out of their blood, and sometimes it was just like, “Hey, I have a blood knife.”

Oren: No, excuse me. I was way more confusing than that. The blood knife was a separate artifact that one of them had. That was different from the other vampire who made a knife out of blood. [laughter]

Chris: [funny voice] Oh, I’m sor-ree. Excuse me, sir.

Oren: See, I want people to understand how much I did not think this through. [laughter]

Chris: But they get in fights and the vampires just cut their veins open and make things from their blood. And in particular, there was this villain that would make blood clones, and it actually worked out really well for the campaign, because we needed a way to encounter the villain, and we were all like OP in the system, where rolls were all really high. So it was really difficult for us to fail anything. But we still needed to encounter the villain, but the villain couldn’t just be defeated, or else she would lose her threat factor. So instead, she would appear to us, it would look like her, and then we would get in a physical fight with her, and she would be a difficult opponent to beat, but then it would just, the final knockout blow would turn out she was just a bunch of blood. [laughter] So she was an image of the villain made from blood. Oren did not specify how much blood that required. [laughter]

Oren: So just, let’s just imagine that it was blood spread very thinly.

Wes: Uhhuh

Oren: It was just like a one micron thick sheet of blood in a person’s shape. Let’s just go with that. Okay. Let’s stop asking questions.

Chris: Some very durable blood here with a lot of resistance to it.

Oren: Yeah, well, Chris, a wizard did it. [laughter] And since a wizard did it, it technically makes sense, and no one can critique it anymore. [laughing] This is what I’ve been told.

Wes: What kind of spells, like effects, do we associate with blood magic?

Oren: Gross ones.

Wes: Gross ones?

Oren: Or usually, it depends, there’s a lot of different versions. The most common are harmful things. You don’t usually spill blood if your spell is to help the crops grow, but sometimes you do. Everything’s…there’s a lot of different types of blood magic.

Chris: There’s also a lot of associations with stealing a life from one person to another. The whole like, [vampire accent] “bathe in blood to become young” [end vampire accent] or something like that. So, I would also think of it, anything that has to do with the body, right? Drink somebody’s blood to take something from them, for instance.

Wes: I think that’s the whole point of vampires, right? Is that they prey on young people for sustenance to stay immortal, right? It’s like literally that act of blood magic just preserves their life.

Chris: I do think an interesting example is Half Bad.

Oren: …The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself? We have to say the full title every time, Chris, we can’t shorten it. It’s a betrayal of everything that show stood for.

 Chris: Somebody just loved that title. Somebody was just very attached to that title. But this is definitely a case of using the sinisterness of blood magic to make it look like a specific group of mages are bad, so that you can then be like, no, they’re not bad, they’re the good guys! Gotcha. [laughing] But in this case, they heal faster, which to me does make sense. It fits the body theme. It’s a little eclectic. They have one very strange difference, which just feels a little arbitrary, where there’s a coming of age ritual in this setting where the mages get their special ability, and the blood mages need a drop of relative’s blood for this coming of age, or they just die.

And I think it’s used, it’s an important plot point in the show, because then the main character who is a blood mage doesn’t have any relatives, and so he has to travel to try to find their blood. So it’s used to good effect, but it is a little bit arbitrary, I feel like.

Oren: I need people to understand just how arbitrary this is because the blood mages, right, that’s one group of them, or Blood Witches I think they’re called, and they do the thing where for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood, and then you have the Fairborn Witches, and for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood.

Chris: [laughing] Oh, I forgot about that.

Oren: It’s the same, except that for some reason the Blood Witches will die because of it if they don’t get it. And the Fairborn, I think just won’t get their powers. So it’s as if you had a setting where everybody ate salt. But like one group of people had a salt deficiency and so if they didn’t eat salt, they would die. Everyone eats about the same amount, and so those group of people are the salt eaters. And it’s not impossible that could happen. It was just a really confusing thing to call them.

Chris: The other thing, I think one reason why it seems arbitrary actually is because it’s only a couple drops, right? It just stretches belief more than if they were a little bit more vampiric about it and needed a pint of blood. [laughing] The thing that’s really supposed to make them creepy is that they can eat somebody’s heart to get their powers, right, which they make a point of, oh, this means they’re bad, and super creepy and monstrous. But then, they’re like, oh, actually, in our families, somebody does this at the end of their life, they give their powers to the next person, and then those powers are inherited with each generation, which makes it look better. The problem is that they want these blood mages to be the underdogs.

Oren: So somehow you have, one side has basically the same powers as the other side, except they also have a certain number of people, it’s not clear exactly how many, but apparently most families have at least one, who can just snowball powers through the centuries.

Chris: It has like hundreds probably.

Oren: And has, and most of those powers are useless, because most of them are just not very well thought out, but a few of them are incredibly good and combined would be basically unstoppable. And so how are the blood mages the underdogs, no one knows the answer. [laughter]

Chris: And they heal faster too, on top of that.

Oren: Right. Also, for some reason, they heal faster. That show is weird because it’s also one of those shows where every witch has a specific power like the X-Men, but then they also all have all the spells, which can do whatever the writers feel like at any given time. So, like, it’s – the magic system of that story is not well thought out is what I’m saying.

But this actually segues into an interesting point that I found with blood magic, which is there’s this whole thing of maybe blood magic’s not that bad. A lot of stories do that. Or they are like, oh, blood magic’s bad. But maybe, if you want to win, you have to embrace the grimdarkness of using blood magic. And, I’m not gonna say that can’t work. I’m gonna say be careful, because you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you’ve created a scenario where being willing to murder someone directly translates into more power. And of course, in real life, there are plenty of opportunities where killing someone could get you power, but it doesn’t literally make you physically more powerful in most cases, whereas in this blood magic situation you have, and – I would just think if that’s the kind of dynamic you want in your setting. Because you might find that it’s hard to justify why the setting isn’t a horrible dystopia at that point. It’s especially bad for role playing games because role playing games tend to pull darker already, and once you start telling players, “yeah, this is a really hard boss fight, or, you could go murder a villager and then it would be an easy boss fight.” If they ever get at all frustrated, that villager murder is gonna start looking real tempting.

Wes: But do you think it works well for, I don’t know, like for a villain, right? When we were talking about this topic, Dragon Age: Absolution came up, right, with, what was his name? Rasalan? Or, yeah, Rezaren, the Tevinter mage that ends up going hardcore blood magic by the end of it. [laughing] And it’s just an escalating thread of, I just want it for this. But what he wants it for becomes an obsession. And then like that descent into realizing that if you just have enough, you can do almost anything. Which for a villain, I think it worked well in that story.

Oren: It works out okay. You just wanna be careful how much you emphasize it, right? Like in that story, we just assumed that the protagonists would never think of doing that. Or that they aren’t really in a situation where it would be practical or necessary for some imagined greater good or what have you. But, and of course they’re not players, right? So you can make them think whatever you want them to think. But if you make it more widespread, it can be an issue.

Chris: I will point out that that particular story is about an artifact.

Wes: Yes, that’s a good point

Chris: …that he wants to use. So, you could use something like that. Okay, it’s not just that we have to kill somebody, but we also have to kill somebody and have this special artifact and there’s only one of them. Or do other things to just reduce the total number of people who would be doing this, right?

Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Oren: Dragon Age is very funny with its blood magic, because most of the time the game is like, “blood magic is corrupting, and if you use it, you’re on the path to evil, and it’s basically magical hard drugs and you’re, once you use it, you’re doomed” or whatever. But then Dragon Age II, which is ironically the one that focuses the most on how evil blood magic is, just lets you take a blood magic prestige class and it’s the most powerful build in the game.

Chris: Oh, my goodness. [laughter]

Oren: And, nothing happens when you do it. Like, it’s just very weird, if you side with the Templars in the little oppressed mages story they have going on, and you break into the mage sanctum, and all the mages are doing blood magic, and it’s all horrible and evil, and the Templars are like, [dramatic voice] “We must cleanse this place with fire.” And then they look over to you and are, like, “Do you have our backs?” And you’re standing there with, like, huge ribbons of blood circling you, [laughter] and big glowing red orbs, and you’re like, “Yeah, let’s get these blood mages!”

Wes: That’s hilarious. I haven’t played two, but I remember in one the mages’, like, quest line where you saved them or whatever. And if I think if you had unlocked blood magic and done that, that you’ll rescue everybody, but then the headmaster Dumbledore figure will be like, “Thank you! But by the way, you were using some magic back there that I’m a little worried about.” And you can just be like, “It’s Grey Warden magic. Don’t worry about it.” [laughter]

Oren: “It’s fine.”

Oren: Yeah, see Dragon Age II was also annoying because most of the time in Dragon Age, if you wanna be a blood mage, you’ve gotta devote significant resources to it. It’s like a prestige class. But then all these random newbie mages are just, like, “Blah! Knife stab self, now blood magic happens.” And it’s like, “Hey, I had to work hard for that, and you all just get it for free?” [laughter] That’s some nonsense.

Wes: Bringing up Dragon Age is a good segue to this, that I’m curious if you two think there’s a strong association or not between this, cause, one of the ways to unlock blood magic in that game is that one of the, oh, forget what they’re called, but, like, the demons, can teach it to you, right. To what extent is there like some kind of devilish aspect to blood magic in stories?

Oren: In stories? Basically all the time. I don’t know if you know what the historical connection there is. I see historical dramas all the time. The witch hunter will come to town and be like, [witch hunter voice] “The evil witch is doing a blood sacrifice for Satan.” And I’m like, maybe that’s a thing witch hunters said in that time period. I don’t know. I haven’t checked, but I do know that’s very common in fantasy fiction all over the place.

Wes: To the point where you feel like if I was writing a story and I want to include like magic that I am certainly running the risk of maybe inviting that kind of, like, premise into the story?

Oren: I don’t know if I would say inviting. I don’t think it’s so common that if you have blood magic, people are gonna be like, [complaining voice] “Where’s the demon to go with the blood magic? Continuity error.” It’s not quite that common. If you had blood magic and then there was like a demon or devil, some kind of supernatural, evil creature that was giving the knowledge of it, or that was what people thought it was, I mean, readers are gonna take that in stride, right? That’s a pretty well established trope.

Chris: I would say that it would be a little odd if you had blood magic and nothing about it seemed – like it was perfectly nonchalant. “Oh yeah. The blood, it’s just like any other element, and there’s just nothing menacing about it.” Then that would be a little strange, not like impossible, depending on context. If you have the right magic system, you might be able to do that, but in many cases they, people would look for some kind of commentary on whether it’s good or bad.

Wes: Interesting. I mentioned earlier that I’m not, that I’m maybe only a third of the way through A Darker Shade of Magic. And one of the early things that happens in that story is that he trades basically a, uh, it’s almost like a little like trinket type game with the four elements and then a little piece of bone to a collector in Grey London, which is a place that doesn’t have much magic. Kell, the main character, describes it as a toy that lets you assess your affinity for magic in, like, Red London. And so it’s like the four elements and then bone, which essentially is blood magic. And I’m just like, I don’t know where the story goes, so maybe demons are gonna show up or something, but it’s just, okay, so we’re having an elemental system and then, blood…as like something else, there. And I know that elemental systems will go beyond the traditional four, but that doesn’t make me necessarily think that there’s gonna be like a demon component because of the way magic was presented through that frame.

Chris: Perhaps? It’s normal to have the four elements and then some kind of life-related fifth element. I will say that the choice of blood or bone for that is a little more sinister than I would expect for a normal, traditional elemental system.

Oren: If I remember correctly, the bad guy in Darker Shade of Magic uses blood magic, but it’s been a while.

Chris: Oren, did you just spoil the story for Wes?

Wes: Yeah, thanks a lot, Oren. [laughs] The main character Kell does use blood magic.

Oren: Oh, does he?

Wes: Because that’s how he goes between the Londons, angsty fashion. He has to cut on himself, and…

Oren: Oh, is that how he opens portals?

Wes: That’s how he portals because, and this is another thing I wanna talk about with blood magic, because he’s an Antari, which is some kind of just human that is just, like, naturally more magical. And so he heals better, because he’s naturally more magical. His blood is actually just a little bit more magical.

Chris: Ah, yes, the convenient, “I heal better because the storyteller wants me to get injured a lot.”

Oren:  Exactly. Not only do I have blood magic power at my disposal, but my blood itself has more, like, magical capabilities than some rube over there. [laughter]

Chris: That reminds me of the Kushiel books. We wanna have sexy times blood. So…heal fast!

Wes: Heal fast! I guess some stories can do it right. Certainly, I don’t love insinuating that just the blood in some people’s bodies is just better than others. [laughs] I’m not a big fan of that.

Oren: Yeeah, I can imagine why you might not love that idea. [laughs]

Wes: Oh, really?

Oren: [laughing] But the important thing is that I didn’t actually spoil anything for you cause I was apparently wrong.

Wes: Oh, okay, good. Thanks.

Oren: Cause I don’t remember Kell using blood magic.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t remember that either. [laughing]

Oren: That’s actually very reminiscent of 7th Sea, where the portal magic in 7th Sea was, like, blood themed, but not the person’s blood. For some reason, the portals you made just bled. To be extra weird and gross, I guess.

Wes: That is gross. [laughs]

Oren: Yeah, it was odd, and it was like, it’s cause you’re cutting into the universe.

Chris: [noise of disgust]

Oren: Does the universe have blood? I don’t think that’s how universes work, man. Uh, now if it started bleeding out some dark matter, now that I could appreciate.

Wes: Yeah. So, Interesting. Oren, how does blood magic relate to the Necro Industrial Complex? Are necromancers blood mages?

Oren: Depends on the story, but usually the difference between death magic and blood magic is the difference between light gray and dark gray. It depends on how much the storyteller feels like separating it. Now, like in traditional D&D, which is where the Necro Industrial Complex comes from, there isn’t any blood related to necromancy. It’s, for some reason, opals are the material component. You need to raise skeletons in 3.5 D&D. So opals, it’s the Necro Opal Complex is actually what it is, but in a lot of stories, blood is very connected to necromancy.

In L Five R [Legend of the Five Rings] I was mentioning earlier, that’s a big one. Blood mages do a lot of raising the dead. Which is weird, because it’s part of the plot of L five R if you read deep enough into the lore, is that blood magic used to not be evil. It was just like a thing people could do, but then the Dark God fell down from heaven and he made it evil somehow on his way down. And so I’m like, okay, so before the Dark God showed up, did blood Magic still have all this gross resurrection type? Did you still raise zombies with it, or is that a new thing that it has only now? I don’t know, but yeah, L five R is one of those scenes where necromancy  and blood magic are basically synonyms, and there are a number of other settings that do something similar. The whole, because again, the blood here is the externalized idea of you sacrificing life to bring something back from the dead. So you can see why they go hand in hand.

Wes: Yeah. But definitely if your necromancy required blood to, like, power it, then maybe you’re running into some inefficiencies with the industrial complex part of that, right?

Oren: Because yeah, cause skeletons don’t have their own blood, okay. So you’re gonna need to get that blood from somewhere. And that’s gonna raise your operating costs, and it’s just not. It’s not. I wouldn’t recommend it. Now that we’ve learned that the Necro Industrial Complex is made less efficient with blood magic, I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you made it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon. And if you didn’t make it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon.

Wes: And thanks for skipping to the end. [laughter]

Oren: That’s very important to skip to the end, to hear the Patreon read.

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

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

Saving the world, epic stakes, exciting battles, all of them are great. But sometimes you want a more personal story that still has plenty of magic to keep things interesting. You want a supernatural drama. This week, we’re talking about how to use speculative elements to bring out the characters’ emotions, what kinds of speculative elements you need in the first place, and how to integrate all that with your main plot. Plus, someone’s out to overthrow Chris as leader of the podcast, oh no!

• Macbeth 

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…

Wes: Wes.

Chris: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now the two of you have been great co-hosts so far, but a witch just gave me a prophecy that one of you is going to overthrow me. Now I don’t know if I can trust you anymore.

Oren: I’m prepared to sell Wes out to any degree I must.

Wes: I’m prepared to do it.

Chris: The question is, which one of you is not of woman born? Which apparently just means a Caesarian section or something like that, which I don’t understand.

Oren: Don’t worry about it.

Wes: It was just how they got around the prophecy for Macbeth, where Macduff could be like, “I was not born of a woman; they cut me out of my ma!” And Macbeth’s, “Oh crap, I’m gonna die.”

Chris: Maybe one of you was born from a trans man. I think that’s a much more logical reading of the statement.

Wes: Agree.

Oren: If I was Macbeth, I would be like, I would contest that wording. Blah. That’s what would happen if I was Macbeth.

Chris: So this time we’re talking about supernatural drama. This is a neat topic for me because, when we think of speculative fiction, we’re always or not always, but often automatically, assume high stakes. Yes, we have a lot of really popular speculative fiction stories [that] are life or death scenarios, action, that kind of thing. We can have any plot that we want. They don’t necessarily have to have stakes that high. And we can also use fantastical things for other effects and for other types of plots. You just want to use them in your plot somehow. Otherwise you end up with what we might call a Mars Western. All the fantastical things can be removed and it wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, Grimm, the show Grimm has this problem.

Oren: Yeah, that’s such a weird show. It’s just a regular cop show. And then every once in a while it’s, oh yeah, also there are monsters.

Chris: And I think the problem that particular show had is it wanted to keep the supernatural hidden and have a regular way to close cases without explaining the supernatural. But you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make any difference.

Wes: It had such an immediate snowball effect because they kept wanting to introduce newer monstrous creatures and stuff. “We cannot keep the lid on this forever.” And that’s why I forget which season, they just had a full pivot to like, “Okay, he’s not really detective anymore.” Or, “We’re going to bring all of his detective friends in on it and also make sure that the police chief, who is also like a half something, is also on his team.” Yeah, pull the veil back way hard.

Chris: Yeah, I heard they fixed it later.

Wes: The premise was never sustainable for that.

Chris: I thought it was worth talking about examples of how fantastical things can be used to create drama and not just to threaten people’s lives. And I think this would be especially beneficial for high school drama, because we had a whole episode where we talked about supernatural teen drama, and the fact that it always comes apart at the seams, because what happens is all the supernatural elements are focused on really high-stakes plot arcs which makes all of the teen drama feel petty in comparison.

Oren: You don’t have to call out Sabrina and October Faction like that.

Chris: Pretty soon it’s just like the drama part doesn’t feel like it matters. Teen Wolf just drops it, becomes a high-stakes show where the drama is not really there anymore to a large degree.

Oren: That happened in the magical girl roleplaying game campaign that I finished running a few months ago. Like at the start of the campaign I did some high school drama stuff and by about the midpoint it was like, yeah, alright, we’re all dealing with way too much magic nonsense for that. So high school is just a place you hang out occasionally for exposition scenes.

Chris: After a while, it just doesn’t feel like the drama matters when everybody’s about to die. Let’s talk about shows, movies, books where the supernatural kind of made a difference to the character relationships that were in the show.

Oren: Chris, is this just an excuse to talk about School Spirits?

Chris: Yes.

Oren: Be honest.

Chris: So we watched School Spirits recently and, oh geez, what network is this on? What streaming service?

Oren: It is on Paramount Plus, one of the worst streaming services.

Chris: When you’re done watching Star Trek, you can watch School Spirits.

Oren: Please watch it; we don’t know if they’re gonna get a season two.

Chris: We need it to get a second season, therefore we need you to watch it, okay?

Oren: Stop whatever you’re doing and go watch School Spirits. Paramount apparently just posted a huge loss for their earnings. This is not good.

Chris: Not good at all.

Oren: Before your company implodes, I’m gonna need season two, okay? On my desk.

Chris: In the plus category is that it’s clearly a budget show. It has no special effects. Which is interesting; they do well with it. It’s a ghost premise. That’s one of the types of supernatural things that you can pretty easily do without any special effects. They have this odd thing where, when they want ghosts to interact with objects in the living world, they just make a copy of them. So that we can show our ghosts do all of the normal things they would do by moving things around and then nobody in the living world actually sees it because the ghost has their own copy of this popcorn that they’re eating.

Oren: Yeah, it’s ghost popcorn now. It also means they don’t have to do like a scene from the living person’s perspective where we see a bunch of stuff levitating because that would cost an amount of money. Probably not a lot, but some money. And we’re not here to spend money. The ghosts don’t have any flashy powers or abilities. Very focused on the characters. I might even call it character-driven.

Chris: Oh no.

Wes: Oh Oren, don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Chris: No, Oren, don’t. We can’t. No. In School Spirits, it’s about a ghost who wants to solve her own murder. So she dies. Most ghosts remember how they died, but she doesn’t remember how she died and she really wants to know. In most murder mysteries, you would need to do something else to raise the stakes and the urgency because, if it’s just one murder, there’s nothing to anticipate as far as somebody else getting murdered. That’s why we still have so many serial killers running around in our shows, so that we can believe that something else will happen that’s bad if we don’t find who murdered the person who’s already dead. But in this case we don’t have that, but it still works, you know, very well by focusing on the drama aspect. The main character, Maddie, who’s dead, she has very strong feelings and that’s why it’s beneficial to have her around because she could be gone and other characters could be solving her murder, but because she wants to know who killed her, it’s much more personal. If my boyfriend killed me, ugh. If my mother killed me, ugh. That’s a big deal. And we do have some stakes related to “Maybe she’ll be able to pass on” or “Maybe she’ll get stuck.” For her, it’s really about her personal happiness. And then we have a variety of other characters that we care about. All of them have just enough flaws that allow us to imagine it’s possible they might have killed her, but are overall still interesting, sympathetic people. The show really focuses on that attachment aspect so we just care who did it.

Oren: Although, interestingly, this is one of the things that would make the show, I think, very difficult to write as a novel. And I’m going to try to avoid any real spoilers here, because everything we’ve told you so far is like in the first two minutes of the first episode. It’s just part of the premise. It follows characters around who are still active suspects so that we can get to know them and build attachment to them. That would be really challenging in a book. The book would have to follow the character but not tell us what they were thinking, because if it told us what they were thinking, it would be too obvious whether or not they were the killer. And that’s just very challenging. Not impossible, but challenging.

Chris: Generally, showing what’s in a character’s head is how you get that strong attachment in a narrated work. In a visual work, you have actors. In this case, like Christian Flores, who plays Simon. Just amazing acting on his part that really gets you to like the characters. He plays like the one character that you never suspect of murdering her, because that’s not his role in the show. But we still have some great actors who are bringing these characters to life, and if we were in a narrated book and we just saw them from the outside and we didn’t get to watch their nuanced facial expressions, it would be really hard to build that level of attachment. The show also does well with creating episode arcs so that each episode has a smaller problem that gives us some tension. Simon is going to confront somebody who he thinks could be the killer, and we’re worried about his safety. Or we have tense social situations, that kind of thing. And so that’s how the show manages to do very well with much lower stakes than we would usually need for our kind of murder mysteries, because it really focuses on that drama aspect.

Oren: And on Maddie’s side, very often her investigations and trying to figure out what’s going on require her to get to know the other ghosts. And you know what that means? Drama! And that’s perfect and it’s just suited to what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t have a big flashy exterior plot that the drama is distracting us from, because the exterior plot is, first of all, much lower in stakes, but also it’s part of the drama, and it just works really well and you should go watch it if for no other reason so that you can come back and give us our own cup of holistic depression by telling us you didn’t like it. Wouldn’t that be sweet? The important part is that Paramount Plus would still get your viewership numbers.

Chris: Another one I think is really worth mentioning that made me think about this for the first time is Paper Girls, which is on Netflix.

Oren: No, it’s on Amazon, I think.

Chris: This one is based on a comic book as opposed to School Spirits, which weirdly is going to be a graphic novel but is not one yet.

Wes: Based on the forthcoming? Is that possible?

Oren: It’s based on a graphic novel that doesn’t exist yet, which is the weirdest idea I have ever heard.

Wes: I feel like that happened with 2001 Space Odyssey. It’s like he did the movie and wrote the book like at the exact same time.

Oren: I’m pretty sure the only reason it says that is to boost sales of the graphic novel so that, when the graphic novel comes out, people who watch the show will be more likely to know about it. But anyway, that’s School Spirits. Now: Paper Girls.

Chris: Which is based on a comic book.

Oren: Actually based on a comic book.

Chris: And it’s got time travel in it and it’s about four girls that hop around in time and they meet their future selves. And it does technically have a high-stakes arc in it, but it’s bad. We don’t really care about that. Mostly the problem with the external arc is that these teenage girls, they just don’t have any way to affect it. They don’t have any agency in it and so it just doesn’t feel like it really matters, because they can’t do anything and it’s just annoying when it comes in. But the time travel is just used so they can encounter their future selves and be disillusioned or disappointed in some way. And so they travel around and then argue with their future selves. Oftentimes about, “You didn’t accomplish the things I expected you to accomplish.” “You didn’t keep in touch with family members.”

Oren: The show is definitely at its strongest when it’s just about these four girls being stuck in a time period they’re not familiar with and trying to navigate that. When the evil time cops show up, protagonists can’t do anything against that, so they’re just going to hang out, I guess, for a while. And that’s boring. I would have liked this so much more if there just weren’t evil time cops and this was just a natural phenomenon that had accidentally sent the girls hopping through time.

Chris: One of the girls jumps to the future and discovers that she’s a lesbian. It’s something she did not previously know about herself. Fairly dramatic for her. And that’s something she has to think about.

Oren: You have one character who meets her future self and is, “On the one hand, you’re everything I wanted to be; on the other hand, you didn’t do any of the things I wanted.” And that’s complicated and it’s neat and the characters are always like stressed out and being crappy to each other, but like also trying to help each other, which is very sweet. They do a really good job of making that seem compelling and not just like characters being rude for no reason.

Chris: The drama that happens between the teenage girls definitely feels like it’s done well. Where they can be mean to each other; at the same time they are also going through a very stressful experience. You don’t really hold it against them in the same way, and they’re trying in many cases to get along, even if they don’t always get along. We also have a really neat scene where one of the girls has her period for the first time and doesn’t know what to do, and the other girls like go and steal some tampons for her. That’s not really a great place to start. So then they go steal some pads for her. I think it’s how that sequence works out. Frankly, we need more things like that.

Oren: Because Mac’s the best and has your back, no matter what’s going on.

Chris: So that one was really good because it really felt that the time loops were uniquely set up to do these personal journeys. Honestly, the kind of time war plot was just window dressing.

Oren: It just feels unnecessary. You don’t need that to keep the girls together, because they’re gonna stick together, because they’re the only ones who know about each other. They don’t want to leave and then be stuck in a time they don’t understand without, like, anyone who knows what’s going on. So even if they argue, you have a pretty good reason for them to stick together. Except for when one of them like dramatically leaves and the other three are like, “We were mean to her; we need to go find her.” That’s also a thing you can do. So you don’t like need the threat of the time cops to keep them together. Would you consider Interview with the Vampire to be a supernatural drama?

Chris: I think I would. Especially the first season, that we have on AMC, or like the first half. Because later there’s a little bit more life or death stakes with enemy vampires. But certainly in the beginning, definitely does a really good job. You could still have it be a story about abuse if they weren’t vampires. But I do think that the fact that they’re vampires matters, because it changes the nature of the story and the dynamics of the abuse and the kind of control dynamic. They also have some interesting things that they do with it. They can read each other’s minds. except for Lestat can’t read the minds of the vampires he’s created. But they can read each other’s minds. Which is interesting; it allows them to have private conversations where they scheme. But there’s also a way that he spies on them by getting another vampire that he created to do it. It builds up to life or death stakes, but those stakes come naturally out of the drama as the situation between the characters escalates. Of course, Lestat in the beginning has to deal with things like, his family is now very suspicious of him and he’s trying to maintain his relationship with his family. But he can’t show up to family events during the day.

Oren: We’re talking about Louis, right? Not Lestat?

Chris: Yeah. That just creates a lot of very personal conflict for him. What about The Good Place?

Wes: What’s the supernatural element? They’re dead. Spoiler.

Chris: Being in heaven slash hell probably qualifies.

Wes: I guess. Sure.

Chris: The Good Place is interesting because, every time they want to reset the drama, they erase the characters’ memories.

Wes: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: Or move them somewhere else. Obviously, it’s a comedy and it has some higher stakes in that they could end up in hell and that would be a problem. But at the same time, it uses that as a premise for why the characters get together and they’re supposed that, “Hey, this is your soulmate,” pushes them together in a way that gets the drama going.

Wes: Probably should just toss a spoiler warning on here. As things progress in the seasons and they do get wiped, but then get brought back and recharged. But the relationships between them, despite what’s going on around, still resurface in meaningful moments. And in meaningful moments that do affect the plot and the other characters. Like in the episode when they all become Janets, Eleanor starts losing herself. That moment with Chidi bringing her back to herself, acknowledging their relationship, I thought it was actually quite well done. Plus they all got to be Janets for a while. That was hilarious.

Chris: They have good relationships in The Good Place, but I think the character arcs is really where it stands out.

Wes: Yes.

Chris: Because the whole premise is that they need to somehow become better people to avoid going to hell. And so that really puts the focus on their personal progress and adds stakes to their personal progress, which would otherwise be more difficult to do.

Wes: And that also is important, just how the show even concludes that you have to better yourself to not end up going somewhere bad. The comedy aspect has conflated a little bit. Still works.

Chris: It’s interesting because The Good Place is reinvented so often to keep everything going. When they finally, for instance, spend a while on Earth, that’s a new way for us to explore the characters and their backstories and why they ended up the way they were. And see what would have happened if their lives had played out differently. Each time we change things around, we get to see a different aspect of the characters.

Oren: Beyond just talking about different examples, which admittedly is very fun, what exactly do you need for a supernatural drama? We talked a little bit about how you don’t want a super high-stakes overriding plot, because then, if you stop to take time away from that to do some drama, it’s going to feel like a distraction. So what other requirements do we need?

Wes: Vampires.

Oren: Yeah, obviously.

Chris: Most of the ones that we see that have good drama, one of the keys is making sure that you have strong characters that have significant flaws that can help drive the drama. At the same time, still being people that you can care about. Which is the real trick. A lot of times, people have trouble writing characters that have reasons to fight with each other without going too far and making their fights seem forced and petty. Any kind of drama needs that kind of character work so you have a reason for them to fight in the first place and differences between them without making it feel overdone or comical. In Paper Girls, where we have these teenage girls and we have issues where one of the girls has been living in poverty and she has issues, and she says a few anti-Semitic comments, which are not great, but at least we call her out. That’s probably not an issue I would recommend most people cover.

Oren: Yeah, it takes a little bit of care, that one.

Chris: But we have another girl who’s just a little bit overly enthusiastic. She’s super academic, needs everything to be done. You can take that a little too far. You know, the girl who feels like she’s forgotten. People call her the new girl, don’t know her name. They all have their personal issues for us to bring out and work on. Similarly, School Spirits. For that one to work, we have to, again, have all these reasons that we create to think that somebody might kill Maddie. And for instance, her boyfriend, which we bring up, is a bad boy. You could understand what’s attractive about him, but then you can easily twist that around and be like, “Okay, how bad is he?” And was he messed up enough that he might have hurt her?

Oren: We’re not gonna say, because you’ll have to watch it to find out.

Chris: Definitely, the characters that have big enough problems that you can actually do a drama with them and have that be meaty is also another requirement. Most of these works have some level of, “What are the stakes of the drama?” Oftentimes, it is an important relationship. Why does their happiness depend on this happening? For Paper Girls, you can understand why it’s a really big deal for them if they become entirely disillusioned by their future selves and who they are and how that reflects upon their feelings about themselves. In School Spirits, of course, we have this murder and Hattie’s happiness is really at stake with who murdered her. Interview with the Vampire has some pretty high stakes. Good Place again attaches “Do they go to hell?” to its drama as stakes. So that’s definitely an opportunity that you can use with supernatural drama that you would not get otherwise, is to attach some kind of supernatural stakes to your character interactions.

Oren: You also just want to make sure that your supernatural setup is actually designed to promote drama. You can easily end up with –I’ve seen this in client manuscripts even– a setting that’s supposed to be full of social drama, but like the supernatural elements are kind of scattershot or are like a magic school where you’ve got vampires and werewolves and harpies and they’re all hanging out. And so that in itself doesn’t really use the magic to drive the drama. That’s just having people with different power sets. On its own, that’s not really enough and you’re likely to end up caught in the issue that other shows have had, where it just seems like the external plot is bigger and more important. And then the other thing of the device that I would suggest is: you’re probably still going to have an external plot and you’re still going to want to resolve that at some point. I’m not just talking about Fruits Basket here, but I am talking about Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket had this external plot of the curse and how that’s going to cause a lot of problems, and Toru at one point is like, “I’m going to break the curse,” and then she does not do that or take any steps towards doing that, and we just forget she ever said that.

Chris: The odd thing about Fruits Basket is that the characters all end up bringing their own curse by just like getting over their personal issues and Toru goes around helping people get over their personal issues, but Toru never helps them break their curse. Why didn’t we just fit those two things together? Why didn’t we more explicitly say, “Okay, they manage to get free of the curse once they get over their personal issues; Toru’s going to go around and just assist them in some way”? And therefore we have stakes to her helping them and stakes to those character interactions. But no.

Oren: It does sound obvious when you say it that way.

Chris: It does sound really obvious, but that’s just not how it works.

Wes: That’s Chris’s supernatural power.

Oren: We’re nearly at the end of the podcast, so which of us was going to overthrow you again?

Chris: If you would like a chance to overthrow me, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: We’re going to have to add so many patron tiers at this point. Just creating work for ourselves, I tell you.

Chris: Look, I have to work that promo into the end of each podcast, so there you go.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who we are very grateful have not tried to overthrow us. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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

We talked about The Mandalorian back when there was just one season, but now there’s a whole lot more of it. Also, all the characters have names now, so that’s neat. Join us as we discuss the highs of season two, the mids of season three, and whatever the heck was happening in The Book of Boba Fett. This is the way.

• The Mandalorian 

Generously transcribed by James. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m your host, Wes. With me today is…

Oren: Oren.

Wes: And…

Chris: Chris.

Wes: And we do an audio podcast, but not like it would matter even if we did a video one. You would never see our faces because we never take our helmets off. Because we are true Mandalorians!

Chris: This is the way.

Wes: This is the way.

Wes: Or we are French house funk music artists, Daft Punk, who are also Mandalorians. The key thing here is – it’s complicated. Look, if you just like having stuff over your face, you’re probably a Mandalorian according to some. This is the way.

Oren: The important thing is that if we do have to take our helmets off, we can go and have a little swim in a neat lake and then it’ll be cool. We’ll all be fine.

Wes: This is true. It’s really just encouraging hygiene in an otherwise increasingly gritty Star Wars universe.

Oren: Everything’s real. There’s a lot of dirt now. A lot of dust everywhere.

Wes: Chris and Oren talked about the first season of The Mandalorian many moons ago, and there’s been two seasons since. So, we thought we would catch up, with probably more complaints than anything else, because quite a bit has happened with the show. And there are more shows and spinoff shows of all kinds of things in this ever-expanding, questionable content realm of Star Wars.

Oren: I went back. I don’t usually do this for podcasts that we’ve done in the past, but I felt like I should this time. I went back and looked at what we said, and I noticed we had a few predictions. And it’s interesting to look at which ones came true.

Wes: All right, share them.

Chris: Let’s hear it.

Oren: So first, we predicted that The Mandalorian would become the flagship of the franchise, which it did. It’s not only huge, but it has so far spawned one show, which we don’t like talking about, and another show that will hopefully be better. That one starts this year. That’s the Ahsoka story, which is going to also be like Rebels season five and also the film reboot of the Thrawn series. It’s a lot.

Chris: They’re making it sound doomed, Oren.

Oren: It’ll be great.

Chris: Just back off a little bit.

Oren: What could go wrong?

Chris: It doesn’t sound good.

Oren: We predicted that Grogu was going to have problems once his arc of trying to find a teacher or trying to learn to use his powers finished, and boy were we right.

Chris: Absolutely correct.

Oren: For this last one, hey, we’re not infallible. We predicted that Cara Dune would be a cool character with a long history in the franchise.

Chris: Oh, man.

Oren: Oh, no. Oh, no.

Chris: Sweet summer children that we were.

Oren: And I will point out that from a storytelling standpoint, we were definitely correct. They were planning to have her be the star of her own show, but then things happened, which I’ll put in the show notes if you don’t know, and that didn’t occur. Fortunately, I don’t think there was any way we could have predicted that. Those were our Mandalorian season one predictions.

Wes: On the whole, pretty good, you guys.

Chris: I think it also might be worth mentioning the fact that Boba got his own show since then.

Oren: Yeah, he did.

Chris: Since we spent a fair amount of time on our Mandalorian podcast just talking about the fact that Mando was not quite Boba Fett, and how weird that was, and all of our theories for why they just didn’t use Boba Fett, and possibly some of the story constraints that they had for Boba Fett were reasoned, because when we actually got Boba Fett, it was just the worst.

Oren: Actually, one reason that I did not think about at the time, but that may have been a contributing factor, is that they felt like if they were going to use Boba Fett, they had to use the same actor who played Jango Fett in the prequels.

Because they did that! It’s the same guy. And I would not have expected that. I assumed they would just have recast him, but it’s possible that they just didn’t think that actor was right, and they wanted Pedro Pascal, because Pedro Pascal has never met a special orphan he could not escort somewhere.

Chris: It’s true. Yeah, that could be it.

So, the Mandalorian is not as good as it was. It’s not terrible like the Book of Boba Fett, but also, I have to say, wasn’t a good sign that the same team who did the Mandalorian also did Book of Boba Fett.

Wes: Right. And we have to talk about Book of Boba Fett, because it has two full episodes dedicated to the Mandalorian story.

Oren: Or here’s an idea. We could just not include the parts where we talk about those episodes, and then just keep going, assuming that everyone already knows what we’re talking about.

Chris: We’ll talk about them in a different podcast. I’ll be like a guest on somebody else’s podcast, and then I’ll talk about that part.

Wes: Way to stay true to canon. There we go.

Oren: I do think that we should mention that, and I know Season 3 is fresh in our minds, but I don’t want to neglect Season 2, because that wasn’t even out when we first talked about the Mandalorian.

Wes: Right, yeah.

Oren: And I think Season 2 is generally probably the strongest.

Wes: It’s good. Especially like, the finale of that is great. I really enjoyed that one.

Chris: Yeah, I loved the Season 2 finale, even though it’s CG. It made me feel like the Force was mystical again.

Wes: Yeah.

Chris: Watching the end of Season 2.

Oren: Yeah, I had some trouble with the premise of, we need to find Baby Yoda a Jedi to train them, and apparently no one in this setting knows who Luke Skywalker is.

Oren: That was a little weird to me, but whatever. Once I accepted that, I enjoyed that quite a bit. I thought having Luke show up to murder a bunch of Sith battle droids was fun.

I don’t like CGI Luke. He’s like a perfect replication of Mark Hamill. If Mark Hamill couldn’t act, is what that looks like to me. But he was fine. He was very minimal. He didn’t talk much. It’s not like in the Book of Boba Fett, where he’s starting his own cult.

That was also where we met Ahsoka.

Wes: Yeah, she was in Season 2, the first half of the season. Because she got to drop that good line during that pretty awesome duel with the person that had the beskar spear, and the whole like, where is Admiral Thrawn? I thought that was kind of a cool nod to her forthcoming show.

Chris: And Mando got the beskar spear for a while, and I thought that was neat.

Oren: We had a funny little Boba Fett fake out, where it was like, there’s a guy with Mandalorian armor, but he’s not a Mandalorian. It’s like, okay, is that Boba Fett? And it’s like, look, he’s got Boba Fett’s helmet. And it’s like, is that Boba Fett? No, it’s not Boba Fett. He got the armor from some Jawas. Oh, okay.

Chris: Although I do have to remind you that was also the season when Grogu ate some poor woman’s eggs.

Wes: Oh my gosh, yeah.

Oren: Don’t do that, Grogu.

Wes: It’s like, we know that Star Wars likes their cute, weird aliens and their ha-ha funny bits, but this is like, the whole point of that episode was, hey, escort this woman and her offspring to this planet to reunite with her partner. They’re just getting consumed by Baby Yoda.

Oren: Don’t do that. That was not funny.

Chris: That was humor that relied on the audience not empathizing with this woman who was in a kind of bad place and was trying to travel across the galaxy to get back together with her mate so that they could have kids, and it was a real struggle. We had to not empathize with her to find Grogu eating her eggs funny.

Oren: That just seems like a bad concept.

Wes: Yeah, not a great premise.

Oren: I did love how they said M-Count because even Filoni is not ready to use the word Midi-Chlorians.

Wes: Nor should he.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, he clearly loves all aspects of Star Wars canon. He wants all of it, but even he knows that if he says Midi-Chlorians, people will be upset. So now it’s M-Count. What is an M-Count? Who knows, it’s something.

Wes: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

Oren: The Razor Crest exploded, which I was honestly surprised by. You don’t normally see main character ships explode.

Wes: No, that was cool, and then they really dropped the ball replacing that one.

Oren: Yeah, I was like, what ship is he going to get to replace it with? And it’s like, he’s going to get a single-seat fighter? That’s a weird ship for a bounty hunter to have.

Chris: Yeah, it’s cool looking, but it’s not very practical.

Oren: Somehow, he knew he wasn’t going to do any bounty hunting in season three. He foresaw that.

Wes: Kind of funny too, because they blow up his ship, and then he gets another ship that is mostly just, hey, remember the prequel trilogy, I guess? It’s such a downgrade, and granted, I think we all really love his, what’s it called, Oren? The rifle that he has in season one?

Oren: Oh, his disintegration gun.

Wes: Yes, that is amazing. And yes, he loses that, but he gets the beskar spear, and then he gets the Darksaber. So it’s, oh, okay, cool weapon upgrade, despite losing the rifle that could destroy anything. The ship was like, no, you get this tiny thing that I guess goes really fast.

Oren: Yeah, it’s super OP, apparently. This is always a problem that Star Wars has.

Star Wars has an issue where it has its characters fight way too many enemy soldiers. This is the first time I think we’ve seen it really happen in space to this degree, because we haven’t had that many space battles where the protagonist is by themself. But in season three, suddenly, the Mando was fighting like six other ships, and it’s like, that seems like too many. It doesn’t seem like he should be able to beat that many other ships. He’s a bounty hunter. He’s not the Red Baron.

Oren: For the record, the Red Baron couldn’t have beat six other planes either.

He would have run away, is what he would have done in that situation.

Wes: But at least he never took his goggles off. This is the way.

Oren: Oh, the important thing is that at the end of season two, Moff Gideon was defeated really thoroughly and so we never saw him again.

Chris: Oh yeah, that guy’s never coming back.

Oren: He’s gone. It would be a really bad decision to bring him back as a villain for season three.

Chris: Wah-wah[sad noise].

Wes: And then to not only bring him back but do a bunch of mysterious buildup and then like right towards the finale, have him and his shadow council and he’s making demands of them and it’s like, he’s a loser. There’s no way he’s going to win.

Chris: Literally he lost.

Wes: And then pulling in the Praetorian guards as well. They’re like, they dress in red and they’re badasses. Except this child Yoda can evade them forever, apparently.

Chris: And now it’s canon that he’s a Sith wannabe.

Wes: There it is.

Chris: He’s literally a Sith wannabe. He acts like it, he looks like it, and it’s canonical.

Oren: It also just dramatically feels like some scenes happened in the wrong order. Because first we have Gideon tracking where Mando is. So normally you would have that scene as a prelude to the bad guy being like, aha, I shepherded you into a trap or something to fight you on my terms. But no, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Din and Grogu end up in a room full of Moff Gideon clones who they immediately destroy because for some reason Gideon has a button for that. Then they go and fight Gideon and Gideon’s like, no, I had this whole clone plan. I was going to do clones.

Chris: How could you destroy all my clones?

Wes: My poor clones. They had the one thing that I never had. The Force. It’s like, this is not a Jedi story. We don’t care.

Oren: Why are we explaining this plan after it’s already failed? What is even happening here? It feels like a D&D dungeon where the players went into the rooms in the wrong order and the GM just couldn’t react quickly enough.

Oren: And so players, like, diffuse the boss’s big plan to rule the world before they even meet the boss. I could buy that in a D&D game. Things happen. It’s really weird that it happened in a scripted television show.

Chris: Maybe one of those clones will survive and then next season we’ve got Moff Gideon clone.

Wes: Oh my God. Don’t. No. Chris.

Chris: But he’ll be an actual Sith. Won’t that make him great?

Wes: There it is. He’s probably just coming back anyway. Something about his stupid beskar Sith suit is going to somehow keep him alive.

Chris: I’m trying to think of why do that with the clones. Why bring in all of those clones only to destroy him? The only thing I can think of is that somehow we’re going to save one.

Wes: And so are we to assume that his cloning projects with Dr. Pershing in the earlier seasons, was that self-serving for him the whole time? Or were those meant to be Palpatine clones?

Oren: I honestly don’t know.

Chris: Why not both?

Wes: I guess why not both. And I guess, yeah, I did bring up Pershing.

Chris: Oh yeah, we’ve got the Andor episode in Mandalorian. Not only are there Mandalorian episodes in Book of Boba Fett, but there is an episode- it’s not actually Andor because it doesn’t have any of the Andor characters, but it’s a very Andor episode where we just hang out with other characters to maybe establish a minor villain for next season, I guess?

Wes: Not only that, but the runtime on that was twice as long as the preceding episode.

Chris: Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it? Just like the clones, why are they here? What do we want with them?

Oren: It was so weird because it was like, hey, I bet you all want to know what happened to Dr. Pershing. I’m like, who?

Chris: Oh yeah, that guy. The glasses guy who liked Baby Yoda but was also not willing to stand up for him. I remember him, I guess.

Oren: Doesn’t help that this episode is part of the current trend in shitty-ifying the Republic. Not only is it super ineffective, and it can send some bored X-Wing cops to harass Din once in a while, but it can’t do anything. And also, it has an amnesty program.

Chris: They don’t let people use their names, they go by numbers. It’s like, what?

Oren: They don’t even establish if the people in this program committed actual crimes.

Chris: Or they just happened to work for the Empire.

Oren: Yeah, it’s like most people were probably in the Imperial military at some point, guys. That’s how giant militaries work.

Ugh, that was so weird and I hated it.

I like the bad guy in that episode. She’s cool. I hope we see her again. That actor was having fun. She can be the villain of season four for all I care.

Chris: I’m wondering if that’s the minor villain that entire episode was meant to set up. I think we probably could have set her up in less time. There had to be a better way. There had to be a better way.

Wes: The whole Pershing story, too, in that sets up even more questions like about their saying, hey, the Republic is actually not that great. But also showing him give this heartfelt speech about why he does what he does to try to like clone organs and save lives and stuff. And to think that no one wants to use any of that technology.

Oren: No, they hate it.

Wes: What? He’s literally talking about saving lives by cloning hearts and other kinds of organs and practicing medicine and everybody’s like, haha, go enjoy your amnesty program, you Imperial loser.

Oren: You absolute weirdo. Yeah, no, that was so weird.

Also, if you step out of line – because I guess your counseling session with the question repeater droid wasn’t enough – if you step out of line, they put you in the brain frying machine.

Wes: Oren, it’s not a mind flayer. It’s not a mind flayer. Don’t worry about it.

Oren: Like best case scenario, it rewrites your brain against your will. Worst case scenario, it kills you.

Wes: I didn’t like that episode, but I did really like that they had a Mon Calamari telling him that thing was OK.

Wes: That was a hilarious decision. I mean, that joke was just peak. I lost it. I saw this nod to Admiral Ackbar. It’s a trap. And this Calamari saying, I actually find it quite soothing.

Oren: That was pretty funny. That was the best part of the whole episode. It’s still a terrible episode.

Wes: The whole thing with the Republic being like, we don’t have the resources to protect the outer systems. And it’s like, here, we have an entire planet full of star destroyers that we’re sending to the scrapyard. Maybe use some of those just a thought. I don’t know. I’m just spit-balling here.

Wes: Maybe that’s where the First Order got all their ships. They’re like, oh my God, can you guys believe they’re not using these things?

Oren: Part of this does seem like it’s a weird attempt to retroactively set up the First Order. And I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I just wish they wouldn’t bother.

Chris: Can we just forget that? Can we just forget that happened, please? That’s all we want.

Oren: Nothing about the First Order makes any sense and attempts to explain it are just going to make less sense.

Chris: I just want a Star Wars story that lets me forget about all the bad parts of Star Wars.

Wes: Is that so much to ask?

Chris: Just leave it alone. Let’s just go to a new planet and just not interact with the rest of it for a while. Make it a distant memory first, please. But speaking of bad things, I think we have to talk about droid oppression.

Oren: Oh boy.

Chris: Sorry to rain on your parade here.

Wes: I like how they were like, hey, you’re going to love this episode because Jack Black and Lizzo. I’m sorry, are we excusing all this racism because these celebrities are guest starring?

Chris: I did like Jack Black and Lizzo, that specific part, but woo, uncomfortable episode.

Oren: I love how back in the day they gave us Solo, where it was like, there’s a droid who wants to be free. Isn’t that hilarious? And I’m like, all right, this is surely the worst Star Wars is ever going to get with its droids. And then they got this episode, and it was like, Din Djarin, you shouldn’t be racist against droids because they love being servants. They love it so much.

Wes: They feel so bad for our frail little meat bodies. They just want to help us.

Oren: If we could have given them, like, a sense of superiority about it, that would actually have made it a little better. Instead, it was just like, yes, we love having your boot on us, humans. Please press harder. The worst.

Chris: Having Mando hate droids was just always a bad idea for this show because in this context, droids are slaves. They’re definitely an oppressed group. I mean, just to be clear, at Mythcreants we do talk about how you can use mindless machines if you want enemies to mow down or what have you.

But in the Star Wars setting, droids are definitely meant to come off as people. We’re supposed to get attached to them, care about them. And so that’s why it’s really unacceptable in this setting that they’re property.

And having Mando hate on them just, oof, in season three, even before we get to the Lizzo Jack Black episode, we have this whole scene where he buys this droid who doesn’t really want to endanger its life doing what he wants it to do. And so then he has to order it to here. It’s too dangerous for me to go in those caverns. So I want you to do it as my canary in the coal mine. Ugh, this is deeply uncomfortable.

Oren: So out of character for Din too. Since when has Din ever been like, I don’t know guys, that might be dangerous. I think I’m going to stay in the ship.

Wes: Yeah, exactly.

Oren: Are we talking about the same Din Djarin? If anything has been established about him until this point, I would have expected his droid racism to manifest as, no, I’m not putting an astromech in my ship, I don’t trust it. As opposed to, I’m going to buy an astromech and then bully it into taking some atmospheric readings for me. Do you trust that those readings are accurate, Mando? Because you don’t seem to trust droids any other time.

Chris: And then there’s also the fact that Baby Yoda is walking around in the corpse of IG-11.

Oren: Yeah, but that did generate a lot of memes. So can we really say it was bad?

Chris: Don’t get me wrong, I think giving Baby Yoda a robot suit was a great idea. It makes Grogu a little more useful. And also, then we can give him the yes-no without getting him on the speaking path. Because we don’t really want him to speak still, because he’s supposed to be a cute little baby.

Wes: The yes-no was, that was brilliant.

Chris: It was priceless. Yeah, it was really very toddlerish. It was perfect.

But why did we choose a character that died for that? And so much time was spent in season 3 with, no, I want to rebuild this droid who’s my friend. And they make it very clear to Mando that, okay, but the memory chip is completely fried, so it just would not be the same person. It’s, no, still want to rebuild it. It’s like, feels like desecrating some poor robot corpse at this point.

Oren: Real weird if you realize that IG-88 was basically a person who saved Din’s life several times. Speaking of droids and going to Mandalore, let’s talk about Bo-Katan, shall we?

Wes: Ah, yes.

Oren: How do we feel about Bo-Katan? What are our thoughts on Bo-Katan?

Wes: We knew she would show up after season 2’s entry and failing to get apparently the thing that she had to have to unite the Mandalorian people.

Oren: Yeah, but they’re real big on proper blade custody transfers.

Wes: Exactly.

Oren: Which I always thought was weird, because those Mandalorians are always making fun of the Death Watch for being too committed to their traditions.

Wes: Gosh, I’m so glad you said that.

Oren: Don’t get me wrong, they could be hypocrites. I’m open to the possibility that they actually have this tradition that they really care about and not others, but I just would have liked someone to point it out, someone on the Death Watch to be like, okay, if we’re the ones who care about tradition so much, why does it matter how she got the Darksaber? And then they’d get all defensive, and, well, because that’s different. Shut up.

Wes: I was here for Bo-Katan being the Mandalorian of that season. I’m fine with that. I think Katie Sackhoff does a great job in that role, and I would have rather just followed her from the start. Din and Grogu didn’t do anything really that interesting.

Chris: I like her as a character. I would have preferred if she had been useful to the plot in that she, okay, she’s in charge, and then what we do is have Mando go on missions for her, and the show focuses on the missions that he’s doing for her.

She’s a leader that we can believe in so that we want him to succeed on his missions, which are helping her, but the focus is still on Mando.

I liked her, but I would have preferred to keep her main character, and if we wanted to do her as a main character of a show, to just give her her own show.

Oren: We are missing one very important fact that makes Bo-Katan important for this season, which is that Katie Sackhoff could actually be in the studio to film, and Pedro Pascal could not.

Wes: Yeah, that probably explains a lot.

Oren: There’s a reason he doesn’t take off his helmet this season, or at least not in a way that we can see his face.

Wes: I remember somebody speculating too, as episodes were being released, that Dave Filoni voiced Paz—wait, what’s his name?—the bulky Mandalorian with the massive gun.

Oren: Oh, I just called him the Heavy.

Wes: The Heavy, I like that. So as the episodes for this season were coming out, there was speculation that the character Paz Vizsla, who, aka the Heavy, the Mandalorian that never gets tired carrying around the biggest gun on the planet. But I guess Jon Favreau had voiced him in the previous seasons, but then that changed to a different actor, so it was like, oh, he’ll probably take his helmet off. They have a different actor, because Favreau’s not going to be behind the mask, probably.

That and a few other things, like knowing that Pedro Pascal was not available, really, it felt like they were just messing with us the whole time.

I think Filoni and Favreau both came out and were like, maybe isn’t the Mandalorian anymore? Maybe there’s others that are Mandalorian. No, we don’t care about that. Be quiet. And then the penultimate episode, The Spies, they really wanted us to believe that the Armorer was a spy for Moff Gideon. And I’m glad she wasn’t.

Oren: I have to admit, I completely missed that part. I do remember now that there’s, oh no, we found a shard of beskar in Moff Gideon’s shuttle that he escaped from. I guess I completely blanked on the possibility they might be making us think that there was a spy among the Mandalorians. Fascinating.

Wes: I think this is where they are being too clever and drawing surprise, drawing on things that are not in the show, but that would be familiar to people that have watched all the other shows. And there’s another Mandalorian character that was team Death Watch, team Darth Maul, who wore a similar colored outfit and was not on team Satine and Bo-Katan. Those creepy long shots of the Armorer suddenly saying, oh, these wounded can’t carry on. Oh, I will take them back to the main ships. Oh, you’re going to go get a secret ambush, but here I go taking these wounded back to the ship. They want to set it up for betrayal. Oh, and she has horns on her helmet, just like Moff Gideon.

So, I don’t like the idea that they were just messing with us because they could. But also, I’m glad that the Armorer was not a spy because I like the Armorer as a really weird character, but a good character. I liked it. Aside from – we have problems with Mandalorian strength and ineptitude. I like her consistent presence throughout the season. And I like how that moment when she asked Bo-Katan if she went in the water and has taken her helmet off since and Bo-Katan’s yes and no. And she’s like, great, you’re Mandalorian, hang out with us. We are friends now. And I was like, oh, okay. Fun moment.

Chris: I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Mandalorians are just very competent. Anybody hang out on a planet where large birds come to eat your children regularly.

Wes: And they have no ships. They have no ships. Where are their ships?

Oren: Where did all these Mandalorians even come from? Because they were all dead last season.

Wes: That’s true.

Oren: That was one of the problems with season two is it killed all the Mandalorians except for the Armorer who somehow survived. Or maybe that happened in season one. I forget. But they were all dead. And now suddenly there are a bunch more and they live on pterodactyl planet and Pterodactyls just come by and grab their kids sometimes. And they don’t even have a guy on lookout.

Wes: It just happens and it always gets away, Oren.

Oren: They also are really confident about how long it will take this pterodactyl to eat the kid. They are really sure they know how long that’ll take.

Chris: Oh, drat. It took one of our kids. I suppose we should do something about it sometime. Oh, Bo-Katan! That’s nice of you to volunteer. We were gonna get around to it eventually.

This is what happens when we really need Bo-Katan to show that she’s useful and the only way we know how to do that is by making everybody else complete incomps.

Oren: They suddenly just forgot how to do anything.

Wes: Which is terrible because the episode where the pirates attack Nevarro, the ground action…

Chris: Oh, that was fantastic.

Wes: Where they’re being like SWAT team Boba Fett.

Oren: Yeah!

Wes: Heck yes! I’m here for this! This is great!

Oren: That was so well choreographed. That whole ground battle was great.

Chris: Definitely an improvement because, again, listen to our podcast episode on season one and we were talking about how bad all the gun battles were. They really cleaned up and improved that since then.

Oren: I’ve even talked about this before is that if you want to make gun battles fun, you have to emphasize movement. People standing behind something and popping up to shoot and then popping back down. That’s not exciting. It will never be exciting. So if you want an advanced technology fight to be exciting, you have to show the characters moving around and flanking each other and using different kinds of weapons. And they did that and it was real fun.

Chris: Best part of season three in my opinion.

Oren: And then at the end, Mando got a nice little house as a reward for all of his work. Because I guess he’s playing a Bethesda video game now.

Wes: He’s got his homestead.

Oren: All right. That is, I think, as much as we have time for. We’re gonna have to end this season of the Mandalorian podcast episodes. We don’t know if there will be more, but if there are, we’ll come back and revisit this in two years.

Chris: If you would like us to remove our helmets, you can support us on patreon.com. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. That definitely makes sense.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a very good patron level. We’ll add that in there.

And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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

One story is good, so wouldn’t two stories be better? And what if you put one story inside the story you already have? That way, your fans don’t have to put down the book if they want to read something else for a while. That’s right, we’re talking about stories within stories: how they work, what their problems are, and when you should use one. Surprising no one, we spend a lot of time talking about authors who’ve gone overboard.

• How to Tell a Story Within a Story

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: Chris. 

Oren: And? 

Wes: Wes. 

Oren: Okay, so for this episode, we’re actually going to record this one for a little while, and then talk about a different podcast that we recorded a while back. Maybe just record that one for a bit. We’ll just do my old Star Trek podcast, as if this was an old Star Trek episode. And then we’ll just come back to the Mythcreant episode and finish it out. Does that sound good? That sounds fun, right? 

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. 

Wes: We gotta fill up this time slot somehow. 

Chris: Look, it’s important that everybody know the backstory of your podcasting career. So we gotta start talking about your previous podcast and then play some of it for a while. It’s just very important information. 

Oren: I think we’re gonna have to go like full immersion and do the original two hour live broadcast setup that we had… for some reason. I still don’t know why. [laughter]

Wes: For the challenge, no doubt. 

Chris: And let’s face it, this podcast would be so much deeper with a framing device. 

Oren: [deep breath] Oh boy. Yeah, I wanted to talk about stories within stories, or nested stories as they’re sometimes called. And the reason is that I read a book that had one recently and it was bad and I’m upset. [laughter] So now I’m gonna make it everyone else’s problem. 

Wes: Oh, and so what book was it? 

Oren: Okay, the book was The Fisherman. It’s a novel that’s supposedly cosmic horror. I have some issues with that label. It’s got weird water stuff, but I don’t think that’s enough to call something cosmic horror. The problem with this one is, so it starts off with this very, very long backstory explanation that explains how these two guys lost their families. That takes a while. And then they go fishing together for a while. And then finally, one of them is, hey, we should go fish in this real weird, mysterious creek that I won’t tell you how I learned where it was. All right, I’m getting into it. 

Chris: I like how this sequence, every time you’re like, okay, once we just get this part done, then I’m sure the story will begin. [laughter] Sure, okay, we need their dramatic backstory. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, maybe the story will start. Okay, well, they’re going fishing, but now they’re going to the creepy fishing hole. So I’m sure the story will start there. 

Oren: Yeah, you would think the story was about to start, but then they stop at a diner and the cook there tells them the backstory of this creek for half of the book. Like, half of the book is just the backstory of why this creek is spooky. 

Wes: Was it actually spooky? 

Oren: No. [laughter]

Wes: Did it ever have a chance, Oren? 

Oren: The parts in the present, when we’re not spending way too much time on backstory, are actually spooky. Most of the time. I’d give it about a 90% spookiness rating. 

Chris: That’s pretty good. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s pretty good. There was one really weird sequence where I think it’s supposed to be spooky, but it’s just gross. But other than that one part, it’s very spooky and weird. The interior backstory is the opposite. 

It’s incredibly dry, and it tells the story of how a Hungarian wizard came to this area of New York and set up shop. And then a while later, a German wizard came and also was there, and they didn’t like each other, and they had a beef, and the German wizard won. And then the Hungarian wizard got banished to another dimension for a while, and he’s still around, and that’s why the stream’s creepy. If it sounds weird and dry, it is. This takes up half of the book, and it just does all of these things that I’m like, why is it doing this? 

First of all, it has too many degrees of separation. So the protagonist is hearing this from a cook who heard it from a minister who heard it from an old lady who heard it from her husband who heard part of the story from the father. 

Chris: Oren, every time you add an additional person, it just gets deeper. 

Oren: Yes, and so I got really confused who the ‘I’ is, because this is all first-person narration, and I’m just like, who is ‘I’? Someone is ‘I.’ Who is talking? 

Chris: One of those people in the chain is ‘I,’ but it’s like a shell game, or passing it back and forth. 

Oren: And it’s barely related to the main story. It does technically explain why this creak is spooky. Other than that, it does foreshadow that this Hungarian guy likes to offer men their dead wives if he’ll help them. That’s a thing he does as an eldritch bargain, which he’s gonna do once we finally get back to the main story, but I don’t think we needed that spelled out for us. It was actually pretty creepy and well-established already. Like, I don’t think I needed that to be spoon-fed to me. That’s a term that people sometimes like to use for stories that over-explain things. 

So this thing has several problems. One, it’s just not very good. If you tried to read this as its own story, you’d be like, what is this? It’s super dry. There’s no suspense. There’s no investment in any real character because we keep hopping around and we get very little characterization from anybody. So it’s just bad. 

Chris: That reminds me, I just have to say, of Ten Thousand Doors of January, where we have this interior story that the protagonist continually reads, and we have to continually read it with her, but it’s one big exposition dump. It does feel, many times when this storyteller changes up the story, they just don’t try the second time around, including stories within stories, right? You didn’t try to make that inner story as engaging as your outer story.

Oren: And it’s also just weird because it’s just, as far as backstory goes, it is so unnecessary. I don’t need to know that a while back, the spooky Hungarian wizard had a beef with a different wizard. I don’t need to know that. All I need to know is that he’s spooky and weird, and that he’s trying to hook the great leviathan who lives in the deep beyond the world. I would really like to know what’s supposed to happen when he does that. The book never establishes that. But regardless, that’s all I need to know. And I need to know that he is offering these two grieving men their wives back if they will help him. That’s the actual premise of the story. I don’t need to know about this German wizard. 

Wes: So the German wizard is the titular fisherman.

Oren: The Hungarian is actually the fisherman.

Chris: Because he’s trying to catch this little leviathan.

Oren: Yeah, because he’s trying to catch the leviathan. That part I actually like. The fishing motif is very cool, which explains why the backstory is so bad, because there’s no fishing motifs in it. It’s just a German wizard. [laughter] And the Hungarian wizard is doing some vaguely bad stuff, and he like turns one of the dead wives in the work camp nearby into a zombie. And the German wizard is like, I guess he should probably not do that. I’ll go mess him up. And then they have a little wizard fight. This is so counter to cosmic horror. Everything is all out in the open. Everything is very dry and matter of fact. That part is not, I don’t think, inherently the fault of it being a story within the story. I think that was just bad writing choices. But you’re not wrong that authors sometimes completely change their style when telling their inner story, and that can be a problem.

Chris: Honestly, it’s similar to POVs, which is one of my grievances against multiple POVs, is that usually the first POV in the book, the storyteller tries really hard to optimize that and make that engaging. And then they just take you for granted when they introduce the second POV. And it’s like, why would I care about this? Which is one of the things that – there’s other problems with multiple POVs. Obviously, we’ve talked about that a lot, but that’s one of the things that makes it worse.

Oren: The other thing that’s hilarious about this is these people, the two guys who are being told this inner story, they don’t know anything about magic at this point. All we know is that there’s a creek that has some kind of mysterious deaths associated with it, and the protagonist knows that his friend is being shady about why he wants to go there. That’s all we know at this point. And so they just go, and this cook just tells them a five-hour story about a German wizard. It’s supposed to be serious and scary, but it is hilarious. Try to imagine how that scene would possibly go.

Wes: Do they just lap it up too?

Oren: Later, they’re like, eh, that can’t have been real. But then they’re all real creeped out by it, because. And the story, the book even implies that they’re supernaturally creeped out by it, because I think later the author realized that he said it took an hour to tell the story, but the actual story takes about four hours to read. That doesn’t make any sense. So he has a little afterwards where the protagonist is like, later on, after all this happened, I was possessed by the spirit of exposition dumps, and I learned all this other stuff, which I have since added to the original story.

Wes: Of course.

Oren: What does that have to do with anything? What even was that?

Wes: It’s like the author got side-railed, went that way, wrote through all of that, then realized what he wanted to actually write about, returned to that, and was like, there’s no way I’m cutting this.

Oren: It does feel like backstory that got out of hand.

Chris: The other thing is that, and I think this is just an impulse to make your story compelling, that when writers put in these stories within the stories, then they’ll have their characters react to the story, right? Because they just heard it. But they always have them be so impressed, and it just comes off like bragging. It’s oh, wow, that dry story about a wizard, little wizard duel, is so creepy, and I’m so in awe. It’s changed me.

Wes: And you’re like, I just read that, and it’s terrible. [laughter]

Oren: I had to read that, man. Don’t tell me that was good. [laughter]

Chris: Which is one of the problems with stories within the stories, is that I think one of the reasons they’re attractive is we want to talk about storytelling because we’re storytellers. And so if we put in stories, then we can talk about stories. But in the majority of cases, this kind of meta-commentary is just very obnoxious. We don’t really want to listen to storytellers wax poetic about storytelling. It’s not very fun. Ten Thousand Doors of January did something similar. Oh, this book, it’s so riveting. It’s just an exposition dump. Or Middlegame.

Wes: But it’s about her father.

Oren: And if you don’t believe in the love story of Ten Thousand Doors, you’re a dirty imperialist.

Wes: I read her, I don’t know if it was immediately her next book, but The Once and Future Witches, as far as I’m aware, it’s what she published after Ten Thousand Doors of January, and still includes stories in stories, but in an effort to draw her main story’s connection, which is basically three sisters who are witches, spoilers – [laughter] if you didn’t get that from the title – to the larger folklore of witches. So periodically throughout this book, there’s just literally a fairy tale. I skipped most of them. I turned the page, oh, this is a fairy tale. Okay, back to the story. I get what you’re doing, but it’s exactly what Chris said. It comes off as pretentious. And sure, there might be enjoyment there, but I want to see what’s going on with these sister witches. I don’t need to read a rehashing of Hansel and Gretel to explain what’s going on with this person.

Oren: Please tell me about the sister witches. That actually sounds interesting.

Wes: Yeah, I did like that a bit. So it opens up with, it’s set in New Salem, and it’s meant to be a suffragette and witches story. So set in New Salem, the youngest sister basically arrives there. She’s got her gnarled staff and she’s 17 and just left home under some odd circumstances because she was the last one there with her dad. And basically finds her sisters and their meeting has this weird magical energy about it. And they accidentally summon the Tower of Avalon for a moment. But then, they get involved in some local politics with a suffragette group, but they’re not willing to take steps. And the young witch is, we have power. Why would we not use it? It follows that trajectory of them forming their own group and then trying to collect more knowledge because the oldest sister is the town librarian and they piece things together. 

Anyway, long story short, big spoilers. The bad guy was one of the first witches with the original three. And so it’s modeled after the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden. So the three, the once witches and the future witches. He is Hansel from the stories who also acquired witch power, but he didn’t stay in the woods with the witch. He learned from somebody that she was bad. And so he killed her, but his sister fled into the woods, becoming the first Maiden. And he just basically used dark magic to keep his body alive and periodically burn witches.

I liked actually quite a bit of it. I really liked how they explained why did they burn witches? And she explained it as originally they burned the witches’ books because that’s where they kept their knowledge. And then they figured if we’re going to kill them anyway, we might as well throw them on there too. But it was more like we’re destroying your knowledge so you can stop this. Stop spreading this kind of stuff, these dangerous thoughts and things like that. In sum, it’s a good book. You could cut out two thirds of it. And that would be great. Because it’s 550 pages, something silly like that. And the whole story could be told in easily 250. That’s my experience.

Chris: It’s a good book, except for two thirds of it.

Wes: Yes. It’s like when you retell it and you’re like, okay, the core of this is good, but I did just skip a bunch of it. I’m liking these parts, skip, skip, and just chugging along because I don’t care about these parts.

Oren: I can see why the author felt the need to put in fairy tales if her bad guy is going to be Hansel, but I promise there was a better way to get that reveal.

Chris: Or just put in one fairy tale. Just put in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You don’t need any of the other ones. The trick to doing a story within a story is that you have to make it matter or else it’s just skippable. And that means that it coming into play somehow changes the outcome of the story. And there’s multiple ways we could do that. Obviously, it can reveal information about the history, and usually if you’re doing that, the character again is also reading, telling the story, listening to it, what have you. They learn something important that’s based on history. They use that information somehow. Method one.

Another method is just to have it impact the character in a way that makes sense. So this one is a little harder. I think it could risk once again getting into the kind of cheesy pretentiousness of having your character be like, oh my gosh, that story is amazing. But I think what you want to do is look at it at a personal level instead of just being like, this is the most incredible story that has ever been written. Just be like, hey, this, I empathize with this character, right? Because it feels similar to my own life. And it got me thinking, and I realized because of this character’s journey that maybe this is what I want to do for myself. So keep it personal instead of just talking about how amazing the story is.

Wes: I like that advice because it seems like sometimes these stories and stories aren’t written for the story or the characters, but the readers. And that’s the wrong approach for sure.

Chris: And then the other one is a little bit more unusual, which is breaking the fourth wall, which you have in The Neverending Story, which I might have to just read that book sometime since I’ve only seen the movie. But that one is just very unusual in that Sebastian, the main character, starts reading a story and then we dive into the story. But then as it goes on, it starts to link him and the story together. So the world starts to, he starts coming into the story world slowly.

Oren: You have a number of stories that use the framing device as a way to insert commentary onto the inner story or the main story, depending on how big your framing device is. The Neverending Story is hard to judge because it’s just silly in a lot of ways and not very well put together. So it’s hard for me to tell how well that strategy would work if it was better presented.

The recent AMC Interview with the Vampire adaptation does something that’s not exactly the same because it’s not a person being literally pulled into a book, but it’s similar in that the reporter is hearing the story from Louis. Louis is clearly lying at some parts and the reporter either calls him on his bullshit or investigates to be like, what’s Louis hiding here? These parts of the story don’t make sense. And that’s really cool. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen that work.

Chris: Yeah, it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen using this for commentary on the inner story seems like it has paid off, especially since that allows the show to clarify that what people are seeing is domestic abuse, which people are bad at recognizing normally.

Oren: It’s helpful that they’re basically doing what you said, Chris, is that they are using this to reveal things about the character and rather than having the reporter be like, wow, Louis, that was the best story I’ve ever heard, or the scariest story I’ve ever heard.

Chris: Which is what the original Interview with the Vampire does. The boy.

Oren: My favorite thing about the new Interview with the Vampire is that the reporter guy is like, yeah, and so when I was like a young kid and heard your story for the first time, I was all like googly eyed and over impressed, but I’m not like that now. I’m snarky and jaded, so you’re gonna have a tougher audience. And it was so great. I loved it so much. 

Chris: Looked at his old work, because this is a different interview. It’s like, thank you. No, it is not an interview. I really appreciate that. [laughter]

Oren: That adaptation is so good. Hey, what if we took everything great about the book and made it better, and either cut or subverted all of the bad stuff? The only way it could be better is if they included Lestat’s dad.

Chris: No, we don’t need Lestat’s dad [she laughs]. 

Oren: Chris, no adaptation has been brave enough to include Lestat’s dad. I won’t stand for it.

Chris: No, that was a good move on their part. But similarly, just going back to The Neverending Story for a second. I do think that the breaking the fourth wall makes sense to me, because it sounds a little cheesy, but they still make it clear, at least in the movie, that the message they’re going for is that imagination is good, and resist calls to give up your wild imagination to be more grounded. And it feels a little fanciful. It’s just like, hey, kids, the message of this story is you should go play with toys and have fun. Or maybe the kids need to read more books, right? Which is the other end is, hey, children, brush your teeth. [laughter] But nonetheless, it has a message that is about the importance of the imagination or of story worlds and books. And so then having a story where Sebastian has to participate in the story he is reading in order to save the story world just fits with that, and I think makes it so that it adds something as opposed to it just having commentary that isn’t useful or doesn’t… You want all parts of a story to be stronger together. And I feel like it fits that criteria. Even if that if you watch the movie, yes, it is a very silly movie. [she laughs]

Oren: One thing that I will advise, and I talk about this in my post from a few years ago on stories within stories, is that if you are planning to put like an entire or at least most of a story inside your book or whatever it is, practice your microfiction. Because that’s what you’re doing, right? Because what you should be doing is it should be short and sweet. I’m just gonna say, don’t do what The Fisherman did. It’s not a good idea. That’s too long. So you’re gonna want it to be much shorter. 

And unfortunately, the example I use in that article is from a franchise I don’t want to give any more airtime to. So instead, I’ll use Bolin’s journals, the one that they find in the minds of Moria. And they don’t read us the whole journal, but they read us a section of it. And it’s real creepy. And it ends with we cannot get out, which is [shudders].

Wes: Very good.

Oren: Gives me shivers constantly. And so that inner story is used for a few things. One, it is used to fill in what happened, which is actually really important. And in the movie, one of the things that’s very confusing is that Moria apparently is super ancient, has been abandoned for a long time. But also there have been dwarves here recently. And it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But in the book, it’s clear that the dwarves are a recent expedition to Moria, which is an ancient, long-abandoned dwarf kingdom. So it gives us some exposition on that. And then it also sets the mood and builds tension as it describes what happened to them and how they all died and how they didn’t make it out and all of that.

Chris: And it’s very relevant for the characters, because if this prior party that came in here died, that means very bad things for them.

Oren: Yeah. So it both gives information that the reader needs, and it is really good at establishing the mood and building the tension of the threat the protagonists are about to face. And it does all that in a very short amount of time. Because if it had been much longer, any tension it had would have worn off because it would have been like, wow, we apparently have time to read this entire thing. 

As opposed to something like the start at The Name of the Wind, which has a framing device. Before we even get to the framing device, we have some randos in a pub telling a story. And it’s short. I’ll give it that. I’ll say that much for it. But it’s otherwise just useless, because it’s just a story about this invincible superhero who nothing bad can happen to.

Chris: And he’s Kvothe, right?

Oren: I don’t know if he’s Kvothe or not, honestly. Kvothe is also like that.

Chris: I don’t know that he’s Kvothe, but that is the thing that struck me about it. Because Kvothe is supposedly really famous elsewhere, hence why he’s changed his name. Slightly. Changed his name slightly. Not enough that would actually disguise him. Just enough to pretend he’s disguised. 

Oren: Especially since his hair is true red. Not like… 

Chris: Red red!

Oren: Yeah, not like fake red people’s hair. No, like real red. You’d think that would make him pretty easy to find. But I think – it’s been a little while since I’ve read this – but I’m pretty sure that story they tell at the beginning predates Kvothe. I think he hears part of it when he’s in his childhood flashback. But I could be wrong. But even if that is Kvothe, it’s just… All it would do… It would be even worse, right? If that was actually Kvothe, and those were things he’s actually supposed to be able to do. The only way that would work is if we told the story about how great Kvothe was, and then the real Kvothe narrated to us about how I actually can’t do any of those things. People just expect that from me. And that might have had some value. But as it is, it’s just worthless. All it does is foreshadow the Chandrians, which is just not worth that much time and energy spent on this.

Chris: Yeah, it’s not an exciting story. It’s not tense. Really. I felt like it did more to establish the magic system, which is maybe what it was for, but I don’t think it had any particular purpose. 

Oren: Right, especially since the magic… The part of the magic system that it establishes is the boring part. There’s two halves of the magic system in Name of the Wind. And there’s the actual, if not rational, at least robust sympathetic magic system that you have to think about, and it has trade-offs, and you have to figure out how to use it. And then there’s the true name system, which is if you know something’s name, you can make it do whatever you want. 

Chris: I understand why people like the true name system, because they seem mystical, then it’s, oh, how do I get something’s name? But they don’t work out very well. Because then you just go around collecting names, and it just becomes uninteresting after that.

Oren: And look, maybe you can do something interesting with actually finding the name, but once you have it, it’s like, all right, now I got this name, and I can basically do whatever I want. I would advise maybe have something a little more interesting happen once you get the name.

Chris: Probably be one part of a bigger system that has other interesting things in it, perhaps.

Oren: Yeah. And then the other method that I talked about in that article is referencing sections of a longer story. And here, you’re not going to put the whole thing.

Chris: This is the Middlegame strategy, just to curse it. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s Middlegame, but also The Magicians, which is not a book I love, but did use this aspect of it fairly well. Because in The Magicians, the inner story is basically Narnia. It’s called Fillory, but it’s Narnia. And The Magicians, although it is pretending to be grimdark wizard school, it’s actually grimdark Narnia. So having the protagonists already be familiar with the fake Narnia story is helpful, because it creates some beautiful dreams they have that the story can then rip to shreds, because that’s what the story is about. And I’m not saying that’s what you should write your story about. I’m just saying that if you want to, this is an effective way to do it.

And they talk about the story, and it becomes clear how it’s important. At first, it’s just like an offhand reference, right? They don’t belabor the point early. They just mention that it’s one of many fantasy books that the protagonist likes. And it comes up more later, once they realize that Fillory is a real place they can go to. And then it sets up the expectations of, oh, it’ll be great, and there will be fauns there, and we’ll be kings. Then they actually go there, [grimdark voice] and everything’s horrible, and the Aslan equivalent ate Lucy’s head. [normal voice] I see what you did there. 

Chris: I feel like one of the issues with Middlegame is that it felt like all of the pieces of the bigger story were meant to be symbolic in some way. And it just came off as too much, right? Like, we’re trying to create a story that is supposed to be from a best-selling series that one of the characters writes. So we’re already putting it on a pedestal by talking about how amazingly popular it is. And then we take little pieces, and they’re supposed to be both from a really compelling story, and supposed to have some deeper encoded symbolism in them. And it only works to the extent that it does, because it’s like when you make up a fantasy chess game, and it’s not really chess. But you’re like, oh, this is a game where all the moves perfectly correspond to the political intrigue in the story. That’s never going to work. You can’t really do that. But you can pretend if you just don’t say what the rules of the game are. 

Wes: Yup.

Chris: Then we can pretend it’s totally analogous. Same with Middlegame’s excerpts. We have these weird excerpts with weird language in them. And no, this is totally evocative of such and such, we swear.

Oren: Yeah, I guess maybe. The weirdest thing about Middlegame is that technically the characters in the book have all read the inner story because it’s a novel that exists in the setting, but they almost never talk about it. So it’s hard for me to tell how it’s supposed to apply to different situations. I just know that each chapter starts with a quote from this book, which took me forever to figure out it was an in-universe book. I thought these were just a completely different set of characters off somewhere else for a while. Which – that book exists. Maguire just went and wrote that as its own story. So I guess at some point it might be funny to go and see if the snippets from Middlegame actually match what’s in the full version that Maguire wrote.

Chris:  I would be surprised if somebody’s reading these books that were written after Middlegame and just be like, okay, that’s cool. Nice text here… huh, we have this weird section where everything just doesn’t fit right and feels really forced. I wonder what that’s about.

Oren: Yeah, it’s like dialogue that was written for the trailer. [laughter] 

Chris: Yeah, dialogue written for the trailer. Huh, that’s weird. 

Oren: It’s like, why did they say that? I don’t know, but it seems like it would sound cool separated from the rest of the story and just set on its own. You’ll be watching an episode of Star Trek and they’ll be doing normal Star Trek dialogue and then suddenly one of the characters will turn to the camera and be like, and that is why we must continue our exploration at all costs. What? What are you talking about, Captain? But that was a line he had to say because it was in the trailer and it looked cool in the trailer. [laughter] All right, now I think our story within a story has come to an end, as is our story outside of a story, because the podcast is over.

Chris: If you enjoy this podcast episode within a podcast episode, please support us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. 

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

It’s time to divide your magic into categories, but what should those categories be? What should they be based on, what powers should they grant, and, most importantly, how well will they fit on an online personality test? Those are all questions to ask of an elemental magic system, and that’s what we’re talking about today. We discuss how many elements a system should have, how to choose them, and why everyone expects four element systems to have a secret fifth element. Plus, what is “beast keeping” anyway?

• The Four Fundamental Forces 

Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Opening Music]

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I am Chris, the mage of plot arcs, and with me is…

Wes: Wes, the mage of red pens. 

Chris: And…

Oren: I am Oren. I have the four elements of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. By their powers combined, I am the standard model of physics. 

Chris: No! You can’t get multiple elements!

Wes: Yeah, boooo!

Oren: Look, I’m going into the standard model state, okay? I could do anything in this state.

Chris: Look, if you’re the avatar or the chosen one, you have to have all of the elements. You can’t just have a separate set of them.

Oren: Look, these are the four fundamental forces, okay? They’re fundamental. You can’t have forces more fundamental than these ones. Yes, I know the standard model doesn’t actually include gravity. I looked this up, but I wasn’t going to let that fact ruin my joke.

Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about elemental magic.

Wes: And so right off the bat, we have to answer the question of what is an element, don’t we?

Chris: Yeah, what is elemental magic, and are sandwiches involved?

Oren: The element of sandwich. It’s definitely- See, I think people are always being like, ‘We could use the actual elements of the periodic table.’ You could, if you’re a coward. What you should do is the elemental groupings of the periodic table, because then you can be an alkaline metal bender and an alkaline earth metal bender, and those will be different, and it’ll take five hours to explain. Then you can be a lanthanides bender. I don’t know what a lanthanide is, I just know it’s one of the categorizations on the periodic table.

Chris: Can I be a noble gas bender?

Oren: Yeah, get that helium.

Chris: I can make people’s voices really high, but I do have trouble exploding anything. Anyway, a magic system could be considered elemental whenever magic is sorted into categories that determine what the magic does- loose definition. So anytime you see a magic system that is sorted into those types of categories, you could call it elemental. Obviously it’s elemental if we have the traditional magical elements like fire and water and there are some trends like elemental systems are more likely to be a little more rational. Not always. They can definitely be very arbitrary, but because there’s such a big tradition of people just controlling their element, we can sometimes be more likely to logically see what a mage is capable of doing and not capable of doing and extrapolating a little bit better. I think partly because an element just narrows it down enough. If you have your mages and they can do absolutely anything, it’s almost impossible to make it rational because there’s no way you can sort all of that out into, ‘Okay, this is exactly how I got this effect.’ If you have all the effects under the sun included in your magic system. Whereas giving it elements oftentimes does narrow down what mages can do. It doesn’t mean they’re not overpowered, but sometimes it narrows it down.

Oren: Yeah, and if you have a story where it’s established that characters can control fire, air, earth, water, whatever, it’s less likely that you’re going to be tempted to suddenly have one of them cast a scrying spell because which element is that? It’s not like you couldn’t figure out a way to do it, but the temptation will be reduced.

Chris: But Oren, I want healing, so I was thinking my water mages would heal people. 

Oren: Ugh…

Wes: The human body is mostly water anyway, Oren. 

Oren: Gosh, man, I’ll never stop being annoyed that Avatar has all of these very substance-based magic effects that are all based on controlling the thing, and then healing, which just does a bunch of unrelated things and they all fall under water for some reason. You should need earthbending to fix bones. Hot take.

Chris: It would have been cool if only the Avatar could heal, because you’ve got to use all the elements together or something.

Oren: I like that, yeah. What I honestly would have done is I would have had different benders specialize in different kinds of healing. That’s what I would have done, and granted, it would have been a little harder in a cartoon. In a book, I think it would have been a lot easier, because you have more time to explain how they’re doing it.

Chris: I would say that’s if you decide you really want magical healing, and that’s the only way you’re going to get it, because I will advise against the, ‘Oh, and people with this element have this power, and then this power, and this power, and they’re not really related to each other, and now we have to give everybody with the other elements the same goodies to make it feel even,’ and so every element is just like a random collection of powers that is really hard to remember, and often feels arbitrary itself. So I would say resist adding too many additional related powers that aren’t really intuitive onto your element, if you can help it. 

Oren: You can also start getting thematic elements if you want. Fire magic is out of hand pretty fast, like Legend of the Five Rings does that with its magic system, where fire magic, yeah, it’s got the obvious stuff of actual fire, but it also makes you smart.

Chris: Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

Oren: Fire magic to get smarter, and air magic makes you better at bows. And I don’t mean because you’re using wind to guide the arrows, that would actually make sense, that air is associated with bows, so if you’re an air shigenja, you can become good at bows.

Chris: Don’t want to make it seem miscellaneous like that. Don’t get me wrong, if you normally have martial artists that control air, earth, fire, water, and you really want healing, and you give them each one healing power, it’s not going to kill you, but pretty soon it’s easy to start adding more and more miscellaneous stuff like that. And also, even the healing powers by themselves just feel a little bit contrived. They don’t quite fit in naturally. So anyway, some advantages of elemental systems are that everyone loves magical categories that you can put people in.

Wes: It’s so true. 

Oren: Yeah, that makes a good personality test.

Chris: That makes a good online personality test, everybody will love it. You can get diverse magical effects while also keeping magic manageable. Doesn’t mean it will be manageable, but it’ll be a little easier, a little more possible to make it manageable.

Oren: It’s easier to balance because if you have one element that flies and another one that shoots long-range deadly attacks, you can more easily make those not the same kind of magic so that you don’t have to deal with ‘Why does he just fly up and shoot lightning bolts down forever?’

Chris: And then you can also use it to create interesting theming and world-building, depending on what kind of elements you choose. Because we’re not just talking about air, earth, fire, and water here. You can basically make anything into your elements.

Oren: Yeah, although I had an interesting observation that as I was thinking about what can be elements, I noticed that, so first you want whatever your elements are to feel equivalent.

Chris: So you’re talking about a set of elements as opposed to what qualifies as an element?

Oren: Yeah, that’s what I was… Should we talk about what qualifies as an element first?

Chris: I don’t have notes on that, but that’s what I thought you were going to say. It would be a little strange if you’re like, ‘I’m the element of mugs.’ I guess they’re supposed to feel at least a little bit magical and mysterious. Or not a noun that’s not a specific object. An abstract noun, whatever it’s called.

Oren: If it’s going to be an element, you want it to feel fundamental in some way. Because an actual element in real life is a substance that is the same atomically. You don’t get it by mashing different kinds of atoms together. It’s all one kind of atom. So that’s the general vibe you’re going for. It shouldn’t feel like a very specific part of the world and if it does, you’re usually going to have a lot of elements. Like I was thinking, earth and sky, those feel like elements.

Chris: Yeah, I will say though that if it has a magical connotation, for instance, you would have ruby and sapphire mages. We associate gems with magic and it’s easy to make them feel mystical. 

Oren: But like, salt and sand, for example. Those could potentially be elements, but they wouldn’t be your only elements. That would feel really weird. That would feel like you’re leaving a bunch of stuff out. 

Chris: So before we get into talking about a set of elements, I just want to mention that there’s more than one way to do this. And when we’re thinking about elements, we’re usually thinking about a specific kind of elements. But there’s actually other methods. So I call this ‘ordered elements.’ The idea of ordered elements is that you have a specific set that kind of represent the metaphysics in the universe in some way. They feel fundamental to how the universe works. Which is why they have to be chosen very carefully, which is what Orin has started to talk about. So that they feel natural. Because if they’re asymmetric, or the set doesn’t feel right, then it’s going to be really contrived and the magic’s not going to be that believable. So, they’re finicky. But there’s other ways to do it, for instance, you can have what I might call ‘sourced elements’, where you pick things in your world that are a source of magic and then you use the explanation that those things are just naturally different, and so the magic that comes from it is naturally different. So, for instance, if you had a set of islands of different sizes and different traits, and then each island had an island spirit, or had an island magical essence, and then the people of that island could channel it, the big island might not be the same as the little island. Maybe one is more powerful than the other, and the number of elements that you have would feel random because that’s how it’s just naturally occurring in your world, right? So it doesn’t have to feel neat and orderly that way. 

Chris: Another way you can do it is what I call ‘chaotic elements’, which feels a little bit more like a superpower system, and more like scientific phenomenon, and a little bit less mystical, which is why I don’t think it’s used very often. But you can just say, you know what, this is all really random, we don’t really understand it, but this one person can channel water and the other person can channel mayonnaise and there’s some repetition, but we have no idea how many of them there are, and they just seem to occur at random. It can be used for a little bit more jokiness, but also just without that, without having a mayonnaise mage, it also just feels a little bit more scientific. But the point is that you’re setting the expectation that it’s really random and eclectic, and that, for instance, a more powerful person might be able to do water and all that entails, and a less powerful person might just have ice, for instance, so they can only deal with water when it’s in its frozen state. But the most popular choice seems to be, again, going with kind of like universal metaphysics that are supposed to vent something mystical about the universe.

Oren: Yeah, that’s where your classic fire and water, night and day kind of elemental systems come from. Those feel like somehow part of the existence in some capacity. 

Wes: Less element and more fundament. 

Oren: Mmm, fundament, that’s good, I like that. 

Chris: So as Oren was saying, you wouldn’t have a system that’s just salt and sand, because that doesn’t feel complete. Which is one of the requirements, is that it feels like it’s a complete set and it’s not missing obvious things. Because if you have salt and sand, then you’d have to ask why you don’t have dust or something else like that in there, because it doesn’t feel like a complete set of all the things that are like that. 

Oren: Or dirt, right? Why isn’t dirt one of them? Or any of the other things that can dissolve in water. Why isn’t sugar an element? A common one that I see in client manuscripts is elements that are mismatched, that don’t feel as broad. Instead of fire and water, you’d have something specific like fire and rain. 

Wes: Yeah. 

Oren: Rain is just a little too specific, right? Fire is very broad, whereas rain is a specific instance of water. And that just seems overly limiting if you’re only doing a two element system. 

Chris: And, in most cases, you’re looking for elements that are also equally powerful. And oftentimes broadening the element makes for a more powerful magic worker, depending on how your system works. Usually if you’re going for more of a mystical set, you’re not looking to make one randomly more powerful than the next one. 

Oren: Right, because remember, people need to be able to identify whichever element they think is best and they’re not going to be able to do that if one of them is just the loser element. 

Chris: Yeah, you don’t want somebody to take your internet quiz and then be sad about the results they get, okay? 

Wes: That’s right. 

Oren: I’m only a rainbender. I hate it. I’m just going to look up the answers next time. I wanted to have fire!

Chris: And they should be equally distant or related to each other. So if you have plants, and then you have lava and steam or something, it’s just one of those things is not like the other. I like to think about it like a color wheel, where it would be very strange if you had blue and teal and green and then yellow. And that was your set. 

Wes: That would be weird. 

Chris: That would be weird. 

Wes: Are there expectations with these, if you have an elemental system, that they have their opposites? Like if you say ‘elemental magic’, that carries a connotation that, like, fire and water are opposites. And then if you talk about light magic, then there must be dark magic. If there’s order magic, then there must be chaos magic.

Chris: I think if you have an element that suggests an opposite, maybe. But in some systems, light mages would also control darkness. Because they would just take the light away, for instance. And some elemental systems do not have opposites that are inherent to the elements they chose. Like for instance, if you have a sapphire and ruby mage, what’s the opposite of sapphire? 

Oren: It depends on how many elements you have. If you only have two, the expectation that they will be opposites goes up. That’s why you could have a fire and water system, but you probably wouldn’t have a fire and earth system. That would feel weird. 

Wes: That would feel weird, yeah. 

Oren: The two elements are fire and air. Really? Those are the two? Something about that seems wrong. Whereas fire and water, that’s more okay. You’re less likely to get people wondering, ‘Where are the other two?’

Chris: Yeah, or fire and ice. 

Oren: Yeah, fire and ice, that’s another one.

Chris: So basically what you don’t want is what they have in Frozen 2.

Oren: Oh gosh, that was hilarious. 

Chris: Where they have earth, air, fire, water, and ice. What? 

Oren: It was really weird! She’s not water, because she’s only ice, so she can’t be the water one, but she’s also clearly too close to water to be the bridge between that they wanted her to be in the movie. It’s amazing how you picked a thing that wouldn’t work either way. 

Chris: Yup, that does not work. That does not work at all.

Oren: So how many elements should you have? That’s a question. What’s the number? What’s the perfect number of elements, Chris? 

Chris: Okay, I will say that part of this is, do you expect the audience to remember all of them? Because I do think that in some cases, I’m going to go over some examples, including Owl House. Owl House has more than you can remember, but that’s not really important, because you’re not expected to remember all of them. If you want people to remember, I think six is even pushing it a little bit, but you might be able to do six if they’re really intuitive. Otherwise, I think the more you have, the harder it might be to just make your set feel natural. You might get to 12. You can have subcategories, right? So if you wanted, you could take air, earth, fire, water, and then subdivide them into three forms each. 

Oren: Because then I don’t have to remember all the subforms, but I can probably remember the base four. 

Wes: If each has clear opposites, you only really need to remember half. 

Chris: And that would probably help you make a larger set that feels more natural and help it feel a little bit more intuitive. But yeah, I mean, if you had, of course, a chaotic element that’s naturally occurring, then you could have an infinite number if you wanted to. But the point is that you could have potentially lots, and then just don’t expect your audience to remember what they are. Don’t require them to and as long as you have it set up so they feel natural, you’ll be fine. 

Oren: That just means that if you have a whole bunch, and you want to introduce a mage who has sound magic, then you’re going to have to remind your audience what sound magic is first. You can’t just have the mage show up and start doing sound magic and expect us to know what that is. 

Chris: So I want to talk about some out there. And again, this is one of those things where I’ve had people submit questions asking me, ‘Hey, are my elements even?’ and the answer is no and then they don’t want to change it. Because usually when people have a really random set of elements that isn’t quite working, they’re just attached to having certain characters have certain powers, and they don’t really want to change it and that’s how they ended up in that situation in the first place. We originally conceived one character having fire and another having lava, and then we didn’t really want to add all the others in. And that’s how it becomes a problem. But one example that’s interesting is that they do surprisingly well with the Infinity Stones, I think, except for one. So let’s see if you can tell me which one I think needs to be at least renamed. 

Oren: Is it Reality? 

Chris: Oren, you were supposed to wait for me to list them first! 

Oren: Oh, I’m sorry. 

Chris: Especially since our listeners may not have them memorized. 

Oren: That’s a good point. 

Chris: Okay, so the Infinity Stones are Space, Time, Power, Reality, Mind, and Soul. These are surprisingly good. They’re very cosmic-feeling. And they’re called Infinity Stones, so that really fits the theme. But the problem is that Reality would normally encompass lots of those other things.

Oren: Yeah, probably all of them. It’s like having a system where your elements are eggs, flour, sugar, chocolate, and cake. One of those is just the other four put together. They’re not equal. 

Chris: And it’s so weird! Because all you have to do is relabel Reality so that it’s Matter. Were they worried that’s too scientific for their audience? I think most people know what matter is. 

Oren: Yeah, I feel like you might still have a problem if matter lets you turn people into slinkies but better naming for sure. 

Chris: I’m not talking about how OP the Infinity Stones are. I’m just talking about whether or not those elements are balanced. But otherwise, I think they do surprisingly well. And it’s a set of six. And again, with things like Mind and Soul, just accept the fact that Mind is different even though technically it would be part of Reality. Or Matter, right? It would be part of Matter. There’s a cultural precedent there of thinking of Mind as being separate.

Oren: Although I would start to be unclear what the difference between Mind and Soul is. I’m not saying you couldn’t show that to me. If you told me those were the categories, I would not intuitively know the difference. 

Chris: And I also think that you could take Mind out of here and change Reality and Matter and the set would work. So that it would be Space, Time, Power, Matter, Soul. Or just Matter, Mind, and take Soul out. And I think it’s okay to have both. It’s not bad. The set would also feel complete with just one. The Owl House magic system has about nine in here. It’s not the worst. The show gets away with it, but it’s a little rougher. So their elements are Abomination, Bard, which is like their music magic, Beast-keeping, Construction, Healing, Illusion, Oracle, Plant, and Potions. And I think the issue here is that we have two different types of elements. We have elements that are representing Plant and Abomination. They’re almost like different types of lifeforms and then Beastkeeping is… It’s not Beast, it’s Beastkeeping. 

Oren: Do we ever see any Beastkeeping magic? I remember the Beastkeeping Master is just like a cat person and I think he scratches people. But I don’t remember if he ever does any magic. 

Chris: So maybe it’s just Beast, in reality, not Beastkeeping. But see, the others are all like… Feel a little bit more task-oriented about activities that you do or crafts. So Bard is making music and constructing things and healing people. And Illusion even could be casting illusions. And then Potions, you’re making Potions. Even Oracle, I mean we can start to stretch this a little bit, is okay, we’re doing fortune-telling. 

Oren: Potions is also weird thematically because in The Owl House, magic is like an inborn thing that you have and you do it out of you. Like it comes from you, specifically from your bilesack. And it’s potions work with that. Because potions are like things that you make. Is this one of those settings where someone else can follow the same instructions but if they don’t have the magical energy, the potion won’t work? Because that one just feels a little odd. Like by default, Potions feel like a thing anyone can do if they have the right ingredients. 

Chris: Yeah, the other problem that happens with potions in many cases is can the potions do everything? 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So all of the other elements are limited in the tasks they can perform, but potions are just like the magic way anything can happen. Pretty soon, potions become really OP. 

Oren: Anytime the author needs like a magical effect that doesn’t fit into one of their other elements, ‘I guess there’s a potion that does that!’ and it’s like, alright, just keeping a long list of all the things potions can do. 

Chris: So yeah, if I were to look at the Owl House magic system, I would probably think about either the task-oriented things like construction or the kind of nature or life oriented things like plants and abominations and do one or the other.

Oren:  I guess if we wanted to explain why they don’t really make sense, we could say that Belos invented them and Belos isn’t very smart. 

Chris: Yeah, don’t get me going about how it does not make sense that anybody would ever choose to get the mark and restrict themself because there’s no advantage to doing that. I don’t care how convincing Belos is, he would not convince people to put on a mark that permanently takes away most of their magical ability. It’s just not a thing that would happen. 

Oren: Look, he’s a very good public speaker, okay? 

Chris: That’s not a thing! No one is that good at public speaking. 

Oren: He can sell you timeshares.

Chris:  Yeah, he locks you in a room, doesn’t let you go anywhere. 

Oren: Until you agree.

Chris:  He lures you in with a free gift and then gives you a sales pitch and then just doesn’t let you leave. 

Oren: There’s like a pile of snacks but you’re not allowed to have any until you sign. 

Chris: Oh no. So there’s Winx, which does pretty well, the new Winx show. Fire, water, earth, air, and then it has light and mind. 

Oren: Light is the odd one out in that exchange. Mind feels like the secret fifth element that everyone expects a four-element system to have now, but light is like fire but less. They did eventually establish that light can do illusions and stuff, which fire can’t do, but, by default, light just seems like weaker fire. 

Chris: In the show, it feels better than it looks on paper because it’s like light and fire, aren’t those kind of closely related? Fire can create light, so what’s the advantage of light? In the show, yeah, they can create entire illusions, make things invisible, and it feels very distinct from fire, which is just you can start fires. So it works a little better in the show. 

Oren: Plus, with fire, you get to be the main character. I was curious what either of you thought of the Mistborn elements, the eight, I think it’s eight basic metals, the metal powers. 

’

Wes: There’s lots to come from, right? 

Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a tricky one, because first of all, choosing metals, there’s lots and lots of metals, and it doesn’t work because he uses it to, ‘Hey, we’ve discovered more’, right, as the books go on. So it’s incomplete because we don’t actually know about all of them. So it’s useful that way, but even trying to pick which metals to use is a liability when creating a system like that. And I think he did the best he could, but also the set of powers, I think that’s the biggest problem, is just the set of powers that they convey are too eclectic and don’t feel what they match. In a system like this, where you have, okay, like a sapphire or ruby mage, for instance, that’s probably not elements where you’re just going to give people direct control over their elements. This is not bling mages, necessarily. Usually what you’re going to do is match it symbolically to whatever power it gives. And so if you do that, you also have to be careful that those powers feel as natural as the elements that you choose, and that the symbolism is very intuitive. Keep it simple, easy. So after he chose a specific set of metals, he also had to figure out what powers those metals represent. It was honestly just a very tricky thing, and so it’s not really surprising that it came out feeling a little arbitrary. 

Oren: To be honest, metals often have very similar properties. And so it’s, okay, why is tin the superior eyesight metal? What makes tin related to eyesight? And it’s like, iron, that’s the one that pulls things towards you. It’s like, alright, iron’s magnetic. That sort of makes sense. Pewter is the super strength one. And it’s like, pewter is not a very strong metal. That doesn’t feel strength related. 

Chris: It works a lot better if you choose elements that have symbolism, right? Because for at least rubies and sapphires, we associate them with colors. In actuality, sapphires can be a whole range of colors. They’re not necessarily blue, but we associate them with the color blue. So then you can use color blue symbolism to choose what a sapphire mage could do. Or if you have a mage that’s like sun, moon, stars, sky, or something like that, you can think about, okay, what is the symbolism I’m going for with my celestial theme? And choose appropriate powers based on that. But to just choose metals that all feel similar. That’s a big ask. 

Wes: The more specific you’re naming it, the more arbitrary it feels for sure. And it gets away from, I think, everything Chris has told us about the point of an elemental magic. If we’re choosing, like, You’re a potassium mage!’ Okay, great. It doesn’t, I don’t know. The more associations you can have with your elemental term, the better. That’s why, like, fire, life, death, order, chaos, all that stuff, I think you can just fit. Things will make more sense under those broader umbrellas. 

Oren: Yeah, although I admittedly do love the idea of sapphire and ruby mages. Instead of having thematic powers, just having to pelt each other with different kinds of gemstones.

Chris:  No, they have a bling contest! It’s like a beauty contest for whoever makes the best bling. 

Oren: Whose jewelry is coolest?

Chris:  Obviously the sapphire mage, because they can make so many different colors. 

Oren: But I like rubies. Rubies are my favorite. The rubies always win in my heart, Chris. 

Chris: One last thing that I thought would be good to talk about before we go is, again, you don’t necessarily have to make it about having direct control over the element, even if you’re doing earth, air, fire, water. It’s very popular. It gets really powerful, though. It’s especially easy to kill people. Too easy to kill people. Which means that you can put limits on it. Like distance, and do you have to touch it, and do you have it to start with whatever that will help. But other ways, besides the symbolic way, is you can have it, like, some other type of affinity. Can you survive an element, like a fire mage being able to walk into fire? Can you sense things inside the element, or through the element, like a scryer dipping their hand in a puddle, and then seeing things that are close to a nearby lake? You could navigate or travel through it, flying or breathing underwater. That kind of thing. 

Oren: In that case, I want to be a microplastics bender. 

Wes: You can go everywhere!

Oren: I am all-knowing and all-consuming. Or all-permeating, really.

Chris:  So I would just, again, think a little bit about what kind of relationship people have to their element, and you can do control. Sample your options a little bit first before just going for one. 

Oren: I think it is time to end the podcast on that note, now that we’ve covered all the elements. There aren’t any we didn’t cover. Don’t write us.

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

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn more about at plotter.com. Then there’s Kelly Macleod. Next there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week. 

[Closing Music]

Chris: This has been The Mythcreant podcast. Opening-closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton

Biff! Pow! Bonk? These are all terms have have been used to describe violence in fiction, but unless you’re writing an old-timey Batman comic, you’ll probably need a bit more. Fortunately, that’s our topic for this week! What’s the best way to describe violence? How much violence should you describe in the first place? Is there ever a good time to use metaphors in fight scenes? Listen and find out! 

• Dullahan

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes. And with me today is…

Oren: Oren

Wes: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Wes: Today we’re going to talk about how to describe violence in speculative fiction. We know that not every reader can stomach violence and not every writer wants to go all in on describing it. Fair enough.

I think, today I just wanted to talk about how to approach describing violence in fiction, some ways of doing it, and some things to keep in mind because people often portray things “realistically”. And so, if you want to depict violent encounters, there are tidbits and advice that we can throw your way. So, let’s just get into it.

Chris: You said realistically, Wes, so I think thinking about the level of realism is a good place to start here.

Wes: I think that’s a great idea because there’s kind of a lot of things that we will let pass with certain types of violence, depending on target audience or rating. Star Wars is a good example. Plenty of violence, but generally not graphic violence. So that when certain things are very graphic for Star Wars, and then somebody walks it off, that’s not realistic.

Oren: In Star Wars, we’re used to characters miraculously avoiding taking lethal damage or something that should kill them, at least by film standards. In real life, you know that getting shot in the shoulder is not something you just walk off a lot of the time, and hitting your head really hard and falling unconscious is not something you just walk off most of the time. But in movies, that is the trope, and Star Wars usually adheres to that until the recent trend of impaling people and then having them just walk it off. What is going on at Disney, guys?

Chris: Can we stop doing that, please? Can we stop? Please. Black Panther’s doing it too. You’re a bad influence, Star Wars.

Wes: Quick note on prose writing: If you are describing violence and you’re using the verb impale, that’s a pretty strong one. I’m just saying, that’s a strong word choice.

Oren: Your old buddy Vlad would be disappointed in you.

Chris: I think you have better ways of creating dramatic moments in prose than showing somebody get impaled. Again, it’s this one-upmanship over, you know, the audience is used to shoulder shots. So now we need to do something more dramatic to make them worry about the character, but we still want the character to live. And you just can only go so far before it becomes absolutely ridiculous. Someday soon, everybody’s going to be sewing their head back on.

Oren: Maybe they evolved the ability to remove their own head.

Chris: Oh, man! Lost girl reference!

Oren: Early Lost Girl reference for you.

Chris: That’s episode two, right? Something like that?

Oren: It’s very early. It’s before they had any budget, and so their bad guy was a guy whose head was hidden in his shirt.

Chris: Again, they’re supposed to be scary assassins, but their ability is that they have evolved the ability to remove their head.

Oren: They said the word evolve!

Chris: And again, these are like fey in this setting. So, evolving, removing your head is a little bit of a theme clash there. Anyway, it was absolutely hilarious. It’s like, oh, they’re so scary because their head isn’t with them. How is that supposed to help them fight? I don’t even know.

Oren: Apparently, they can see without it, so it’s like fighting a normal person, I guess. They’re not invulnerable as far as I can tell, or if they are, it has nothing to do with their head.

Chris: I think that that would be a disadvantage. It would be very interesting if they took their head and put it at a bird’s eye view.

Oren: Maybe their eyes can shoot lasers, so they put their head on a little cart as a turret and it flies around and shoots at you while you’re trying to fight them. Or you could just go the opposite direction and take comics as an inspiration and write Biff! Pow! You know, that sort of thing.

Maybe this is just me, I have to ask with you two here: Am I the only one who really doesn’t like onomatopoeia used in fight scenes in particular, but I guess anywhere in stories? Anytime a story writes boom when there’s an explosion, my eyes roll back into my head.

Chris: I really think it’s about how it’s used. I think if you use cheesy comic book onomatopoeia, that is going to feel like a tone clash in many stories, especially when you want the fight scene to be very serious and tense.

But I do think that sometimes onomatopoeia is a lot more subtle, where you just have a little italicized drip, drip, drip that’s kind of representing a sound.

Wes, where do you see the border of onomatopoeia? What qualifies and what doesn’t qualify?

Wes: Technically, we’re just looking at is the word on the page representing the sound as closely as possible? Drip, drip, drip is an interesting one. I never really would have thought of that as onomatopoeia, but I see that there’s definitely an argument for that. I don’t know what the line is. I think medium matters. And so, if I see it in a graphic novel, I don’t mind it at all. It feels like that’s just kind of part of the deal.

But if I was reading a story and they’re somewhere there was an explosion and then single word, italicized: boom. I’m just like, ugh. Maybe that could be done well, but it wouldn’t be done that way.

Oren: Maybe I’m just biased right now because I’m nearly done with my Animorphs reread and Animorphs uses onomatopoeia constantly. And some of it just sounds a little silly.

Like when the Yeerks fire their Dracon beams, the book has tsew written out. And so, the narrator is constantly saying tsew. I don’t know what that is. And it’s also very similar to the onomatopoeia they use for the sound that the hawk in the group makes when it’s screeching.

But I also just think it might have to do with the fact that the audio narrators, when they were recording, were clearly given the direction to try to sound as freaked out as possible when reading the onomatopoeia descriptions to try to make the fight scenes more tense.

Wes: It’s kind of an interesting point, because if you were not listening to an audiobook version of that, but reading, my experience with that, when I see onomatopoeia written down, I think my internal reading brain doesn’t process that the same way as just normal prose. I just see it. I register it. Okay, cool. But I’m not in my head going tsew-tsew, or whatever.

Oren: It might not be a big deal. Except when the Yeerks shoot at them with guns or lasers and the narrator is reading: bang, bang, bang, as if they’re about to be murdered in real life. It’s like, guys, I know that no one is going to die in this fight, okay? It’s an Animorphs book. I know that no one’s allowed to die until the last book.

Chris: I think this is similar to when we’re talking about level of realism. What is the tone of the story? Is it campy? Because you could definitely get away with more onomatopoeia if the story already feels campy.

Oren: I mean, that is, I think, also just a general problem with Animorphs. As is, remember how of The Dragonet Prophecy, the first book had really gruesome fight scenes?

Chris: Yeah, it’s like this does not feel appropriate for middle grade.

Oren: Yeah, ease off on that.

Animorphs is the opposite. Animorphs starts with what feels like appropriate levels of description of the injuries and the damage that the characters give and receive. But as you get further in, it gets more and more graphic, and it just doesn’t match.

Because again, this is a story where we have to pretend that every time the Yeerks fire their lasers, that they have hands made of butter and the lasers are constantly slipping and sliding all over the place, so that we can explain why a bear doesn’t just get disintegrated by a laser beam. Then it’s like, now read this very graphic description of a tiger biting someone’s head off.

It’s like, I don’t think you’ve earned this, Applegate. I don’t think you’ve earned the right to make me read this.

Chris: Certainly, if you want your characters to do things in fighting that are unrealistic, like how high can they jump? How big is that weapon? Do we get an anime size weapon that’s the size of a person?

Oren: I want a sword that’s big enough I can use it as a shield.

Chris: How well can they shake off injuries? That kind of thing. It just should be consistent, and it should match the work. But it doesn’t always have to be highly realistic. High realism isn’t better; It’s just different and it suits a different tone of story.

Oren: A lot of this has to do not even with what is realistic, but what feels more realistic based on tropes. And one time back when I was in college, I approached a new group to play in a Firefly game and I was like, hey, I want to make a guy who uses a sword. And they were like, that’s cool. You can totally make a guy who uses a sword. And I’m like, all right, I have this really powerful character who uses a sword and I want his sword to be super big because I was playing a Final Fantasy game at the time. And they were like, no, you can’t do that. That’s not realistic. I’m like, okay, it’s not realistic for my sword to be huge, but it is realistic for my sword character to charge across a room before any of the bad guys with machine guns can shoot him and then stab them all with his normal sized sword? That’s realistic? I was a little salty.

Chris: So, should we talk about narrating a fight scene itself?

Wes: Before we hop into that, generally, I think if you are going to get into a violent situation in a story, you have two options: You can narrate the fight scene, show it all blow by blow, or you report the violent encounter after the fact. Those are really the only two options. If there’s a third one, I’m not smart enough to think of it.

There’s pros and cons to each. And depending on the level of violence and how graphic the violence might be and how realistic you might want it to be, I feel like there are good decision points for whether you’re going to show it happen or report it after the fact.

Chris: I would say that usually if this is a situation where you don’t want to show it in a scene, in most cases, you probably just shouldn’t have that violence in your story.

I guess if you have a story that’s dealing with a really difficult issue… So, let’s say you have a story that’s about something like sexual assault, about something like torture; You have to have a character in that situation in order to make the necessary commentary that you want to make, but it’s also very sensitive. That would be a time to cut away until afterwards or something like that.

Wes: You’re right on all those points. And I think after the fact stuff, we see that on screen or we read about that in stories, whodunnits, mysteries, things like that. The anticipation, the next victim, and it happens, but we cut away. And then the investigators see it after the fact.

Chris: So, this is not a fight that the protagonist is actually engaging in, in that case?

Wes: Exactly. That’s a very common use for not showing it, but letting the audience get the anticipation of, oh no, kind of picking up the pieces later without showing something as graphic as the examples that you described.

Because whatever violence you’re including in a story at whatever level, I think that a lot of writers can feel a sense of concern that depicting violence is condoning violence. And that’s something that I think everybody needs to kind of understand. How you depict things in your stories and report on them. There are certain levels of authorial endorsement that come with that. And leaving certain things out is probably a good idea if it does not contribute to the story meaningfully.

Chris: I do think that the major mistake that people make when it comes to messaging is that they think that if they depict something and make it seem bad. Let’s say, oh, I don’t want to condone violence, so I’m going to show how horrific violence is. And then they do it in detail and it’s like really graphic. That doesn’t actually condemn violence. It normalizes it.

So, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Right? If you want to show graphic violence, but also want to condemn it, you can’t do both of those things.

Oren: Showing violence as horrible can be part of condemning it, but it’s not that on its own. Right? The classic trap here is the stories about characters having cool fights and then the author feeling kind of bad that they’re glorifying violence. And so, making the fights unnecessarily brutal and gross. Also, Animorphs, let’s be perfectly honest, later Animorphs books do this too, where we’re clearly trying to do all the horrors of war, but also, we want to have super cool animals-fight-aliens fights.

That is, I think, the trap to avoid. If you are trying to avoid glorifying violence, the easiest thing to do is to not have violence in your story. But if you want to do something a little more in depth, it takes more work than just making the violence you have more unpleasant.

Wes: And just being consistent in the depictions, I think also matters.

Because, to piggyback off of what Orin just said, if you have a story and I’m looking at basically every superhero story where the goons just get violently destroyed and then the villain, somehow you aren’t going to kill. Because everything that led up to that moment, despite if you’re like, oh, I can’t kill, that would be against my code. It’s like, well, you probably killed and hospitalized 30 people just now.

But that is kind of condoning a certain type of violence, right? It’s like, well, we’re not going to point out that that was problematic, but that you might kill this person. This one moral dilemma right here is suddenly the focus of your attention? I don’t like that. It’s not consistent. It’s not realistic.

Oren: I don’t know how much of that is description, but that is a problem that the whole like, well, I don’t want to kill this guy because he’s the boss. And it’s like, if nothing else, that’s dissonant. You can argue whether or not it has any kind of problematic messaging, but it certainly creates a weird feeling of your character being really inconsistent.

For the record, I’m not super worried about stories glorifying violence by having characters get into cool fight scenes, if for no other reason than that ship has entirely sailed. But beyond that, I do think there are some things to consider, like you just mentioned, having your characters be willing to ruthlessly kill minions, but suddenly the bad guy, no, he can’t. We need him for the next book.

Chris: Personally, I’m not going to look at somebody who writes a cool fight scene and be like, you’re promoting violence because you wrote a fight scene. At the same time, if your point you want to make is an anti-violence point and your protagonist solves problems with violence, I feel like you’re going to be working uphill at that point and that you should consider a different way of solving problems.

Wes: No, you both raise good points. The presence of violence is not necessarily condoning, but how it works into your story. And Chris, I think you raised torture showing up. If somebody, this happens way too often, we’ve talked about this a lot, if there’s violent torture or any kind of torture in your story and that gets the protagonist what they need, you’ve condoned that violence.

Chris: Even if it’s the villain torturing the protagonist, but the protagonist still gives the villain information that’s useful. Oren’s written about this.

Oren: Well, because that feeds into, there’s a lot wrong with torture. Hot take. Hot take: Torture would be bad, even if it was a reliable means of getting information, but it’s not. And the fact that a lot of people think it is, distorts the debate around it.

That is something that I will never stop getting mad about whenever I see some story where the hero or the villain, either way, it doesn’t matter who it is, beats up some guy until they give them the information and it just works that way.

And it’s like, that guy could have just not known the information. You didn’t know he knew that. He could have just not known. And then he would have beaten him until he lied to you to make you stop. Or maybe he lied to you the first time. You often have no way of knowing. And they never show that because it would be narratively inconvenient. So, they instead just want a dramatic punch this button until you get information. And I think we need to do better as writers. I think we can and should do better.

Chris: Are we ready to move on to fight scenes?

Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about some fight scenes.

Oren: I’m ready for fight scenes. That’s a lot more fun than torture.

Chris: Yeah. So, I have some tips. Wes, I think you probably have your own tips.

Wes: Yeah. Let’s talk about it.

Chris: So first, know what actions to cover and what level of detail is important. At the too detailed end, we have talking about either exact body parts. You can just say that somebody punched somebody else. You don’t have to say that somebody used their right hand to punch somebody else. That’s too much detail. And this is just a logistics issue, really. But you cannot recreate a film. Don’t paint a diagram. You have to keep it simple.

But then you do want to stay in the moment and focus on specific actions that are happening right now. Unless logistically for the story to be believable, you have to summarize sometimes. If you have a huge battle, you’re going to have to summarize battles realistically last a while. But otherwise keep the fight short and stay in the moment. Have less moves, but make those moves riveting instead of like, and then they punched each other 20 more times, or over and over again, or whatever you have to fast forward.

Oren: I would say that as a rule, if you have an option between summarizing the fight or just making the fight shorter, usually making the fight shorter is the right option.

Chris: It’s more realistic too, because bodies break pretty easily. A lot of times the long fights that we see choreographed in film are actually unrealistically long.

Wes: One fight scene that I really like on that note is in the first Daredevil that came out on Netflix, where his quest reward at the end of the season is getting the Daredevil suit. And up until that point, he’s just wearing a black leotard and a black headband.

But there’s a long shot in the hallway in, I think like episode three, where that poor stunt actor is having to fight all these people and the choreographing goes on for like two minutes. And you can just see the actor just completely exhausted by the end of it. I’m just like, yes, this fight scene’s amazing because they’re not shying away from the fact that every punch thrown is draining this person’s willpower.

Oren: That fight scene created its own little genre of hallway fights. That’s a thing now. It’s like, oh look, they’re doing the hallway fight and we all recognize it. Thanks Daredevil.

Right here, I have a quick question on the subject of summarizing. Is it summarizing to say something like he launched a flurry of blows?

Chris: Yes.

Oren: Is it bad?

Chris: I mean, I’d have to think more about the specific circumstance, but I feel like we’re making the individual blows feel unimportant at that point. What we want is to focus on specific actions that could make a difference. And a flurry of blows, it’s also just very abstract. If it’s some kind of combo action that involves more than one movement, I might state that at once, but normally I think that’s going to get a little bit too distant from what’s happening.

Individual steps that your character takes are usually not important enough to narrate individually. There might be some times when you want to say a character specifically stepped forward and punched or something, but normally footwork is just not important enough.

A specific punch or kick or block are all things that, you know, if you fail that block, you can get sliced up, that individually make a difference. So, you’re looking for actions that do that. I would have to look at what the flurry of blows does in the fight, but I would be concerned about that.

Wes: Launched a flurry of blows, when I heard you pitch that example, Oren, I almost felt like that introduces then the fight scene. It’s like they crossed swords and engaged, and then we describe the fight scene. It’s like the pre-fight summary. That’s how I understood that. And I don’t know if that’s good practice or not?

Oren: I would say that something like the example you just gave, crossed swords and engaged, is a little different than a flurry of blows because that is one action and then a statement of intent.

Wes: Well, does it though? Cause you could say Oren launched a flurry of blows and then you could describe those blows. I’m keying off of launched because that doesn’t convey finished action.

Oren: I guess my question would be: if you’re going to describe them all anyway, why did you start by summarizing them as a flurry of blows?

Wes: To prime the reader.

Oren: All right. Well, consider me officially primed.

All right. I have another question about metaphors in fight scenes. So, if you had two characters who are about to start fighting and then the narration describes about how they were playing the most dangerous game of all. Presumably, maybe it’s not as bad as that. Let’s assume it was a good metaphor. I just don’t know of any.

Chris: Admittedly, when you said, I have a question about metaphors in fight scenes, my instant internal reaction was don’t.

Wes: —Don’t.

Chris: Here’s the thing: We have to keep up the pace. And because actions in this case are very quick and happen very fast. We also want the pros to be tight, to reflect how fast the action is. Metaphors, they tend to be a little bit more confusing. They definitely slow things down.

If you have a pause in the action where let’s say both people are exhausted and they kind of take a step back and stumble for a moment and you have an opportunity, then to add in a little bit more narration that maybe you could fit in a metaphor.

But otherwise I think in most cases, if somebody added a metaphor to a fight, they would be again, summarizing and stepping back and being like, oh, this person maneuvered like a fish swimming upstream, I don’t know. And at that point, the question is, are we being specific and immediate? Are we focusing on what’s happening now? And how exciting that is? Or are we kind of taking a step back? I’m not going to say metaphors during fights are impossible. I’m sure there’s something that could work out, but I think that would be dangerous.

Wes: I think more importantly in describing a fight scene, and if you are doing a grittier, perhaps more realistic, more violent story, using plain, simple language can often convey stronger violence more effectively.

If I just said, he raised the hammer and struck the opponent in the skull and felt the hammer go in. It’s very simple, non-flowery language, but it’s gross. Those little zoom-in details, without saying he slashed his opponent and blood rained down like dark tears from the heavens.

Chris: I mean, I will say though, that if you have just finished off your opponent, you do have time, usually…

Wes: …to bring in the metaphors.

Oren: It’s hard for me to separate best practice from taste here, because I know that personally, I have a very narrow band of describing what happens when you hit someone. Between It feels like I’m reading a Marvel fight where every hit is just on a cartoon character and Ugh, I’m grossed out, there’s too many organs. It needs to be in that very narrow band, or I won’t enjoy it. And I don’t know if that’s the right way to write a fight scene or if that’s just what I prefer to read in fight scenes.

I don’t need to know it. I’m a content editor.

Chris: That’s a good point. Strong, direct, active statements really punctuate those important moments. And you need some sentence variety, even during a fight, but look at which clauses have kind of lower emphasis.

And if you have anything that they’re doing simultaneously, first of all, make sure it’s actually simultaneous, but also that’s going to be lower emphasis. And so, make sure that the content in there is naturally lower emphasis. And if they’re punching and kicking, that’s, you usually want a very direct statement for that.

So, before we go, because I know we’re getting low on time, I’d also like to just go over what is graphic because I do run into manuscripts where writers don’t realize how graphic they’re being. So, I think just talking about the difference between what I would consider graphic or not graphic.

And I will say, I am a person who does not like graphic bodily injury, and so the line is going to be different for different people. So, this is partly what I would consider, igh, and what I don’t.

For instance, in a non-graphic fight scene showing an injury, you would have a simple statement about the injury, and then oftentimes describe the reaction by the injured person to that injury to kind of represent its impact. So, somebody is stabbed in the stomach. They cry out and collapse onto their knees. For instance, we just say they stabbed in the stomach. We’re not describing that stomach wound in detail.

Oren: And then they just get up and walk away.

Chris: So, we use their reaction to it to make it feel impactful without describing the actual injury in that much detail.

You can have really abstract descriptions of pain if this is a viewpoint character getting injured, piercing, throbbing, that kind of thing. Some people might have issues with blood, but usually blood is fine.

If you want to say a body part is at an odd angle to show the bone has been broken, I would just not be exact about it. Do not get specific. Their leg is at an odd angle. It’s all you need to say. You don’t need to say exactly where on the leg or what angle it’s at. But I would say that if you make your injuries particularly gruesome, it’s still going to be too much.

Like for instance, Wings of Fire, we have a description of how acid falls on somebody’s face and starts eating through it. That’s just inherently really gross.

Wes: I think if you want to add a slightly more appropriate description to emphasize the injury, if that’s the type of story you’re telling, then there’s a difference between what Chris has described, where he brought the hammer down on his opponent’s hand and his opponent recoiled in pain, or something like that.

If you give an extra line in there to say he heard the bones break, a little extra declarative line can provide just a little heightened sense of graphic violence. I do think it’s best to keep it short and simple, though, and not go down this level of overly describing it because readers are going to fill it in well enough on their own based on the details that are already in the story.

Chris: Personally, if I read description where bones are heard snapping, I consider that graphic.

Again, this is about what type of story you’re telling. So, I’m not here to tell you to not make your violence graphic, but generally you need a reason because it is going to be off-putting to some people. So, if you’re telling a really gritty story or something that’s just revels and dark gory stuff, it’s not a good way to spice up your climax or make your climax more exciting because it isn’t excitement. Doesn’t make anything more exciting. It’s really just about the level of realism and how dark you want it to feel, how gritty you want it to feel. As I said, bone snapping, any bones sticking out.

Again, this is going to be gross. You can exit the podcast now if you don’t want to hear this.

Anything popping out: Eyeballs popping out, any other parts. I would say any description of organs. That’s pretty graphic. Skin being sliced, not a big deal. But if the skin is being stretched or is missing, somebody’s been skinned. That is going to feel pretty graphic. It varies with body parts being gone, which body parts we’re talking about. A missing finger, not that big of a deal.

Some writers will write, here’s the viewpoint of somebody as they get torn apart. That’s not a thing that is a light reading. When it comes to describing pain, if you have really graphic metaphors or analogies about like, oh, this thing felt as though an arrowhead was being driven up my spine, it’s possible to make descriptions of pain graphic enough to be unpleasant for some readers.

Oren: Well, that is a good thing, I think, to end the podcast on.

Chris: Yes!

Oren: I think we all died of being squicked.

Chris: All right. If you found this podcast, I’ll say useful, possibly not enjoyable, please support us. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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

Any good adventure will give your hero a sense of personal growth and accomplishment, but what about something more tangible? Think of the rewards one could earn: sparkling jewels, enchanted weapons, or just great stacks of cash. This concept of “quest rewards” is very common in video games and TTRPGs, but it’s a lot more complicated in a scripted story. Why’s that? We’ll tell you!

• Din Djarin 

Generously transcribed by Suzanne. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: Chris.

Oren: and…

Wes: Wes.

Oren: Now as a reward for reaching episode 430, we each get a precious treasure. Chris, you get an enchanted red pen that slays all contrivances.

Chris: Oh yeah!

Oren: Wes, you get a pile of gold and jewels, which may or may not have a thematic greed curse upon them.

Wes: It matters not. I can die knowing that this treasure is mine.

Oren: For me, I get the satisfaction of a job well done.

Wes: The best reward of all.

Oren: The real treasure was the podcast all along. [Laughter] So this topic was born out of me thinking about video games and tabletop roleplaying games and looking at the fact that quest rewards are basically standard for those genres and thinking that they probably got that from written stories, but then realizing that that’s kind of an odd topic in written stories. In a video game, it’s like, yay, I completed a mission. I got 5,000 monies and a new gun. Woo! But if you do that in a written or filmed or otherwise non-interactive story, it seems a little weird. But there are still rewards that characters get, so I wanted to figure out what was going on with that. What’s the deal?

Chris: We’re not gamifying our stories. We still do have rewards.

Oren: Yeah, I’ve had some clients who definitely had a story I think critics would have described as feeling video gamey because the character went and did some difficult stuff and then at the end found a chest or something with a cool item in it.

Chris: That felt kind of random, like this doesn’t come out of the narrative, it just, oh, there happens to be a treasure chest here.

Oren: It’s sort of like the random encounter feeling you get when your character’s just walking along and then suddenly, whoa, bandits! Whoa, okay, we’re fighting bandits now. All right. Okay, bandit fight done. Moving on.

Chris: It’s like, we don’t have story structure. Oh, wait, I’m supposed to have an exciting moment now. Random attack!

Oren: And for this, I think it’s like I’m supposed to have something satisfying at the end of a quest of some kind and I don’t have that. So instead, cool sword! So I thought that would be kind of interesting. I can think of stories both older and more modern where at least something that looks like a quest reward is still part of it and the resemblance starts to get fuzzier the further out on the sandwich discourse grid you go because you have the really obvious stuff like if you go back to the Hobbit, Bilbo is going on this adventure with the dwarves for some cash. He’s gonna get some cash money and he does. He gets some cash money at the end. And then in a more modern story, we have Din Djarin who gets bounties and also gets cash. Those are kind of a literal interpretation of a quest reward. And then you have things where the character maybe wasn’t like promised that if he did this thing but still gets a cool thing at the end of a story like Rand getting his super powerful magic sword in one of the Wheel of Time books at the end. A sword so powerful that in the next book he had to get rid of it because he was too strong.

Wes: I also kind of like the quest rewards that are like, I’m giving you this with the understanding that you are going to go do this thing. It’s like the pre-reward. Like when Beowulf goes off to slay Grendel’s mother, this guy gives him Hrunting, the sword. It’s like, here, use this.

Chris: It’s dangerous to go it alone. Take this.

Wes: But of course then that sword fails him, but then he finds a giant sword amongst Grendel’s mother’s lair and then uses the giant sword to slay. So he gets a double quest reward there. Getting that key item right in the video game moment that is way stronger than anything that you had previously.

Chris: Yeah, there are pre-quest treasures usually given by a mentor or something in preparation for the quest. But that happens in video games too, right? Not just in prose or non-interactive works?

Oren: It does, but not with the same regularity. In video games and in classic D&D style RPGs, you expect to get some kind of tangible reward at the end of a quest that will make your numbers higher, basically. And of course, this is a big generalization. There are video games that don’t do this. It depends on the medium. But it’s common enough that when I talk about quest rewards in video games, everyone knows what I’m talking about.

Chris: Right. But I’m just being like, getting treasure without doing something first. I’m just thinking about Link and his little village that he often starts out in. Does he have to do anything to get his first sword and shield?

Oren: Depends on the game. But yes, usually you get something to start you with. But I would say in video games, that’s not more common than it is in prose stories. I think the reason is that they serve the same function, which is either a way to explain why the character can do the thing that they need to do. It’s like, well, now you have a cool thing that you didn’t have before. Plus, a bit of novelty and wish fulfillment where the brand new weapon that they have now is more interesting than if they just started the story with this sword that they’ve always had.

Chris: You could do a little mini obstacle in the village to give your hero their first sword if you wanted to. But I think in many stories that’s not what the story is about. We have other things to spend time on. There’s your sword of basic slang so that you can get on with your journey.

Wes: Even the gifting process can say something a little bit, even if the thing isn’t particularly special. Like when Aragorn gets Narsil and he’s just like, here’s the sword for your station. Oh, cool sword. Does it do anything? No. It doesn’t. But this is a sign of how I trust you and I sanction you on your quest. Something like that. But Sting glows when Orcs are near. That seems more useful. This sword doesn’t do anything.

Oren: Yeah, but it’s like a long sword and Sting is a short sword, so it does an extra 1.5 damage on average per swing.

Wes: Ah, key.

I like in the movies too, when Frodo gets from Galadriel the Light of Eärendil, this little container full of something. He’s like, uh, what?

Oren: Galadriel, why did you give me this?

Wes: Two movies later, it comes in handy. It’s like, you gave me a fragile vase full of water? Cool. Thank you.

Chris: It will light dark places, Wes.

Wes: Oh, right. Yes, but like, is that a metaphor, Galadriel?

Chris: Is this like the reward is the friends we made along the way kind of thing?

Wes: Yes. [Laughter] Obviously, we know Tolkien loved his epics and that like higher person of station gifting the person going on the quest something cool, I think plays into like the whole lineage of items and their stories and why that’s important to say this thing that I’m giving you has gone by many names, but always done these very things. And now you guys know that it is once again, this item that is also going on the quest and that gives it a special story significance, at least in epics. And we don’t really write epics anymore for good reasons.

Chris: Right. But if you go on a quest and you have the sword that some famous person used to slay some giant monster, that makes it feel significant.

Oren: Nowadays, I feel like if a quest starts and they make a really big deal out of the sword they’re giving you at the beginning, I’m like, that sword’s gonna break, isn’t it?

The lesson is going to be that the sword didn’t matter. That’s the only reason to make a big deal out of the sword they give you in the opening chapter. It could be a lesson right there, like Taran, when he gets his first sword at the beginning of I think it’s the Book of Three when he has to head out to find Arawn and Dallben is like, here’s a sword and Taran’s like, what does it do? And Dallben’s like, it stabs people. What do you want from me?

Wes: It’s a normal sword, you assistant pig keeper. Bringing up the Book of Three is a good example of how at the end of that book, each of Taran’s party members, they all get a quest reward. That’s kind of fun. I mean, the best one is obviously Gurgi’s bag of never-ending food or whatever it’s called.

Oren: I love his wallet of never-ending food.

Wes: Wallet of never-ending food. That’s the best quest reward.

Oren: That’s actually the version of the quest reward that I think is underappreciated, perhaps, by modern writers, just because that’s a fun bit of wish fulfillment at the end of the quest, and you don’t usually want to use that as the main stakes. If you’re using a quest reward as the stakes, you need to think about everything the stakes need. Like, what bad thing will happen if I don’t get this? Because readers care more about a bad thing that will happen than a cool, nice thing that you might get. But if you already have stakes, and you’ve got those all sorted, then a cool reward at the end is a lot of fun, and Gurgi’s wallet shows exactly the way to do it. It’s cool, it has a neat function, it’s novel, it’s kind of unique, it serves a specific need that the character has.

Chris: It suits Gurgi.

Oren: Yeah, it suits Gurgi.

Chris: The other thing that’s really useful about that is that it is logistically useful in books down the line, because now it’s like, oh, the heroes are in a bunch of trouble. Geez, how are they getting food? They’ve been out in the wilderness for weeks. Oh wait, we have Gurgi’s wallet, so I don’t have to explain how they got food for traveling. That’s super useful to have. But also, it’s not like, broken. It’s not overpowered.

Wes: That’s a good point. If the quest rewards happen in the resolution of the story, if you are working on a series, they can show up later. Maybe have a bigger part in another story.

Oren: Just try to do better than whatever it was Eilonwy got. Like a pin or something? I think it did eventually have some random effect later that wasn’t really important, but I was like, oh right, yeah, I guess she had that pin. Everyone else got something cool, and Eilonwy got a pin. Not even like a super cool-looking pin.

Wes: I remember like, Doli’s reward was, sure, you can turn invisible, but it’s gonna hurt.

Oren: Teach you to whine about not being invisible. [Laughter]

Wes: Yeah.

Chris: That is a good point though about the usefulness, because if your character gets an item part way through the story, whether that’s the end of book one or several chapters in, it does have to come into play later. Which can be an issue in the latest D&D movie. They spend a huge amount of time just trying to get one item, and then it doesn’t really matter. I mean, we could say it kind of barely matters a little, but it doesn’t matter in proportion to the amount of time they spend getting it.

Oren: But on the other hand, it gave me such joy whenever they slipped and called it the Helm of Dysfunction. So can we put a price tag on that, Chris?

Spoilers for the D&D movie, but as opposed to this random staff that they just happen to have. And it was a portal staff, and they basically use it to solve all of their problems going forward. It’s like, now we’re thinking with portals, and I’m like, is this a D&D item? I don’t remember this in any of the magic item guides that I’ve read.

Chris: Yeah, it’s like, why didn’t you spend your whole quest trying to get that item? That would have worked a lot better.

Oren: Because we needed it earlier to get them out of a bunch of other situations we didn’t know how to get them out of.

Chris: Yeah… On the other hand though, if you do have a section of your plot, and you realize that you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make a difference, adding an item that matters later can be a way of making that section of the story matter. So let’s say you do have a random quest that your hero goes on, and they don’t meet their objective and then they just go back to normal. And you’re like, okay, well, they just failed and nothing happened. So that thing they did doesn’t matter, but you really like it. Maybe they will, while they’re doing the thing that they ultimately fail at, also happen to find something important that they then use so that section of the story still matters.

Oren: Yeah, that can be very handy.

Chris: I also think rewards are useful for balancing karma. If the hero worked really hard, especially if they suffered a lot, we want to see them rewarded for that. And it plays not just a quest, but like other important struggles. For instance, if you have a coming of age story about a young hero, and that hero goes through their first battle, you would expect that to be a very difficult experience. So usually there will be something that comes out of that battle. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be an item, though. Or friendship was the reward. Oftentimes I think rewards are just leveling the hero up, especially when it’s a young hero. So they might get a new title. The example that I can think of that comes to mind is in Eragon in book two, we learn that he now has the title of Shadeslayer because he defeated the Shade at the end of book one.

Oren: Oh, well, good for him.

Chris: Right? Eragon is funny in some places, but that part is appropriate. It’s like, hey, you got some candy. People think you’re cool. They call you Shadeslayer now. And that’s your reward for going through that struggle and succeeding.

Oren: Well, they’d better call him Shadeslayer… or die.

Chris: No!

Oren: That sort of use of quest rewards can also be very handy, especially in a story where the character was laboring for a particularly selfless set of stakes. Like if they were really trying to help other people a lot, they can feel like they deserve a little extra. And it’s better to give them a magic sword than to have someone fall in love with them as a reward in most cases.

Chris: Oh, no.

Oren: Or just give them someone as a spouse now, as used to be the tradition. I was looking for stories that had examples of this, so I checked out TV Tropes and it was like, okay, there’s like a couple of animes and some movies and some fantasy books and like fairy tales. And I opened that one and it’s like, oh, look at this long list of fairy tales. It’s like, man, how many of these are like a guy getting a wife under very shady circumstances? And the answer was more than I was comfortable with.

Chris: Yep, there’s a lot of fairy tales like that. Now, to be clear, I think it’s okay for your hero to become really cool and do something cool and someone likes them afterwards. And that can in a way be a reward, but that’s very different from if you defeat the dragon, you get the princess’s hand in marriage.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, having your hero become someone more romantically interesting, I think is fine. The issue is when they haven’t really done that, but now someone is way into them and it feels like you’re just giving them a prize. Long way of saying I agree.

Wes: Shrek did a pretty good job with that. There are all these motivations happening. Shrek wants to go do this reward just to get everybody kicked out of his swamp. And Lord Farquaad is sending him on a quest to get the reward of a wife and he’s the bad guy, so it’s a bad thing to want. But then Shrek does the dragon quest, but then after that develops a relationship with Fiona. There was time for that romance to happen. So even though he and Donkey did rescue her from the tower, it’s just a little different enough from our standard fairy tales for sure.

Chris: That’s an interesting example because they definitely invoke the trope without actually doing it too much because after he rescues Fiona, she does expect that he’s going to be this prince she’s going to marry. Now later we find out that what she’s hoping for is if she has this handsome prince and true love’s kiss or whatever kisses him, then she won’t become an ogre anymore. That’s what she’s actually hoping for. But what it appears is that he rescues her and then she’s like, oh yeah, that means we’re getting hitched, right? And the important thing is he says no.

As opposed to this thing that we see often where it’s like, oh no, this is wrong, but she wants to so much. So I guess it’s okay. It’s like, yeah, then you’re just looking for an excuse to do the bad thing, storyteller.

Wes: Yeah.

Oren: Not a great thing to equivocate on, I would say. The good news is that the fear of clichés works in our favor because the whole go on a quest and get the princess’s hand in marriage is so well known that like very, very few authors will do it sincerely because everyone knows it. And so they’re like, no, it would be cliché. So it would be a faux pas to put that in my story. And it’s like, well, you’re not wrong, but that’s not the main reason.

Chris: It’s also notable that even Disney movies have stopped with the like, they instantly fall in love after one dance at the ball routine. They subverted it with Frozen and their other recent movies to give people at least a little bit more time.

Oren: Now they try to do an actual romance arc with varying degrees of success, but they’re trying.

Chris: They’re trying. It just goes to show how outdated the whole I rescue the princess and she marries me or I do a task and get a wedding is at this point. If even Disney has cut it out.

Oren: Finally caught up, Disney. Good job. We knew you could do it.

Wes: Are there any particular quest rewards that you all really like in stories? Because I have a fun random one.

Oren: Please tell.

Wes: Well, I really like in Lord of the Rings in the books, because it doesn’t happen, unfortunately, in the movies is that basically in return for like helping the Ents out and befriending the Ents is that Merry and Pippin get to drink Entwash and they get huge. They become huge hobbits.

Chris: Really?

Wes: Yeah, they grow. They’re basically become, I don’t know, like dwarf sized. That’s important at the end for the scouring of the Shire because they’re both just like riding into town and Frodo and Sam are there, but they’re kind of broken people. Merry and Pippin are just like, huh, huh, and they save the Shire because they’re huge hobbits.

Chris: I did not remember that part.

Wes: It’s so funny.

Oren: I’m imagining how much of a nightmare that would have been to try to do in the movies.

Wes: I know.

Oren: They were already employing very cutting edge film technology at the time to make the hobbits look short and make it look like that was naturally part of the scenes with the human-sized characters. And so at least when the hobbits were all by themselves, they didn’t have to do that. They could just film the hobbits normally. And now suddenly if Merry and Pippin are significantly taller, oh my God.

I can see why they didn’t do that.

Wes: It’s just a funny question because one, it literally makes them bigger. And then two, they return home and it’s like, look how much they’ve grown physically and metaphorically and spiritually.

Oren: It’s a secret metaphor.

Wes: Exactly. Plus Entwash. You’re drinking Ent sweat.

Oren: Is that what that means? Is that just water that washes off of an Ent?

Wes: I don’t remember what it is, but I know it’s just called Entwash. I mean, I think the Ents drink it, but it’s unclear.

Chris: Probably not their sweat then?

Wes: Probably not.

Oren: Maybe they’re weird survival types, Chris. Who knows?

Wes: That was a quest reward that always stuck with me because I thought it was funny, but I also really liked it when I first read the books. I was like, oh cool. These hobbits are big. They weigh probably like eight more pounds each. That matters for some reason.

Oren: I actually enjoyed in the first season of the Mandalorian- I think it was the first season. Maybe it was the second season. I don’t know. Whichever one, when he gets the darksaber.

Wes: Second season. Yeah.

Oren: I thought that was pretty neat. I’m not super attached to him having it. Spoilers for the third season, but the reactionaries are mad because he gave it to Bo-Katan. I don’t care. I think it’s fine that she has it, but it was cool when he won it from Moff Gideon and had a cool darksaber.

Wes: Yeah. And he wasn’t fighting Moff Gideon with the understanding he would even get it.

Oren: Right. It was a whole. Moff Gideon happened to have it and he was like, well, I guess I’ll take this. And then they’re all like, no, you can’t give it away. It has to be won in combat. And he’s like, well, I guess I’m stuck with this for a while.

Wes: And then I like the implication later where he uses it. And he’s like, oh my God, this thing sucks. It’s so heavy. Why does it hurt to use?

Oren: Part of Dave Filoni’s obsession with having non-force users use lightsabers. It’s a common thread in a bunch of his Star Wars material.

Chris: I have to say, I did really like the Beskar in the Mandalorian. He did something, he gets Beskar, brings it to the smith. It just feels kind of video gamey, doesn’t it? You get the Beskar and then you bring it somewhere and then the shopkeeper makes a thing for you.

Wes: It was fun too for people like me who like, I didn’t know that their armor was made out of Beskar. You know, I just saw what looked like an impressive amount of money and I was like, oh, cool. He gets a lot of money and then I go and melt it down and make cool armor out of it. Yes, please.

Oren: I honestly couldn’t remember if Beskar was invented for the Mandalorian or if it was part of Star Wars secondary canon before that. But yeah, it was kind of neat. It was like, here’s some metal ingots. It’s like, that’s an odd thing to get paid in. It’s like, oh, I see. It’s blaster proof armor.

Chris: He also got the Beskar Spear as a reward. And I thought that was pretty cool because you could actually, I think, fight against somebody with a lightsaber with it. So that was a really neat thing and it was unique, but also useful. I don’t remember what happened to that thing. I’m sad he doesn’t have it anymore.

Wes: Well, because you have to watch the Book of Boba Fett to understand what happened to it.

Chris: Well, I did, but I tried to forget as much as possible.

Oren: I was legit sad. What happened to that spear is that the armorer melted it down because like Beskar’s not for weapons, it’s for armor. And I’m like, all right. On the one hand, that does make sense because Beskar’s only real use as a weapon is if you’re going to fight someone with a lightsaber and have an ability to block lightsabers. And that doesn’t come up that often. So I get it. It makes sense, but I was still sad. I love that spear. I was really sad when she melted it down.

Wes: Spears are great weapons. They need to be in more shows.

Oren: Yeah, I do love spears. Someone get me like a Jedi with a long stick with a lightsaber taped to the end.

I’m into this. It can be like in the extended universe books where they started introducing weird lightsaber customization features where you could have like a nine-foot lightsaber blade.

Chris: Whoa.

Oren: It’s like, this is getting out of hand.

Chris: Let’s not do that.

Oren: Or you could make your lightsaber catch on fire. So it would do extra fire damage. You know, if there’s one thing a lightsaber needs, it’s more damage.

Chris: Well, apparently now somebody can walk away after they get stabbed through the midsection with a lightsaber. So apparently it does need fire damage.

Wes: Yeah, I guess so.

Oren: Yeah, that’s the problem, man. The Sith need that extra 1d6 of fire damage. They just can’t get a killing blow without it.

Chris: For me, when it comes to negative treasure, cursed items, I always keep thinking of in Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the dragon bracelet.

Oren: Oh, that thing creeped me out. Not because it turns you into a dragon. That’s fine. But because it didn’t grow when you became a dragon.

Chris: That was really creepy.

Oren: Just freaking crushing your arm now. I hate everything about it. I was scared to wear rings for years after that. Not like I wore a lot of jewelry anyway, but I was definitely mildly afraid of putting on a ring and worrying that my hand would grow while I was asleep.

Wes: I get that for sure.

Chris: Yeah, that part was not necessary. The thing that really helped the story was turning Eustace into a dragon.

Oren: That is a good part of the story. It’s as good as Eustace’s arc was ever going to be. It resolves his arc really fast after that, but I still liked the dragon transformation.

Chris: I do think that in a lot of cases with treasure, it is almost like a karmic problem where storytellers don’t want to give their heroes treasure unless they need it, not just because they want it. And there may be some exceptions, especially if the hero has kind of gone through a lot of excessive hardships to get the treasure. But I think in that case, that’s often when it’s, oh, we didn’t get the treasure, but friendship was the reward all along.

We didn’t actually need it for anything as opposed to, oh, my parents’ business is going to be foreclosed on. Now I need money, and then you get treasure to pay for it. And then often heroes just give away the rest. Or if they get a bunch of treasure, they don’t need it for anything. They often give it away.

Oren: Sometimes they put a portal on a balloon and the balloon spews the treasure out over the rest of the town.

We’re getting close to the end here, but I do have one more thing I want to mention, which as I talked earlier about using quest rewards as the stakes. And there’s a cautionary tale I want to share, which is that you need to be careful that the quest reward isn’t just a cool thing that you as the author want your character to have. So I read the novel Chilling Effect a little while ago. Some spoilers for that novel. The big thing that the protagonist is trying to get at the end of the story is that she wants her ship back, because she had a cool ship at the beginning, and it gets stolen from her about halfway through. And now she has I guess a less cool ship? Although granted, it’s kind of unclear why her first ship is better, but it’s supposed to be better in some unspecified way. So her big motivation is that she wants to get her ship back, and it’s just kind of a weak motivation, because she doesn’t need the ship for anything. She’s already got a new ship, which I actually have more attachment to than the first ship, because she spent a bunch of time fixing it up and getting it space-worthy. So that felt a little too video game-y. That was like, yeah, well, we need to get the cool ship back so that it has better stats for us to blow things up better with.

Chris: Are there any actual stakes, like negative stakes?

Oren: No. If she doesn’t get her ship back, she won’t have her ship back.

Chris: Right, so that’s the problem, is that’s not capable of generating tension, because it doesn’t matter. There’s no negative consequences if she doesn’t get her ship back.

Oren: Yeah, basically. That’s the issue. And I’ve seen that sort of problem in client manuscripts on a fairly regular basis. This was just one of the only times I’d seen it in a published work, so I thought it was worth pointing out.

Alright, well, I think that’s a good note to end this on. We now have the reward of a podcast episode. That’s basically good. That’s the same as a pile of gold.

Chris: We can say that’s the reward we earned for talking for half an hour. You can read what you like into that.

Okay, if you enjoyed this episode, please support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

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

Spell books and mystic sigils are all well and good, but what if you’re planning a story with lots of fights? For that matter, what if the spell books and mystic sigils are part of the fights? This week, we’re talking about how to design your magic system for maximum action entertainment. Sorcerous martial arts, psychic duels, and shimmering shields abound! Plus, you know there will be complaints about pro-bending, right? How could there not be?

• Channeling

Generously transcribed by Anna. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. And before we get started, just letting you know we are looking for audio editing volunteers. No experience is necessary. We will train you just to make us sound good. 

Oren: Please make us sound good. [Chris laughs] You have no idea how much we need that. 

Chris: Anyway, just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer. 

Oren: Alright, so it’s time for a magic battle. Very exciting. So you’re gonna make a shield and I’m gonna shoot little bolts at the shield until it either goes away or I get tired. Does that sound like fun? It’s like a lot of fun, right? Very exciting. 

Chris: To make it more exciting, maybe we can just make it last longer. You know, make it epic size? 

Oren: Yeah, I could make the bolts real big and glowy. 

Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’ll make the shield super huge. Oh, it’ll be a dome. 

Oren: Everyone loves domes. So magic, designing magic systems is hard and I really struggle with it. So I thought that it would be useful to focus specifically on making a magic system that is for fighting. If you want to do a lot of magic fights in your setting, what should you design your magic to be like? Because I’ve encountered a number of stories, both published and unpublished, where the author clearly wants to have a lot of magic battles but did not design their magic to work for magic fights. And so as a result, the fights are boring, or contrived, or over too quickly and such. So this is a way to concentrate and figure out if this is what you want your magic to do.

Chris: And like, usually when we talk about fights, we also have to point out the difference between movies and books because it’s not the same. Movies, of course, are very good at making magic look cool. So we can have what is actually a very boring magic system or just a magic system that’s not optimized for fighting. So maybe it’s interesting, but the fights would be really boring and they’ll do all kinds of things to make it look super cool. Even though the fight isn’t actually that exciting in a way that a book would take advantage of. A book has to focus more on the strategy of the situation and has to carefully communicate first what is happening, which is hard enough when you have a whole bunch of people moving around and not just moving around, but also using magic, which has to be explained. 

And part of what is happening is who is currently winning and why. And then they have to know what could happen. Right? So if you want your protagonist to feel threatened, we need to know that something could threaten them. If your protagonist just comes up with whatever magic is super cool in the moment and can do just about anything (which there are lots of stories where that is the case), how do you threaten that person? They’re on fire right now, but we know that they can just kind of like, wave their wand and that fire will turn into water and they’ll be completely healed. There’s not going to be much sense of threat in that situation. 

Oren: Wheel of Time has that problem, which, because the mages can do practically anything. Age of Myth has it even worse. The book Age of Myth, where the mages are just at Q-levels of power. So like when two of them are fighting, I have no idea who’s winning. One of them throws a house at the other one and it’s like, is that bad? Is having a house land on you a problem for these mages? I can’t tell. I have no way to know. 

Chris: [laughs] So yeah, the first question is just, are you limiting your magic? If you have a really long range ability to like, blow up anything, it’s not going to be much of a fight. Somebody just does spells in their basement. 

Oren: Anything that instantly ends the fight, that there’s no defense against, is not good. And it gets worse the more easily it can be used. Like the further away you have to be, or the less effort you have to put into it. Avatar starts to have that problem towards the end with Korra, especially with bloodbending. Like bloodbending is actually very boring. It’s fine as a scary thing for the bad guy to do to show how threatening he is. But once you actually get into the fights, he can’t use his bloodbending because it just ends the fight immediately. Winx Saga on Netflix had the same problem. There were a bunch of characters, they were called blood witches, who, their power was just instant mind control. And so to stop them from just ending fights immediately, we just had to introduce a bunch of situations in which their powers didn’t work. It just started to feel like now it’s gone the other direction. Now they just feel useless. 

Chris: So just having good limits is really important to keep the fight interesting. Because if one person can just insta-kill the other person, there’s no strategy that can happen there. Or having a death spell that’s equivalent to just shooting a gun or like a wand. A gun is at least better because a gun can run out of ammo. If your character has a kill spell, they don’t have any reason but to point their wand at the other person and be like, “kill, kill, kill,” all over and over again. And that’s just not very interesting. 

Oren: That also can get into another common problem, which is repetitive powers, where you have a bunch of different powers that more or less do the same thing. I’d rather not mention it, but there’s a certain wizard school story, which is the poster child for this, because the characters have like 50 different spells, all of which do some variation of “point your wand and it incapacitates whoever’s on the other end” in various ways. And it’s like, there are not that many ways that you can do that that are actually interesting. Like, oh, well now the blast you shoot is green instead of red. [Chris laughs] That doesn’t actually make it that much more interesting. And even Avatar starts to run into this problem in Korra, but not just in Korra, but that’s where it really starts to become obvious, is that they have different bending powers, but often the bending powers just kind of end up being various flavors of “push your opponent backwards.” That’s most notable in pro-bending, where they added a bunch of restrictions that made the fight less interesting, and now they literally are just shoving each other back and forth. And I don’t know whose idea that was, but it doesn’t work very well. 

Chris: Right, it’s also because it was a kids show, and so they don’t really want to show people getting burned. So fire pushes people back now. 

Oren: Roasting someone alive. So I wanted to talk about two extremely broad strategies that you can go with, with your magical combat. And I found that, I think pretty much all books are going to fall into one of these categories, but that’s not impressive. It’s just because they’re very broad. There is the enhanced physical fight, in which the characters are still fighting with their bodies in some capacity, but they have additional powers that help them do that. Avatar is like that. Star Wars is like that. The Art of Prophecy book that I’ve talked about a few times recently is like that. Mistborn is like that. Any kind of magical martial arts story is going to be that way. And then the other extremely broad category is where your protagonist is basically not using their body in any meaningful way, and is just dueling with powers themselves. Which is rarer, but still happens. And The Broken Earth is probably the most notable example right now. Because when two mages in The Broken Earth fight, what they do with their hands basically doesn’t matter. They’re entirely dueling with their magic powers. So first things first, pick one of those. Decide which one you want. 

Chris: There is opportunity for a little bit of blurring. So if your characters aren’t really doing martial arts, but where they stand ends up mattering for how good the magic is. Maybe there’s some ley lines, and if they are immediately on top of that ley line, for instance, they can cast better magic. They might still have reasons to use maneuvering their position as a strategy during the fight, or doing magic to get the other person off of the ley line to reduce their power might be a thing. You can still use a little bit of movement and spacing if you want, but it’s not the same as doing martial arts with some magic. 

Oren: Okay, so the first thing that I recommend for your magic, when you’re adding defensive magical options, you usually want those to be active defenses. Such as jumping out of the way, or some kind of difficult deflection spell, or something like that. You don’t usually want all of your magic defenses to be like a passive shield or a suit of armor. Some of that is fine. It can help explain how your characters survive, despite having these very spectacular attacks hurled at them. But if that’s like the entirety of their defense, then that just gets kind of boring, because they just stand there and take hits. 

Chris: You definitely don’t want defenses to be super reliable, because you also don’t want, for instance, a shield spell that a character can just cast over and over again. You want the possibility that the defense will fail, or some way for the attacker to get around it so that they have to change tactics. I’m actually reminded of the Borg. They have adapted! [both laugh] Okay, this character’s using this type of shield. Maybe there’s a way to get around it, or certain types of spells that get past that type of shield. 

Oren: Yeah, I mean, and like, the bad guy having a form of invincibility or resilience that they use offensively is a little different. The Borg don’t just like, sit there and wait for your phaser to run out. They come at you. So there’s a certain amount of like, alright, well now we can’t shoot them and we need to think of another way to beat them or something. And that usually involves shooting them with something that isn’t an energy weapon for some reason. [both laugh] Bullets, they could never adapt to that. 

Chris: That is hilarious when sci-fi settings pull out, like, okay, but like, what about the physical bullet? 

Oren: Yeah, Stargate did that too, where it was like, the replicators are basically immune to everything except bullets. Bullets can kill them. It’s like, well, that’s convenient. 

Chris: So if you have a battle, it could be just magical or there’s no reason you couldn’t do this if you’re doing like, physical martial arts too. Basically you want to create strategies that you can communicate to readers and that your characters can use to be clever, right? And that can change from fight to fight. The more fights you have, the more you need to be able to vary those fights so that every fight doesn’t feel the same. So basically what you want is lots of different levers that you can pull to affect the outcome of the fight and make the situation different this time. And one way to do that is to just think through all the different ways that your magic can break down or go wrong, right? Which is something I encourage people to do anyway, because you’re always going to have times in the story where magic is a little inconvenient. And on one hand, it can be a little bit much if you’re like, oh, it’s like the transporter fails for a different reason every time. That would solve the problem. But still, it’s good for magic to not always work. 

For example, it’s very common in magic systems for characters to need to concentrate to do magic. It’s like, just concentrate, just concentrate. But strangely, once a character learns to concentrate, that almost never goes wrong. I almost never see stories where the concentration is only for a little training arc that’s usually underdeveloped. We never see people who are proficient in magic have problems with concentration, but there’s so many reasons why we might not be able to concentrate. And there are tactics an opponent can use to break somebody’s concentration. Anything from just a loud bang right nearby, that would make it hard to concentrate. Or you could go with the whole “your loved ones calling out to you” thing if we want to be much more clever about it. But if your characters have to do X in order to cast magic, that’s potentially something that could be disrupted, even if it’s something like, internal, like concentration. 

Similarly, if you have an elemental system and they need to have access to that element, they can’t just generate it automatically. You probably don’t want to take all of the element away from them because, or at least not for the full fight. Maybe you take it away and they get it back. But you could have a strategy that’s about reducing it. So for instance, if you have a water mage and a fire mage, and the water mage can’t control steam in the air, the fire mage might use a tactic that’s designed to grind down the amount of water that the water mage controls by boiling it. 

Oren: I like that concept. I do find it kind of annoying when you have an elemental system and like only one element has that problem and it’s always water. It’s assumed for whatever reason by default that fire mages can just make fire and earth mages always have earth around, basically. Most of these stories never take place somewhere where there isn’t any earth. And then air mages always have air or they would be dead. But with water mages, it’s like, ah, well now there’s no water. Drat. [Chris laughs] It starts to feel like picking on water.

Chris: Well, I will say if the fire mage can’t just create fire in thin air, the water mage is definitely going to have an advantage for that one.

Oren: Yeah, I agree, I agree. 

Chris: Yeah. And then your magic systems have their own trickiness because you need to make them roughly equivalent enough if you’re doing lots of fights. 

Oren: They have to be the same but different. 

Chris: Same but different. But for instance, if your characters have magic tattoos, okay, what happens when somebody gets injured in a way that breaks their tattoo? That creates a new pattern there. Could that mean that their magic goes wrong? And just look at all the aspects of your magic system. Be like, “okay, where could it break down?” That’s a potential attack vector that somebody could use and the fight could then focus on that. Now you need a reason why, again, they would do that instead of just doing the insta-kill spell, which is why you don’t really want insta-kill spells. You want something where a person has to be clever to get around the other person’s kind of defensive or has a reason to try to get an advantage, right, for later in the fight. 

Oren: The Broken Earth is actually a very good example here. So The Broken Earth has a clear objective that you’re trying to achieve in a magic battle, which is you are trying to break the other mage’s Torus, which is a fancy way of saying their little donut of magic that’s around them. Because if you break that, you can’t use your powers without an intact Torus, and if you can’t use your powers, you’re basically helpless against another mage. And so first it’s like, alright, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to break their Torus. And then, how do you do that? And so it creates this interesting system where you have to try to figure out, okay, should I put all of my energy into one point and attack there, but then they can avoid that attack? Should I split them into multiple attacks and hit them from different directions? And you have to try to find different sources of power from within the ground, because it’s all geology-based, so you’re trying to find hot spots or pockets of gas that you can use to draw power from. And so it creates a very active magic system. With a goal that is clear and easy to understand, but multiple ways to accomplish it. And no, like, one single, “I get out my Torus-piercing bullet and shoot it.” It’s a remarkably good combat system. I really like it. 

One of the problems with that book is that there isn’t nearly enough mage-on-mage fighting, even though that’s like the best part. [Chris laughs] Because it’s an Oppressed Mages story. It’s like, I would really love it if the battle was between two factions of mages instead. 

Chris: Yeah, that sounds cool.

Oren: It’s so cool. Anyway, so that’s an example. There aren’t that many examples of books with good magic systems for fighting. 

Chris: Unfortunately. 

Oren: Broken Earth is one of the few I could find, and so I feel the need to trumpet it. 

Chris: Well, I mean, similarly to, you know, what makes the magic break down, you could also go with, can you add something fun that would give somebody an advantage? You just have to be, again, be careful that the advantage is not too big, because you don’t want, like, “I do this and then the battle is over.” Well, I mean, that might be very convenient for one fight, but if you have lots of fights. For instance, my example of, maybe it matters where they stand, and then you have a reason for them to try to do a weird king-of-the-hill situation, for instance, where they’re both trying to stand on this little hillock and like fighting over it. [laughs]

Oren: “You give me that. That’s my hilltop!” 

Chris: Or anything else that could be interesting. One of them is upwind, or has other things about them. Items on them. Maybe you have a system where they have rings that help a little bit, and they can knock rings off of each other’s hands or something like that. So there’s lots of different options here, but basically you’re looking for things that could make the difference, you know, give an advantage or a disadvantage, or be the difference between winning and losing, so that you have different things to focus on in different fights. 

And it’s also helpful, I think, if your mages are a little different from each other. And it doesn’t have to be like they inherently have one talent or the other, but you know, they can be trained in certain ways so that they focus on some tactics over other tactics. And that way they can do a little bit of sizing up. What’s this person good at, what they’re not good at. Just like all the times when we have physical fights. It’s all about, okay, this person is very fast, but they’re not very strong, so they can’t take a hit very well. That kind of thing. It’s also nice if you can do that during magic battles.

Oren: I had one client story, and I’m changing the details of this because it’s a client story, but the general concept is the same, where the idea was basically that characters can activate more magical abilities, but doing that comes with risk of either exhausting themselves faster or losing control of their magic. So it was like (as an example, this isn’t what it actually manifested as, but without telling you the details of someone’s unpublished story), suppose you had a series of magic gemstones. You could like, socket them into your magic wrist gemstone holder. And the more you put in, the more powers you had access to, but also the faster you are drained and the greater the chance of a bad reaction between the two spells. So that creates an interesting choice that the character has to make, of like, “Okay, how many powers do I want at one time? What’s the risk worth here?” That was just a really cool concept, and it introduced a bunch of fun strategies for the mages in this client’s story to use in fighting. I really liked it.

Chris: Yeah, any time the choice to use magic has to be strategic. Like, one of the things that’s interesting is if you have a system where you have to prepare magical things in advance, as opposed to just during the fight doing spells, that can be, you know, that has its own strengths and weaknesses. But if your character is like, okay, I’ve used up my magical battery, and now I have a finite number of spells that I can use, these spells left, now I have to suddenly be strategic. And there’s a cost to using magic now. And now I can only use it if it’s actually worth it, right? Where I have to like, “wait till I see the whites of their eyes” is basically the equivalent. [Oren laughs] Don’t shoot until you have a good shot, because we have limited ammunition. It’s similarly, you gotta hold on and only use a spell once you know it will have maximum effect if you only have a limited number of spells. So anything that has a tradeoff that comes with a cost, then the character has a reason to be more strategic than they were before, as opposed to again, just spamming the insta-kill spell as fast as you can for the entire fight. 

Oren: If you’re primarily experienced with magic systems through videogames, this is a place where you’re going to run into problems. Because in a videogame, you can have like, fire, lightning and ice. And each of those have a different, like secondary effect. Fire puts a damage over time, lightning gives a paralysis and ice slows them or something. And like in a videogame, sure, that totally could work. But in a story, unless it’s a very specific type of story, hitting someone with fire, lightning or ice will have roughly the same effect in that they will be dead. [both laugh] Those secondary effects aren’t going to matter, so you have to think about it in terms of real humans and the way real human bodies work. You can’t count on very abstract secondary effects that only work in video game logic. 

Chris: Unless you’re a Dragon Age cartoon show, though. 

Oren: Yeah, I mean. [both laugh] 

Chris: This new Dragon Age show, which was very surprising that it kept using all the same mechanics as the videogame. 

Oren: Yeah, it was weird. Character gets like, stabbed in the back and just walks it off because they’re fine. Because they have hit points left. 

Chris: Well, it does feel like Dragon Age. So that’s success there, I guess. 

Oren: Yeah, it definitely feels like Dragon Age. [both laugh]

Chris: I think it’s worth looping back on the fact that you want to make characters do more with less. We’ve talked about these situations where we have magic powers that just get out of hand. And I think bloodbending is such a great example because it shows you why we add things like that to the story in the first place. For one episode, it was really impressive and cool and intimidating. And so it had its purpose at that time. But then when we start to use it more and we get used to it, then suddenly it’s bloodbending everywhere all the time and our fights are just less interesting. 

Oren: Right. And I was thinking about bloodbending too, right? Because I was like, all right, what if they… Because in Korra, they added a ton of special things onto bloodbending to make it even more overpowered. 

Chris: And they didn’t have to. 

Oren: That was a completely unforced error. There was no reason to do that. 

Chris: I do think that once you add something that’s cool to your story, you want to bring it back outside of its original context. And that’s part of the problem here. Because originally, bloodbending was very difficult. It could only do it during the full moon. 

Oren: And that was something that I was thinking about. I was like, what if they hadn’t added all of that nonsense to bloodbending that they do in Korra and make it able to take bending away and work when not on a full moon and not even have to make motions to do it? What if they just hadn’t done any of that? What role would bloodbending have had in the story? And I was forced to conclude I still think it would be kind of not good because it would basically just come down to Katara can auto-win a one-on-one fight during full moons. That’s what bloodbending came down to. If it requires full moons, that basically means it almost never comes up. Except if it did come up on a full moon, then the fight would be kind of boring. 

Chris: There’s exactly one bloodbending plot you can do, which is “character learns bloodbending for the first time.” [laughs]

Oren: You could arrange things so that on the full moon, she has to fight multiple enemies because she can only bloodbend one person at a time, presumably. So maybe you could make it work that way. But once you find yourself having to limit a power by like, a certain time slot that it can be used in, that’s already a bad sign.

Chris: Right, I mean I do think with bloodbending we could have had maybe one additional episode where Katara uses it when she really doesn’t want to. Right? Uses it out of desperation. And then the full moon just doesn’t come back for the rest of the show. And fast forward to Korra, Korra learns bloodbending for the first time. It’s also still super creepy, the end. 

But yeah, besides that, I think the other thing that happens a lot is that people who show their protagonist learning magic, they really want the climax to be showing, “Oh hey look at all the cool, powerful things they can do now!” But that doesn’t actually make for the most exciting climax. Because you’re just escalating all of the powers. They probably won’t feel threatened. It’s going to be really hard to keep track of what’s going on. So I think in many cases it’s almost better to, if your protagonist is growing in power, make them show off during the penultimate fight. And then for this climax, force them to show a lot of ingenuity by taking things away from them, right? 

And again, if you have lots of levers, if you have reasons why your magic wouldn’t work, then you should be able to do this. If you don’t have any way to take the magic away from them, then you’re kind of forced to wait until the very end of the story to give them magic so that it doesn’t get in the way of conflict. But if you have those levers, then what you can do is they can show off for the penultimate fight and then during the climax, “Oh no! Their magic item was broken or their magical battery is out” or, you know, whatever you want to do, and then show that they are so good that they can overcome this obstacle by being clever. And showing finesse, for instance, instead of just like raw power. That kind of thing. Or in some cases, you can loop back onto the lessons that they were learning when they were just starting. It’s like, “Oh, you need to be more disciplined. You know, do your breathing exercises.” “Oh, breathing exercises are so boring!” And then like, at the very end, “Oh, I’ve got nothing left except for these breathing exercises.” [both laugh]

Oren: A breathing exercise to save the world. 

Chris: Something like that. 

Oren: Here’s a question as we’re coming to the end of our time: What did you think of the magic fighting in Mistborn? 

Chris: Now that I think about it, it did feel kind of like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn’t actually think about it that way at the time, but when I was told after, I was like, oh yeah, that does make sense because they’re leaping off of rooftops a lot. 

Oren: Right, if you are a Mistborn in the setting, you can do that. That’s one of the things about it that I found kind of annoying is that it felt like, to do the cool stuff, you basically have to be one of the Special Mages who gets all eight powers. Because like, with just one of those powers, there’s not really a lot you can do. But with all eight of them, you can base, or at least with, there are a few that don’t really matter, but with like two or three, you can do magical kung-fu fighting. 

Chris: On the plus side though, that means that you can have your super special chosen one who has all of the powers and not have them insta-win because they’re super powerful. 

Oren: That’s true. 

Chris: That’s definitely a tradeoff. There’s so many people who want to do the trope of,  “My main character has all the powers and everybody else just has one.” Right? It’s good wish fulfillment. I think that when you get to an elemental system that has like eight different elements, right? It’s one thing for Aang to have access to all four elements. Of course he also has the Avatar State, which is the real broken. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s the real issue. 

Chris: But if you have eight elements, think of how much that magnifies the difference in power level and it’s just gonna make it harder for you to keep that under control. 

Oren: Or alternatively, the way that Mistborn addresses that problem is that like five of the eight kind of suck [Chris laughs] and they don’t really matter that much. It’s like, “Oh boy, I have eight powers. One of them is: the ability to notice when someone else is using magic.” And then another one is the ability to prevent that first power from working. There’s like the one to see far away, which is situationally useful. And then there’s like the three that are actually good, which is super strength, and then like the ability to pull metal towards you or push it away from you, which are like the three that actually matter in the story. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s worth noting that Mistborn also has a limit in that they all rely on metals that get burned up. So you have kind of a limited time span quantity, which is also, I think, a good choice there. 

Oren: It gives you a good built-in reason why they can’t use their powers forever. Admittedly, it does have certain shades of like, they’ll get tired because I don’t know how long the metal that they’ve taken will last. They can tell me in the story, but like, I have no way of knowing how many seconds have gone by. 

Chris: If you have any limit that’s like they get tired, their energy fades, or, you know, we have a limited quantity of material, something that’s, you know, not binary, that’s like an amount that diminishes, the key is really being consistent about it and not just, hey, this would be a convenient time for them to get tired. It should always be present and used consistently, and then it will feel a lot better. 

Oren: Alright, well, that’s a good note, I think, to end this podcast because we are out of time. 

Chris: If you found this episode useful, become a patron. You can support us on patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.