A writer can be a great thing, but would two writers be better? Three? Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of authors you can combine, Voltron style. Though there may be practical limitations, depending on the project and how you approach writing. This week, we’re talking about co-writing, a practice that has driven some authors to success while baffling many others. What are the benefits of co-writing, and what are the downsides? And perhaps most importantly: who do we get angry at when a co-written story disappoints us?

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

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

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

Oren: Oren

Bunny: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: We’re talking about co-writing today, and I think really the only way to make sure that it’s truly co-writing is to trade off each sentence, and to have each sentence be roughly equal length. So I’ll start, and we’ll go in a circle. “The worm was having a good day.” Oren.

Oren: Yes, “…and the early bird was also there.” I think you all know what happens next.

Bunny: Uh-oh. Chris, you wanna conclude us?

Chris: “The worm ultimately had a very bad day.”

Bunny: Oh no. That was beautiful. That really teaches me something about loss and hardship. And stories taking unexpected directions.

So, I think co-writing, beyond playing an improv game, can be broadly defined as just when there are multiple people involved in creating a story. And that can take a lot of different forms, like obviously TV shows and games and stuff have writers’ rooms and teams, which might shift throughout the show’s runtime. And it might even get new creative directors. That sort of setup is also fairly hierarchical, so everyone’s writing towards the vision of one or two people who are the showrunners.

There’s also graphic novels, which I would argue are co-written, even if there’s only technically one writer, because the images have a big effect on how the story is told. So I think that’s also a kind of co-writing.

There’s also what happens when people trade off between books in a series, so, like, Wheel of Time started with one guy and ended with another guy. I don’t think that quite counts as co-writing, but it’s certainly still multiple people having inputs into the creative process.

Oren: If you’re a real weirdo, you get dice involved. [Bunny laughs] Then y’all sit around pretending to be wizards for an evening.

Bunny: I don’t know who would do that. That sounds weird. Disturbed behavior, very strange. 

Oren: Big old nerds.

Bunny: They just sit around and co-write together for a couple hours every week. There’s also ghostwriting, which I don’t think really counts. If you do count it, that’s probably one of the main ways that co-writing happens with regard to novels. I feel like novels are the hardest thing to co-write simply because you can’t do things like assigning particular characters to a particular writer. There’s just so many words.

Oren: Au contraire, you definitely can. [laughing] It’s arguably less convenient. So depending on how you split the responsibilities, you can definitely have one person who is responsible for the dialogue of a character. Depending on the premise of the story, that can be easier or more difficult. If it’s something like This Is How You Lose the Time War it’s very easy, because that’s a series of letters.

Chris: Similar to Sorcery and Cecelia, two writers that were writing letters back and forth to each other is how they wrote the book.

Oren: But supposedly with, for example, The Expanse, which is written by two authors who go under a single pen name, supposedly Daniel Abraham was in charge of some characters more than others, and then Ty Franck had more influence on the other characters. Abraham in particular is noted for writing a lot of Miller, the detective, because that was based off of Abraham’s D&D character. It wasn’t actually D&D, but it was whatever roleplaying game they were playing as a setup for The Expanse. Now that doesn’t mean Abraham would write Miller’s line of dialogue and then he would turn the page and hand it to Franck, who would then write Holden’s dialogue. I’m not saying they did it that way.

Chris: You could probably have improv-ed chats to get ideas for how the conversation goes if you want.

Oren: And when it comes to ghostwriting, that is often a very squishy topic. Sometimes a ghostwriter is literally just told by a celebrity, “Write a book and put my name on it.” And then sometimes you have something more like the Animorphs ghostwriting. As the series went on, Applegate was busy and didn’t have time to do all of the writing herself. Supposedly, K. A. Applegate is already two people, like supposedly that also incorporated a lot of the work of her husband, and then they brought in more writers and Applegate would create outlines and then give those to the ghostwriters who would write dialogue and fill in description.

Nowadays, the impression I get is that we would be more likely to just call that co-writing, and those authors would get their names on the books. It would be less common for that to be done in secret now. That’s just a feeling I’m getting from hearing people talk about it.

Chris: I get the sense that with an IP work where somebody is hired, a writer is hired to write a story in an existing franchise, publishers don’t necessarily want some people to know that this is an IP work. A lot of times a writer does get their name on those, but not necessarily, and it could be secretive, and they want all the books to be under the same pen name.

Bunny: Yeah. One of my favorite book series growing up as a kid, Warriors, was four people writing under the pen name Erin Hunter, and I have no idea how that work was split up. My little kid brain was not nearly developed enough to be like, “Yes, I bet this was written by writer number two, and this has the oeuvre of writer number three.”

Chris: I suspect that most IP books are more heavily supervised and edited. All the contracts are different, but I think there’s more likely to be an editor who goes in there and just makes changes on their own to make them fit whatever franchise it is.

Oren: And sometimes we are fortunate enough to have interviews and behind-the-scenes material where the writers tell us, and that’s how we know a lot about what was going on with The Expanse. We know that Ty Franck created the setting originally, and he was trying to pitch it as an MMO, which I have so many questions about how that was supposed to work. Do you mean like a space MMO, like they were supposed to fly the ships around, or are you imagining that they were like a people-scale MMO, and they would use ships to fast travel. That sounds really wild. And when that didn’t go anywhere, he ran it as a roleplaying game for a while. And as someone developing a setting for both prose and a roleplaying campaign, I can see that makes him smarter and more attractive.

Bunny: How clever and sexy of him to do such a thing.

Oren: I know, right? Just a really classy act. And then he brought Abraham on board, and that was when they decided to go the novel route, and they collaborated on different parts of the story, basically. And so we know that, because they’ve talked about it in interviews.

But then other times it’s a lot less clear. Like the Long Earth books are co-written by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. We don’t know how they split those roles. As far as I know, neither of them ever said. There are some characters who are a lot more Pratchett than others, like Lobsang, the AI airship who believes he is a reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman. That is just a Discworld character right there, let me tell you.

Chris: [laughing] It does speak to some of the liabilities of co-writing. It can be weird if the work is written in two completely different styles. And sometimes it’s fine. Again, if you have characters by different authors that can give them separate personalities, that makes them distinct, and separate voices, that makes them more realistic as characters. With something like that, I would be nervous about, is a story tonally unified. There is Pratchett doing his thing.

Oren: It worked fine in The Long Earth. The Long Earth had its problems, but I don’t think clashing writing styles was one of them. I did notice that the book felt less and less Pratchett as the series went on, which makes sense, his health was declining by then. I don’t imagine he had a lot of time for co-writing, so that part I was made a little sad by, but I don’t think there was any serious clashing.

I have noticed that in other books, for example, Good Omens, the book. It’s very noticeable that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse three are entirely evil and have no redeeming characteristics. And then there’s Death, which is just Death from the Discworld novels and is almost a good guy. That always struck me as weird, right? It’s not like you couldn’t have Death be different than the others, but the book never gives any indication of why that would be. It’s just that’s how Pratchett likes to write Death. And I love that Death, so I’m not complaining too hard, but…

Chris: Sometimes writers divide up the works in different ways to try to mitigate the unevenness. Either you have one person do the entire first draft, and the other person do like a second pass, or they edit each other’s writing. Or as we said, if you have the idea that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they might naturally sound a little bit more different. Or two people writing to each other, two different authors will give each their own voice, so there are ways to mitigate the style unevenness, but sometimes that can take work to resolve.

Oren: Yeah, I have tried co-writing a couple of times. I’ve discovered I’m not good at it. I have not communicated well with the person I was writing with, and I would end up taking the story in a direction that they didn’t want it to go, and I didn’t talk about it to them enough. Then they would look at it and be like, “This is not at all what I wanted, and I’m so far into this I don’t feel like I can stop.” And then the project would fizzle.

Chris: I think that’s the number one downside. We talk to a lot of writers about trying to make their stories cohesive, and we talk to them about “find out your darling,” and “center your darling,” and make everything about that, and it’s just really easy for two different writers to have two different darlings and to try to put the story in two different directions, because they care about different things. And so I think for co-writing to work well, you really need writers that have–either are very determined to make it work [laughing], because they’re like, both famous, this is a great opportunity. But in a lot of cases, co-writers with just very similar tastes.

Like Sorcery and Cecelia, one of the reasons it works well, even though it’s got what are basically two different viewpoints in different locations, because that gives them an excuse to write letters to each other, is that they’re both cute little regency romances, fantasy regency romances. Both of the authors are into that, when a reader reads them, if you like one, you’re more likely to like the other, and it gives the whole book a more unified feel despite the fact that each writer has their own playground to work in. Whereas if you try to work with somebody who just likes different things in their books, it’s gonna be a lot harder.

Bunny: And even when everyone’s aligned on the goal and the story and where we’re going with it, and so on and so forth, there can still be little blips where someone has a strange amount of passion for one particular small thing that doesn’t quite fit what everyone else is going for.

So like right now I’m writing a script for a game with two other people, and we’ve had a couple of cases. So what we’ve done is essentially divvy up all of the characters in the game between us. And whenever we write a scene with our character and then another person’s character, usually one of the characters is leading the scene. And so that’ll probably be the person who writes the first draft of it, and then they just add “this is what I want to convey” type of dialogue for the other person’s characters. So you’ll write your character’s dialogue and the serious tone of the scene, and then you want the response from their character to have the gist of like, “Oh no, that’s awful! Frowny face, frowny face.” So you write that, and then later they’ll come back through and replace that with dialogue in that character’s actual voice.

Chris: Have you ever had a circumstance where somebody came in and saw that and was like, “Yeah, I actually think my character would react in a different way,” and that created problems? Or did you all outline together closely enough that hasn’t been an issue?

Bunny: We did a lot of outlining and brainstorming together, so I don’t think we’ve had that be a huge issue. I’m trying to think…we’ve had instances where we get attached to our various NPCs and want them to have bigger roles than they should in the story.

Chris: [laughing] I have also encountered this, where somebody else who was just like helping me a little bit fell in love with the character that was supposed to be a random side character and wanted to give him, like, all the candy.

Bunny: Right, in this game, people will be clicking through this dialogue. We don’t want it to get too long. People are gonna be like, “Why does this random bug guy have deep and tragic backstory about the main character’s brother?” And then we’ll have to go in and talk about that and see if we really wanna center this character more, or whether this is just going to confuse the player.

Oren: Mind your own business, that’s why.

Bunny: [laughing] Sit down. Let me talk about the bug guy’s trauma, star-crossed lovers. So we’ve outlined and stuck together closely enough, I think our main strength, and the thing that’s made this particular co-writing experience work so well, is that we all communicate a lot, and I think that is probably the most important thing when you’re co-writing, on an interpersonal level. Like, the cohesion part, obviously that’s important, but that’s a problem of the script. Getting the script out there, you’ve gotta communicate. There is no way to co-write if everyone’s not on the same page.

Oren: Yeah. That’s why my attempts at it have all failed. By the same token, I also think that just my temperament with writing makes co-writing difficult for me, because I’ve also tried the other way where we all have access to the same document, and we can see it as it’s being written. And I hated it so much. When I’m actually writing, getting the words out is hard, and having to constantly worry, like, “Oh man, am I gonna have to delete this because my co-writer didn’t like it? Oh, no. Now I can’t write at all.” Now, obviously, that’s not a problem for a lot of people, so I’m not suggesting that’s a general issue with it, but certainly it was for me.

Chris: I mean, for me, the opposite can be a concern. This experience is not fun because I’m stressing about the fact that I want to change what the other person has written. And it’s one thing if they, for instance, hired me as an editor, because I’m there to give them feedback. But I also know as an editor that their vision is the most important, and all of my suggestions are in service to their vision for the story. They are the creative here. But when you’re co-writing, and you’re like, “Okay, that plot point seems a little contrived to me, and I’d like to change this, and other things, I think I would like this to just be a little different,” then every single point you would have to explain to the other person why you don’t like their version.

Bunny: I think, Oren, you make a good point about the temperament that you have to get to successfully co-write. Whatever temperament you have towards writing, there’s no good or bad necessarily, but I feel like there are better and worse temperaments to bring to a co-writing scenario. You cannot be defensive, for example, when it comes to co-writing. You’re gonna have eyes on your work constantly, and depending on the amount of co-writers, like you’re always going to be reading each other’s work and giving feedback and rewriting.

Like, we just got out essentially the third draft of our script to our next round of beta readers. We were supposed to have it done earlier this week, and then we just kept bouncing it back and forth with like, “I’ve resolved these comments and I made some comments on your comments. Could you take a look at that?” “I made some comments on your comments, and added a few things here and there. Could you take a look and review that?” And you gotta be willing to do that quite a lot.

Chris: It also brings up the question of when is co-writing faster, and when is it slower? Faster writing could potentially be a huge benefit, because prolific writers definitely have a big career advantage. And it’s not just because they have more books to sell, because you could be like, well, I have more books to sell, but now we have to split the profits between two people. But I think just putting out stories more often helps writers keep the attention of their fans, and build a reputation, and all of those things that are beyond having twice as many books to sell. So that’s a big benefit if you can put out books more fast by working with somebody. But if you’re going back and forth a lot and everything has to be coordinated, do you ever feel like it’s just really slow?

Bunny: I feel like the pace that this is going at, because this is a game project, and we’re part of a pretty big team, and we’re all doing this as a portfolio project–we’ve been pretty regimented with schedules and stuff because we have a producer, and she’s been pretty on top of things. She’s actually one of the other writers.

We’re pretty lucky in that regard, but I think if it were just us three writers, we would be bouncing it back and forth for eternity. Being like, “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve made some more comments,” like that sort of thing. It probably would’ve been faster if one of us had been the only one writing it, but I don’t think we would’ve had as interesting of a product.

Oren: It definitely helps if you have one person who can be in charge of saying, “Okay, we’ve debated this enough. We have to make a decision.”

Bunny: That was what was happening last night, when I finally got the scripts out. I was like, “All right, I’m locking this. Resolve the comments. Some of these lines we’re still not happy with, we can revise them later. We need to stay on schedule.” This project is lined up into “sprints,” which are just sections of time with specific goals in them. That helps keep things on track. But obviously not every set of co-writers will have that sort of thing.

Oren: Closest I’ve ever come to make anything like this work is co-GMing a campaign. The most successful I’ve ever been at it is when there were too many players for one GM to handle, and so we split them into multiple tables that people would occasionally switch between, and that was fun. That worked. The campaign was more chaotic than normal because we sometimes had to revise things. The GMs communicated ahead of time and tried to have some basic ideas of what was going to happen. But it’s roleplaying games, right? Stuff happens in real time. You don’t plan the story a hundred percent. So sometimes the two tables would diverge a bit, and then we’d have to see if we could bring them back together, or if we just had to roll some stuff back.

Bunny: That sounds far more complicated than the current co-writing thing I’m doing, because at least there aren’t a dozen wild card act player characters.

Oren: But the upside is that with roleplaying games, the standards are a lot lower. [everyone laughs] You know, with roleplaying games, my players will accept a lot of contrivances as long as I make their play, their characters, feel cool. And that’s not necessarily the case with an audience for a written work or for a video game.

Chris: You understand the story is gonna be less polished, but what you get is a customized story that’s for you.

Oren: The one that did not work at all was when we once tried to have two GMs for the same table. Not saying no one could make that work, but it did not suit us.

Bunny: How did you even try to make that work?

Oren: The original idea was one person would handle NPCs, or combat, or whatever, but one of the reasons it didn’t work was that we didn’t communicate very well on what our delineation of tasks was.

Chris: It was back to the communication.

Oren: It was both of our faults. I started doing more and more, and that was on me, because I was taking up more space, but I was doing that because they had decided to do less, because they saw that I was doing more.

Bunny: It’s like any group project.

Oren: So it was both of our faults that time, but it just didn’t work. I just ended up becoming the sole GM. It’s not impossible, but it certainly didn’t work for me.

Chris: I’m sure that you can also have a beneficial partnership by having people who are a little bit more specialist in what skills they take on. Like one person who likes to perhaps discovery-write that first draft, and another person who loves to have a draft to start with and wants to revise it and make it reflect their own vision, that would be a potential partnership. Or if somebody really likes the story, and somebody else is more into the prose and the wordcraft. I think there’s a lot of potential for that kind of thing. But I do think with those kinds of partnerships, it means that both people have to be ready to let go of the other area. [laughing] It seems like the biggest obstacle in many cases, besides communication, is if people have different visions for the story, it’s gonna be hard for them to both be happy with it.

Bunny: If you’re doing anything in a non-hierarchical structure, like any co-writing that’s not that TV writer’s room example where you’re all following the direction of a creative lead or whatever…

Chris: Or an IP work where you have the author that’s hiring people to fill out their outlines or something like that.

Bunny: Exactly, like an IP work. Everyone has some level of creative control, and that means you’re gonna be doing a lot of compromises. Everyone’s going to need to have a level of accountability. Gets complicated very quick.

Chris: Do you think that’s why in something like Sorcery and Cecelia, which two writers, they were just having fun over a summer and then decided to take all of their fun letters and make it into a book, giving them each their own playground where they had their own set of characters, but it was only cohesive because they were doing something very similar.

Oren: Probably wouldn’t have worked if one of them was living in, like, a steampunk dystopia. [Bunny laughs]

Chris:  After they were done, they did bring them together and decide to make some revisions. But if I understand, it was largely improvised, and they would do things like come from the countryside to London, or London to the countryside, which is the location of the two protagonists.

Oren: One of the things that’s funny about TV shows is because so much of the writing is done in a very team environment, and there are a lot of hands on the script over time, it’s very difficult to tell who came up with specific lines and whose story goes with who.

Chris: Yeah. I wanna know who from the Avatar live-action show was writing those terrible  dialogue lines.

Oren: What if we front-loaded all of the exposition?

Chris: To me, it felt like some other person came in, and was like, “No, we need exposition here,” and deleted somebody’s perfectly good dialogue line to put in something terrible. [laughing] That’s what it felt like. I don’t know if that’s what was happening.

Oren:  I listened to an interview once with one of the writers of the Deep Space Nine episode “Starship Down,” which is an episode about the Defiant getting damaged and flying around inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, doing like a whole submarine parallel. One of the two people who was credited as a writer on that episode, the way he tells it is that they wrote their script and originally it was actually underwater. It was literally submarine stuff. It was accepted, and then it was almost completely rewritten, and almost none of their original script is in the episode, but they’re still credited as the writers. [Bunny laughs]  And assuming that story is true, then we just have no idea who wrote that.

Chris: Yeah. It sounds like with TV shows, it can get political which person is credited, and can be sometimes a little arbitrary.

Oren: It certainly has a lot to do with your ability to make more money later. The more writing credits you have, the easier it is to get a job, et cetera, et cetera.

Bunny: Yeah, a lot of things are just black boxes, which is weird because we’re used to thinking of media as having only one author in general, but there’s a whole, dare I say, an ontology of authorship that you could get into. You could argue that plays are coauthored, simply because reading a play and seeing it are two different things. And just as the illustrator of a graphic novel contributes to the story, the actors of a play also do. It’s a weird and difficult thing, authorship.

Oren: Yeah, but I need someone to form a parasocial relationship with. [Bunny laughs] Can’t do that with a diffused group of creatives, each of whom has donated a small but vital component to the piece. What do I look like? Some kind of epitome of the human spirit? No.

Bunny: [laughing] When I take something they write personally, who do I write my email to?

Oren: I need the hate mail address.

Bunny: I need Alan Smithee.

Oren: Okay, so now that we’ve covered that the most important part of authorship is who we send hate mail to, I think we’ll go ahead and end this episode for today.

Chris: If you would like to help us co-write more episodes, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons, who while not technically co-writers, definitely make the show possible. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

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

Rise, podcast episode, rise from an auditory grave and do our bidding! Muahahahahaha! Necromancers are a staple of speculative fiction, whether they use arcane arts or a spooky lab. They’re absolutely always evil, or are they? Perhaps they’re just misunderstood, even if some of their practices are a bit unsavory. That’s what we’re talking about today, plus a return of everyone’s favorite dystopian setting idea: the necro-industrial complex.

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

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

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: —and—

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now, listeners, you’ve only heard our voices. You don’t know that we’re really alive. Perhaps someone used magic to reach beyond the grave. Someone who shall remain nameless but is definitely Bunny.

Bunny: [laughs] Ooooooooh.

Oren: Ooooooooh.

Chris: Why did you do it, Bunny? You know there are consequences for violating natural laws.

Bunny: Natural laws? I’m above such things. [evil laugh] Nature bends to my whims, and by nature I mean podcasters.

Oren: Yeah. Consequences typically for violating the laws of characters being dead, because when we want characters to die, it needs to be dramatic, and if we could bring them back, that would be a problem. Other natural laws, like not being able to throw fireballs, it’s perfectly fine to violate those. No problem.

Chris: It’s hard to have stakes if you could just bring everybody back to life exactly as they were.

Oren: It really is.

Chris: Do you hear that, DnD players slash writers? Yeah. I understand why it’s useful for an actual tabletop role playing game where people could die on accident to get resurrection, but it is not great for a story you plan ahead.

Oren: The worst one, if we’re talking about RPGs, is Eclipse Phase, where everyone is just digitally immortal and as long as you have money, you can just print a new body and download yourself into it. It is so hard to create stakes in that setting. You can do it, but you are working against all of the gravity of the world because it’s a combat game, right? It’s not like a political drama game. You’re supposed to spend most of it shooting guns, but you can’t die. So [stressed noise].

Bunny: Dying is like nicking your finger.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a little annoying. You have to pay to get a new body, and if you’re a successful adventurer, that’s not hard.

Chris: I guess, first rule of necromancy is, your necromancy can’t just bring all the characters back to life. No problem.

Bunny: Okay. I was thinking about—this is like, full on resurrection. Do we count that as necromancy? Does that seem like it’s a necromancy type thing? It seems adjacent.

Chris: I think we should have an expansive definition of necromancy because we need to keep it fresh and just doing the same very narrow thing over and over again just makes it get old.

Oren: No, it’s gotta be bones and rotting flesh, or it’s not necromancy. It’s gotta be like a creepy green, or—

Bunny: It has to be purple.

Oren: It could be purple. I’ll allow purple, but the natural color of necromancy is green. I’m sure we’ll all agree.

Bunny: It’s the color of the slime from Ghostbusters, which is fitting ’cause ghosts.

Chris: Yeah. I think it needs to be black with green accents to be precise.

Oren: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Bunny: It’s like an eyeshadow palette.

Oren: But necromancy in most settings tends to be flavored evil and bringing people back from the dead perfectly intact and normal is usually considered a good thing. So even though logically that would be a kind of necromancy, socially speaking, it’s not usually qualified that way.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could potentially have another consequence where you bring somebody back perfectly intact and then something else really bad happens.

Bunny: Yeah. There’s ways to flavor that if you want it to be dark.

Oren: Yeah. If there’s, like, negative consequences, you’re more likely to call it necromancy.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: But of course, that’s just an expectation, right? There are plenty of stories—especially now ’cause people love to be counterculture and stuff.

Chris: I think when any villain or monster starts to get well enough used, right, it becomes really fertile ground to make it into protagonists and good guys.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: Because that adds some novelty that is lost just by again, being used for villains over and over again. Not that you can’t have good necromancer villains in your stories, it’s just you have to do a little bit more work at this point to make them cool and scary. Whereas if you turn them into a protagonist, then you know there’s already a little more novelty to that. It won’t last forever. But right now.

Bunny: Oh, so you could say, you either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself resurrected into a hero?

Oren: Well, there’s also just an element of, wow, okay, so necromancers are classically evil, but that’s largely aesthetics-based.

Bunny: Yeah. Let’s throw some bones on it.

Oren: People reasonably ask, okay. Is there anything inherently wrong with animating a skeleton to do stuff? Does it not matter more what the skeleton does than that it is a skeleton? And the answer to that is a little more complicated than I think some fantasy fans are willing to admit. We also generally understand that a person’s remains—we have at least some responsibility to leave them as the person wanted them to be left, and that probably didn’t include being made into a skeleton and dancing around for amusement.

Chris: Yeah. You could create a culture where everybody’s like, yeah, no. The ultimate death is to have my skeleton walking around.

Bunny: Yeah, I once wrote a flash fiction piece where if you were convicted of certain crimes, then you would be sentenced to—essentially your body would be used for necromantic labor.

Chris: So now was this, they executed and then it’s used from necromantic labor? Or is it just like eventually when you die?

Bunny: In this case, I think they were executed because I was being edgy, but…

Oren: Ooh, so dark.

Bunny: It was so dark.

Chris: Yeah. Honestly, being like, “yeah, someday when you die, we’re gonna use your skeleton for labor” does not sound like a great deterrent when it comes to crime.

Bunny: No. I think at that point you’d be like, oh, I don’t give a crap.

Chris: Yeah. I would love to see a protagonist who is a skeleton and they have to like, somehow regain their health and get free of the necromancer master. Hmm. I think we could do that.

Oren: That’s another one, right? Is that the trope, the default is that any undead you create are basically mindless. And if they’re conscious, that’s certainly a lot more complicated.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s a lot more interesting and it’s a lot more interesting than having just like zombies, but they’re controlled by someone. Distinguish yourself from those zombies a bit. Be a bit more nuanced with it. Don’t make it just like basically a robot or a golem, but it’s a corpse because spooky. Like, you could do more.

Chris: I also do think that if you are gonna make your necromancer a protagonist, one of the tricky things is that having undead minions is inherently a pretty powerful magical ability. And it’s great for villains, right? ’cause they automatically have minions that your protagonist can fight first before they get to the final boss. That’s very useful. But if you have a protagonist, you have to make sure that they’re not too powerful. If they’re like, raising lots of minions everywhere.

They could have really big obstacles. Well, honestly, at that point I would [be] inclined to—how about, like, a newbie necromancer? A wannabe necromancer. They’re just getting started. They can raise one finger from the dead and the finger will crawl along and try to do their bidding. It’s the ultimate pull my finger.

Oren: Once you take the magic and give it to a good guy, you have to start thinking about limits that were less important when a villain had it. Or I guess you could just do Gideon the Ninth and just have everything be super bombastic and powerful and, uh, not have to worry about that part. But…

Chris: Yeah. But Gideon is not a necromancer herself.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: And I think that’s important. Again, we can talk about other stories like Three Parts Dead, where the main character is a necromancer and can just do who knows what

Oren: Sort of. 

Bunny: Yeah. Kind of. There is a skeleton in that one.

Chris: Yeah. But in Gideon, again, there’s another character. Even Gideon’s ally, Harrow, is semi antagonistic. So again. There’s tons of necromancy everywhere, but we know what Gideon can do and that is hack at things with a long sword.

Oren: And before anyone emails us, yes, we do know that Harrow is the protagonist of the next book, but we haven’t read that one, so we can’t comment on it.

Bunny: I don’t want to ’cause I don’t like Harrow.

Oren: Yeah, that’s the reason. You solved it. We’re all on the table now.

Bunny: You’re just prejudiced against necromancers.

Oren: Uh, everyone knows the best necromancer good guy was a DnD character that I played back in college because I found this absolutely busted ability in one of the Unearthed Arcana books for 3.5 that let me exchange my familiar for a skeleton warrior who got stronger as I leveled up and was actually a better fighter than the fighter in the party.

Chris: Oh, no.

Bunny: Oof.

Oren: Oof.

Bunny: I feel bad for that fighter.

Oren: I felt a little bad, but not bad enough to stop.

Chris: Isn’t that how it always goes? 

Oren: And then I went around and I actually read the rules on how to raise undead in 3.5. And they were a little busted. They were like, primarily limited by how many opals you had access to. ‘Cause that was the material component for raising undead and wasn’t that hard to get opal. So I ended up with a lot of minions and then I made my GM play—we were doing a little strategy game instead of DnD ’cause okay, the enemy rolls up and it’s like, all right, I position my five giant undead shrimp on the ridge here.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, okay, so besides having a necromancer who is a villain or protagonist, necromancy can be used in other ways. You can have it as more of a cosmic-horrory thing, like a temptation for your characters. “Don’t resurrect your loved one. Don’t do it, Dawn. You hear me?”  Yeah, and what can be there is just something that people shouldn’t touch in the dark book or whatever you have, or it can be a part of your world where there’s not necessarily lots of necromancers that are famous, but the actual magic itself is used often.

Which I feel like should lead us to the Necro Industrial Complex.

Bunny: We knew it was coming.

Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Necro Industrial Complex. For anyone who hasn’t listened to our old episodes, this was a concept I came up with, uh, from reading the 3.5 rules on skeleton raising ’cause in Fifth Edition, there were pretty strict limits on how many skeletons you can control. But those didn’t really exist in 3.5, at least not by my reading of the rules. It was basically just again, how many opals can you afford? And it occurred to me that these skeletons can basically do everything a human laborer can do, but forever. And they never tire and they don’t need money and they don’t need food and they don’t rest. So the amount of things you could do with them, like you could have a bunch of them turn a crank and start the Industrial Revolution with skeleton power.

But skeletons are also powered by negative energy, which is established in some other parts of the book as having bad effects on stuff and turning everything more evil. So no, I figured that no process is a hundred percent efficient. So some negative energy must leak out of the undead over time, and if you have enough of them, you get Global Negative, Inc. And that’s a problem.

Bunny: The hole in our optimism layer.

Oren: That could be an interesting story, I suppose.

Chris: Yeah. If you did have a world with lots of necromancy, it seems realistic that you would have a lot of labor offered by necromancers and everybody has their own skeleton servant.

Oren: Yeah, but hang on, they gotta license those skeletons. You can’t just scrape everyone’s skeletons out of the ground. People whose skeletons those were deserve to profit from them. So you gotta pay a licensing fee.

Chris: I don’t know. They were out there just like in an open graveyard that was open to the public. Does that mean that it’s free for me to just scrape them and use them for my own skeleton training purposes?

Oren: Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna inhibit progress.

Bunny: Yeah. Can’t stop innovation with too much regulation. I mean, in some places there’s—I’m pretty sure here in the US we think you put someone in a grave and they stay there forever. But you know, in some places in the world, it’s actually pretty common that you’re essentially leasing the grave. Like, your loved one will stay there for maybe five years and then they’ll get moved and someone else will take the grave. I think they get moved to—I don’t remember what they’re called, but it’s like they’re all stacked in like a building. It’s—

Oren: Like a crypt?

Bunny: More serious than that, I guess. Like a crypt or something. I forget. But at that point, why not just cremate everybody? Maybe they do get cremated, I forget, but I don’t think they just get cremated. I should have done my research on this.

Oren: There are a lot of different burial rights and a lot of different funeral customs, right? You do have cremation. The reason why they might not do cremation is that’s actually hard. Cremating a body in a meaningful way without modern technology is difficult and resource intensive. Like, you can do it. You don’t need a blast furnace, but just doing it with whatever you happen to have lying around is not easy. So that might be a reason.

Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like this happens in European countries and stuff, like thoroughly developed countries like Germany or something.

Oren: I would imagine it’s a tradition at this point, right? It’s probably not.

Chris: I think that what this means is that we all need an urban fantasy setting where Necromancers run all the funeral homes.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: And take care of your dead for you. And some of them may be on the side, animate some of those dead, but they’ll deny it if you ask them.

Oren: Going back to the fantasy side of it, that is an interesting thing you can do if you wanna play with the morals of necromancy. Maybe necromancy isn’t inherently evil, but there’s a good chance depending on how your necromancy works, that your characters are like—any necromancers are directly benefiting from death.

They either—it gives them more bodies to raise or it gives them more death energy to power their spells or whatever. And sure, people die all the time naturally on their own, but if you get power directly from that happening, you have a pretty strong incentive to move things along. So that could be interesting. You could play with that.

Bunny: Yeah. If you wanted to get a little silly with it, it could also be like organ donation, right? I don’t know. Like you will your body to this necromancer, “this underserved industry needs more workers. Be generous. And will your skeleton to Nursing Homes Incorporated” or something?

Oren: Look, if they’re gonna profit from my skeleton, again, I’m going to need a share. Please send money to my heirs for all the work my skeleton does.

Chris: I wanna earn above minimum wage. Oh man. Can you imagine having some families just be inherently richer than others because they have a long line of skeletons that they still profit off of? Because they have a long family history with lots of people.

Bunny: Oh, I’d read that. That definitely gives nouveau riche a new meaning.

Chris: And then the orphans are extra poor ’cause they have no family connections and therefore are not making passive skeleton income.

Bunny: Oh.

Oren: Oh no. Oh my gosh.

Bunny: This is how you have a four hour work week, is that you have all of your ancestors working in the mills.

Oren: Big oof.

Chris: I do think it’s worth talking a little bit more about what kind of powers, right? Obviously we’ve talked about skeletons a lot and there’s so much rich material that has not been tapped there. But again, I do think it’s worth broadening what powers might be considered necromancy, just a little, so that you can come up with more interesting things.

And of course it always can be a combination [of] things, like, you can always include reanimation if you want to. So we talked about having intelligent undead, or [were] talking about, I think it’s Magic Bites that has—vampires are raised by necromancers, but for some reason that means they’re just mindless corpses.

Oren: I hated that, I did not like that part of Magic Bites. For one thing, the necromancers are called the People, which is the worst name for them, like, they’re not even communist. You would hope they would be communists with a name like that, but no. They’re just a group of necromancers, so it’s such a generic name that I had to keep reminding myself who they were talking about when they said the People.

Bunny: Those ones over there.

Oren: Then also the vampires are just, yeah, we have vampires, but they’re really just flesh golems that our necromancers pilot around, which is—why call them vampires at that point? Is it just to give a little middle finger to any vampire fans who read this book and were hoping for real vampires?

Bunny: Yeah, I’d feel cheated.

Oren: It’d be like if you had a, “Hey, we have werewolves in this setting,” and it’s just like a dog that sheds all its hair once a month. And we call them werewolves. That would be disappointing, right? It’s a weird thing to lead people on about.

Bunny: Disappointing to us and disappointing to the rug. 

Chris: But you could have a situation where necromancers do create vampires and then maybe the vampires are self-sustaining after that, but they have an interesting relationship with a necromancer who started the line, for instance?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That could be a thing.

Oren: I’ve seen fantasy stories before [where] that’s the origin of vampires, is that they were originally created by some powerful necromancers, such and such.

Chris: And maybe they’re beholden to them or they have to like, they’re indentured for a while or something like that. Obviously there’s Talking to the Dead. I don’t feel like I see enough necromancers doing things with ghosts.

Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!

Chris: Instead of just zombies.

Bunny: [spooky voice] Ghosts!

Oren: Oh man. Getting flashbacks to every Mage campaign I’ve ever run where we have to have a huge argument about whether or not ghosts fall under death or spirit.

Bunny: I think the answer is just yes.

Oren: And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like the changes they made in Mage: the Awakening. ‘Cause they added death as a type of magic, which hadn’t existed before in Ascension. And it just has a lot of weird overlaps with the other types of magic and it’s confusing and I did not love it.

Chris: You could have a necromancer that deals with living spirits as well as the dead, or does things like steal souls from people’s bodies and swaps their bodies, or maybe even temporarily, somebody’s on their deathbed. It’s like, okay, we need to get some information on this person. I can keep them from crossing over for a little while.

Oren: For me, I think what it comes down to is like you want it to feel like it’s its own thing and not just a reskin of another type of magic, and there’s always gonna be some gray areas, but if you want your necromancer to have like offensive spells, I think you can do that. I would just like them to be more in theme with like death or maybe even like vitality forces than like, for shooting a green ball of fire and saying that’s necromancy.

Bunny: Or purple.

Oren: I find that kind of boring. DnD does that sometimes. Like a bunch of spells or—they have a lot of damaged spells, but this one’s necromancy. For whatever reason, we said this one was.

Chris: That does sound like something that would happen in a game where somebody’s trying to manage the mechanics and doesn’t want to create all new mechanics for raising skeletons, right?

Oren: Yes.

Chris: Instead of just casting a fireball.

Oren: Correct.

Chris: I think another one that’s really good is having your necromancers travel to the underworld, like Sabriel was probably one of the coolest depictions of necromancy I’ve seen, where she got her bells.

Oren: I love the bells. Those are so cool.

Chris: And they take her to different levels of the underworld and kind of command things. Very cool.

Bunny: Underworld is just inherently cool.

Chris: And of course, immortality. Powerful mages gotta have immortality. 

Oren: Immortality is definitely one of those things that like, depending on how you flavor it can be necromancy or it can be something else.

Bunny: Yeah, I feel like flavor, as we’ve been talking around, is a very important part of what makes something necromancy or not, like a Frankenstein’s monster type of creature is flavored as science rather than magic. So we probably wouldn’t think of it as necromancy, even though it’s pretty much necromancy.

Oren: I was gonna list one of those actually. 

Bunny: Okay, maybe I’m wrong.

Oren: Frankenstein and Reanimator. I mean, we don’t call them necromancy, but I think a lot of the same tropes apply. Right? You are bringing to life something that was dead in a weird way. Things don’t go great when either Frankenstein or Herbert West does this. So that falls under the same milieu as it were.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that they are given—some science aesthetics are put in there, but they’re also aesthetics like seeing bodies sewn together in the green color of Frankenstein’s monster and a lot of popular depictions that feel similar to magical necromancy.

Bunny: Look, science is also green.

Oren: Science is often green. That’s true.

Bunny: I think you could also do something interesting with the necromancers if instead of focusing so much on like, just death, you could do more with Chris mentioned earlier as well and focus on like, vitality and the transfer of like vital forces and stuff like that because as much as it’s about death and that is, I would argue one of the important parts of necromancy, you could do more with the other half of that equation.

Oren: Yeah. I’m a big fan of necromancers that just drain the life from other people to fuel themselves. I like to literalize the metaphor of the powerful draining the life from the less powerful. It’s a lot more fun with magic.

Chris: I also think you can get more novelty if you focus more on non-humans. So you got your skeletal or zombie dragons, or—

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: —perhaps your necromancers are just like all the plants around where they walk, die. Right, as [you] draw the life from them. And maybe you have weird skeletal trees, right? So you can—doesn’t always have to be humans and undead humans all the time.

Bunny: The trees are necromancers.

Oren: There’s a very fun moment in the Dresden Files where he is like looking at the rules against necromancers and he notices the law only technically applies to human remains. So he like, summons a zombie T-Rex from the museum. I don’t remember if the book acknowledged the fact that the dinosaur on display is probably a plaster mold and not the actual bone, but I was willing to give him a pass on it.

Chris: Yeah, that’s cool enough. If you believe hard enough that it’s bone, it’s bone. Was there an explanation for why it’s not allowed with humans? Is it just we’re being disrespectful to dead bodies, or was there something inherently harmful?

Bunny: Skosh.

Oren: I’m pretty sure—okay. If I remember correctly in the books, it’s been a while. There was an implication that necromancers are inherently evil, but it was never really explored. Dresden does that and he doesn’t suffer any negative effects. He doesn’t become corrupted from using necromancy to bring back a T-Rex. It’s possible that it was supposed to be like a closed-minded law, or maybe we were just not supposed to question it, and we assumed that it would be evil to bring back a human who knows.

One thing that I was surprised by is from reading a couple of books with necromancers in them, I think people maybe have a stronger sense of like necromancer costume aesthetics than I did. Like in Three Parts Dead, there was this thing about necromancers wearing skull caps, which is a pun obviously, but also literal. The character Tara was playing against type by not wearing a skull cap, like a literal skull cap, not a figurative one made of a skull. I was really confused by that. Is that a thing? I try to think of all the necromancers I’ve seen and I don’t remember them having that outfit.

Chris: Yeah, that’s news to me. That must be just—I would’ve not thought of them wearing skull caps.

Bunny: That must just be like a Three Parts Dead thing. If I had to guess. I don’t know.

Oren: Gideon the Ninth did the same thing too, where it was like, ah, necromancers, and their like goth punk aesthetic with lots of spikes and stuff.

Chris: Was that all of them or was that just like the Ninth House that wore the like skull face paint?

Oren: At least like the skull face paint. Okay, sure. Skull is bones and stuff. They do that. But I swear they had like silver studs and stuff. Maybe I’m making that up.

Bunny: Did they also have skull caps?

Chris: I don’t think so.

Oren: Not that I remember.

Bunny: Okay. Okay.  So that’s not a universal part of the aesthetic then. I was gonna say, I feel like. Yeah, I would be very behind if I’d learned that right now.

Chris: Yeah. The most aesthetic thing, I think about Three Parts Dead of Tara is just learning that even though they seem immortal and unaging over time, they do wither away into like skeletons themselves. So that was a neat detail. Other than that, it was interesting ’cause she seems a lot more like a magical lawyer than she does like a necromancer for most of the book.

Oren: Yeah. She is only a necromancer on a technicality. What kind of magic can Tara do? Yes.

Bunny: Face removal magic.

Oren: Yeah. She just has, among other things, a spell that lets you take off someone’s face and keep it in your bag. And they are, of course, they cannot be harmed while their face is removed. Obviously. You can’t be hurt without a face.

Chris: But removing somebody’s face while leaving them alive does seem appropriate because it sounds like next to manipulating death, but not exactly traditional necromancy. So I like that one. But yeah, most of what she does, it sounds like all magic in that setting is just powered by souls.

Oren: Maybe. The book is vague about what powers a lot of magic.

Bunny: The stars.

Chris: Oh, that’s right. I forgot. That was very strange. I guess I just wanted it to all be powered by souls because that would make it feel more cohesive.

Bunny: That’d be thematically cohesive. The star thing is…

Oren: That was one of the things that bothered me about that book series is that it was like, Hey, magic comes from people’s life energy. And so you get magic by convincing a bunch of people to give you some of their soul or life energy or whatever. Or also you can get it from the stars, I guess NBD.

Chris: It’s like, what?  

Bunny: But not if it’s Cloudy.

Chris: So last thing I might mention is. Again, should you have other forms of magic besides necromancy in your setting? Three Parts Dead has just divine magic and necromancy. All the mages, as far as I know, are necromancers I think, and that can depend on if you want a setting that’s really horrific and you want magic to feel horrific, it can actually be better to not have any other form of magic. Because this disempowers people and makes it a bigger temptation to use necromancy.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Because there’s nothing else. And that’s very creepy and can be very cosmic horrorish. Whereas if you add other kinds of magic, that will, again, empower people and give them magic to fight necromancers. That is not evil, but you can make aesthetic contrast that way. You just, as Oren said, don’t just have the fireball be different colors. You want it to feel like a different type of magic, but at the same time you can have your golden rays of light and plants blooming and other things that are meant to contrast with your darker necromancy magic.

Oren: All right, with that, I think we will rebury this podcast ’cause the energy animating it is starting to fade.

Bunny: No, [it’s] not starry enough to sustain my power.

Chris: And if this episode helped bring you back to life, then consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Slash Mythcreants.

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

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

I’d love to tell you what the topic is this week, but then what reason would you have to keep reading the rest of this blurb? Obviously, the best option is to string you along by abruptly ending each sentence without really giving you any information or closure. At least, that’s the strategy behind cliffhangers, which is what we’re talking about today. Advice around these can get pretty weird, and if there’s one thing we hope you take away from this podcast, it’s to not treat your audience as the enemy. Also, we’re upset at the streaming model even though we will never willingly go back to the way things used to be.

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Music]

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

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: Oh, no! This podcast is going to end without saying what the topic is. I’d better say it now! The topic is… Thank you for listening. Please do the Patreon stuff and like that smash button and share/scribe to all of your friends and yeah, that’s… I think we can call it, guys. That was a good podcast.

Bunny: Yeah, if we don’t do that, why would people listen to the next episode?

Oren: Yeah, come back next time and you’ll find out what today’s topic is.

Bunny: It was a princess with a shiny tail… I don’t know the closing theme as well. I definitely won’t be too mad to continue if we do that.

Oren: Yeah, it’ll work right. Everything’s fine. Nothing bad is going to happen here. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Chris: It’s only a cliffhanger if they’re literally hanging off a cliff. Otherwise, it’s sparkling dissatisfaction.

Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We need to get into term policing of cliffhangers.

Bunny: That was going to be how I was going to start.

Oren: Yeah. So today we’re talking about cliffhangers and whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. And if you’ve read my previous coverage of the topic, you probably won’t be surprised which side I take. We do first have to answer what is a cliffhanger. So I discovered, having published a book… Oh, I published a book. Buy my book. That’s my whole personality now.

Chris: Ooh!

Oren: …that people are way more liberal with the description of what a cliffhanger is than I thought, because I had several people tell me that my book ended on a cliffhanger, and I didn’t think it did!

Chris: No, that is not…

Oren: I don’t think that’s a cliffhanger, guys! I didn’t think it was one, but, you know, they didn’t like it. It was annoying. So, you know, the customer’s always right to a certain extent, I guess.

Bunny: Yeah. Customer is always pedantic. I don’t think that counts.

Chris: Granted, you can’t always expect all the people online to be… It’s like with the unreliable narrators. People now use that for all kinds of things that are not unreliable narrator, and we can’t necessarily expect people on the internet to be very particular about the way they use terms.

Oren: And I don’t want to make it sound like I’m putting people who read my book on blast if they didn’t like the ending, and that’s perfectly legitimate. Maybe the ending’s bad, who knows? But I don’t think it was a cliffhanger because, without any spoilers, it leaves a plot thread unresolved, but it doesn’t end in the middle of a fight, which is what I would consider a cliffhanger.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: I would consider a cliffhanger something that ends in the middle of an open, urgent conflict. So it could be literally hanging off a cliff, it could be an argument, it could be a fight. That’s what I would consider a cliffhanger.

Chris: Yeah, I think so. In most cases, there’s something new that arises, some new urgent threat that becomes last minute, and then it’ll cut off immediately after it happens. Like someone breaking in, and then lifting a knife to stab the protagonist! And then cut, go to black, would be something that is a typical cliffhanger. It’s something new, but it’s also annoyingly urgent, so it gives you a feeling of annoyance. Whereas we talk about hooks a lot, and we recommend those to end with, because people… I’ve heard a lot of people recommend, “Oh, you just end chapters with cliffhangers.” That is not my opinion, but I do often recommend having a little hook, and the difference is just… Again, it’s not something that you feel like has to be addressed that second, so the… For instance, the protagonist might learn the villain broke into a place and stole powerful weapons. Like yeah, they will probably use that weapon in the future, it is going to cause trouble, but they are not currently aiming that weapon at somebody, about to shoot that.

Bunny: Yeah, it seems like it’s a cliffhanger if you’re justified in using the Dun Dun Duuuun music.

Chris: Yeah, that… That’s a good measure.

Oren: And people also describe endings where a sudden new thing shows up, even if it’s not necessarily a conflict. You’ve spent the whole book with the protagonist doing stuff and having an adventure, and then the book ends, and in the final scene, their long-dead spouse walks in the door and then you cut to ending. People might describe that as a cliffhanger. And even though there’s not a fight, right? they’re not like… As far as we know, there’s no reason to think that the spouse is attacking anyone. But the extreme curiosity of, “What, hang on, I thought the spouse was dead. What’s happening?” That could be considered a cliffhanger, maybe.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bunny: Yeah. And I think also what counts as a cliffhanger can also depend on the scale that it’s appearing at. So something that might count as a cliffhanger at the end of a story would be less of one if it was simply ending a chapter, just because one happens on a smaller scale than another one. At the very least, that’ll change how the audience takes it.

Chris: Yeah, I would say that if it’s something that’s designed to make it so that the audience cannot rest at a place that is normally designed for them to take a break, including chapter endings, that it could qualify as a cliffhanger. But I would say that, generally, the type of hooks that people would have as end of chapter often would not be as large. They could be as large as the end of the book, but often just because that’s a smaller break.

Oren: So the way that I look at it is that cliffhangers at the end of chapters, or the end of scenes, to a certain extent, are probably inevitable if your book has interesting high-tension conflicts, just ’cause you do want to end those with a hook; you don’t want to feel like the story is over. And those don’t have to be cliffhangers, but they probably will be sometimes. Like, that’ll just be the most convenient thing you’ve got to hand. It’s like, “Man, I’ve been going for a while, I need a stopping point, but I’m about to start another fight.” I could put in a new, completely different hook, or I could just have the fight be about to start. “All right, I’m calling it, this chapter needs to be ended at some point.” So that’s probably going to happen. I would say don’t do it a lot, but a few times it’s probably not going to kill your story.

Chris: I would also say, if it’s a hook, it’s more likely to be accompanied by some kind of satisfying resolution, and that’s more usable because we fulfilled some of our promises to readers, but at the same time left something open for interest instead of closing up nothing.

Oren: Right.

Bunny: Right.

Chris: Or, for instance, I think it was Demon Hunter, the anime that just had this really annoying habit of always ending an episode right before a fight started. The actual story arcs were deliberately misaligned with where episodes would end.

Bunny: That’s obnoxious.

Chris: So that you always felt like you had to watch the next one, and then they would actually resolve the arcs in the middle of the episode and then open new ones.

Bunny: See, I feel like the reason people, and by people I think I mean us, because by now I feel like our standpoints on this are pretty clear, the reason that cliffhangers are so annoying is because they tend to be used for things like commercial breaks, for instance, where it’s really disingenuous: “Watch this commercial about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the sponsor of today’s podcast, to learn where things are going next.” And I think about cliffhangers the same way I think about jump scares: It works, but it’s a cheap trick, and sure, it can be done well, I suppose, and some people really like jump scares, and true, it affects me the way it’s supposed to, I jump when I’m jump-scared, but it’s not a pleasant experience.

Oren: It has been fascinating to look at streaming shows over the years as they evolved from regular TV shows, which had commercial breaks built into them, because everyone knew what the commercial breaks were going to be approximately, and so they would build those into the episode, and so you had these obvious breaks for commercial, and they were often cliffhangers, right? because commercials are annoying. “Don’t change the channel! You have to come back.” And then streaming shows came out and they had those same breaks for a while, even though they didn’t have any commercials. And then those went away and streaming shows stopped having those breaks ’cause they didn’t need them. But now all the streamers have commercials again, and a lot of their shows haven’t caught up. So a lot of the breaks for commercials are in very awkward places.

Bunny: Ugh, the villain turn.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think, again, hooks are good, and there is definitely a fuzzy boundary between a hook and a cliffhanger where it gets more annoying. I do think that a lot of cliffhangers, especially if the storyteller is in the habit of always using a cliffhanger at the end of everything, in effort to bring the audience back, I feel a little like that starts to get into Black Hat storytelling, where our purpose is no longer to actually serve our audience and give them the best experience we can, but instead to manipulate them for our benefit. And that’s the thing that I don’t like. I think that I want to win, but I also want them to win. I don’t want to feel like I’m in competition or playing against my audience, right?

Bunny: I think I have genuinely quit shows before because I reached a place where the episode didn’t end on a cliffhanger and a thing got resolved and things seemed to be okay, and I’m like, “I know if I keep watching, I’ll start hitting those anxiety-causing cliffhanger endings again and just be dragged along,” and it gets exhausting. I would rather end here in the middle of the show where there’s a semblance of resolution than continue being dragged along.

Oren: That is the best way. If we could all get the audiences for all shows together and convince them to do that, that would stop writers from putting in annoying cliffhangers. So, hang on. I’ve got my new organizational platform ready.

Bunny: I’ll sign up.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Yeah, where’s the dotted line?

Chris: I do think there’s a real chance that cliffhangers give a short-term boost, right? where people are more likely to read the next installment, but at the cost of a long-term following. And because, again, short-term gains are always just so much easier to measure than long-term loss or gain, but we don’t really know, I think for sure. But I have also, you know, I quit Orphan Black because of the cliffhanger at the end of the season. I felt very cheated by that. I felt like that was what was supposed to resolve at the end of the season, so even though I had been mostly enjoying the show, I decided not to continue for that reason. So it can cause people to leave. It’s possible. The numbers are hard to tell, right?

Oren: Yeah. One of the reasons I quit Foundation over on Apple was the same reason, although Foundation wasn’t a great show in other ways, but…

Chris: Oh, Foundation was the absolutely… like, when I think of the ultimate worst cliffhanger I have ever seen, it’s the Foundation show.

Oren: Yeah. Spoilers for Foundation if anyone cares. So there’s an episode where we discover that someone we thought was a good guy has murder-knifed another good guy, and they’re all dead and it’s all terrible and bloody. And our protagonist sees this and is like, “Why did you do this? What’s going to happen?”

Chris: And to be clear about the emotional investment here, it’s the protagonist’s boyfriend who kills their mentor.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So this is like a group of three who are very tight-knit as far as we know. They’ve been getting along great; we have no reason why he would just suddenly turn around and murder the mentor, so it’s very bewildering.

Oren: And then the murderer throws the protagonist into an escape pod, and she is sent off into the void, and episode ends. Okay, I guess we gotta come back next episode to find out what that was about. Next episode we’re like, “Hey, we’ve jumped to the future. You don’t get to find out what that was about.”

Bunny: Ugh, that’s awful.

Chris: Yeah, now we’re at the colony with other people now, and it’s three episodes of that before we get back to her, and even when we get back to her, we don’t get answers, right? She’s now in the future. So it’s just… it’s awful.

Bunny: And that’s the problem that… A very similar thing happens when you do too many cliffhangers in your chapters, especially if you have multiple points of view. Again, I’ve had books do this to me where a chapter will end on a cliffhanger and then it switches to another character’s point of view and I… I just… I skip that chapter because I know that chapter is going to end on another cliffhanger, and so I just read the chapters out of order.

Oren: Man, Feast for Crows ends… Spoilers for Feast for Crows, I guess; it’s a billion years old now, one of its endings is this big cliffhanger of whether Brienne is still alive or not. We had to wait six years for the next book, and in the next book she’s maybe alive. It’s actually unclear if the character we see claiming to be Brienne is actually her. And then that book ends. So we never even found out. And we never will.

Bunny: Oh my gosh.

Oren: Which is the biggest danger of ending your show, book, or whatever on a cliffhanger, because you might not ever get back to it. If you’re an author, you might just lose steam and not ever write the next one. And if you’re a television show creator, especially now, where it just seems like they murder shows left and right because the streaming bubble is collapsing, there’s an even higher chance that you’ll never come back to finish the show. So it’s… oof, it is a… Man, that is a gamble you are taking.

Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, Isn’t that what happened to… uh, I think it was called First Kill, where it ended at least on a very low note and then it didn’t get renewed?

Oren: No, I wouldn’t… Okay. I wouldn’t say quite that with First Kill.

Chris: I think First Kill still resolved a lot of things that were mainly addressed in the season. It just opened up another big hook for the next season. I think that was a little more reasonable.

Bunny: Ah, okay.

Oren: Yeah. For spoilers for the end of First Kill, but it’s like a Romeo and Juliet-type story, and it ends with the two of them running off together. I think that’s what happens, right, Chris?

Chris: Yeah. But then, I think, one of their brothers has got some bad evil plans of some kind. It’s been a while.

Oren: Yeah, it’s clearly laying a big hook for season two, and it’s disappointing that that was never made. I liked First Kill. But I’m thinking of something more like the show Dark Matter, or I should say one of the shows called Dark Matter. This is the sci-fi one that tried to be Firefly and it ends with an evil alien fleet from another dimension warping in. And that’s it. Show over.

Bunny: Wow.

Chris: I mean, they were probably trying to do a TNG, which I can sympathize because The Next Generation, Best of Both Worlds, again, if you’ve only seen it in reruns, you may not know how torturous this cliffhanger was, because Best of Both Worlds, that two-parter was three months apart.

Oren: Yeah. Although I have to be honest: I’ve joked about that, but nowadays, three months apart for a show cliffhanger feels like nothing. I used to joke, “Oh, we had it so much worse.” I actually realized: no, it’s worse now!

Chris: Yeah!

Oren: It takes two years, if you’re lucky, for a show to get another season now. It’s ridiculous!

Chris: And honestly, those streaming service shows are really relentless with trying to do all the cliffhangers and fancy doodads. Honestly, they just get too elaborate with their stories and try too many reveals. Just tell a good story, come on. But in any case, we got only eight episodes that are two years apart, and I just… I’m just waiting for streaming servicess to realize, “Oh, we need to keep our subscribers, not just to get them to subscribe in the first place. So we should actually have a 22-episode season now.”

Oren: Yeah, someone can suggest, “Hey, what if we spent less money per episode so we could have more episodes?” And they can call it, like, Disruptive Micro-Prestige Television. And it’s not really that simple, there are other reasons why streaming seasons are so short, but one of the reasons is the arms race of spending so much money per episode. Not the only reason, but it’s a big one.

Bunny: And the gaps between seasons and stuff like that is one of the reasons I just can’t really get into television, I’ve found. Because not even necessarily… and I think cliffhangers are a big part of it, but not necessarily the only part, is because you’re never guaranteed to get a satisfying outcome to anything that happens.

Chris: Especially if it’s a mystery box show.

Bunny: And an incomplete TV show. Yeah, no, exactly.

Chris: Yeah, that’s true.

Oren: I could complain about what TV is like now for the next five hours, but moving back into the realm of books, because I think most people who listen to this are probably more likely to be writing books than TV shows…

Chris: That’s right, those things.

Oren: Those weird, like, collections of pages. Who knows?

Chris: Going back to just when cliffhangers work personally, regardless of the medium (books, shows, graphic novels), I am much more sympathetic to a cliffhanger if it’s the end of the penultimate installment. So if we have a series of any kind where it’s the second-to-last episode of the season, or the second-to-last issue in a series of comics, or the second-to-last book in a series, I’m just much more sympathetic to having a cliffhanger on those ones, because I feel like that kind of helps escalate and generate excitement for the finale, so it just feels more appropriate to me.

Oren: Yeah. One thing that I would strongly recommend for anyone who’s thinking of adding a cliffhanger, regardless of where you’re adding it, is make sure you can actually follow up on the cliffhanger.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Because sometimes that’s harder than it sounds, and there are a number of cliffhangers that are more annoying than normal because they end with, like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen?” And then they come back and it’s like, “Oh, it wasn’t actually a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

Chris: Which I think is another issue with this whole mentality, that every chapter needs to end on a cliffhanger, is writers try to push it too much and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t really have a cliffhanger here.” Okay, does this make up something that doesn’t actually work?

Bunny: It’s definitely like… If you watch a lot of old serials (not the food, the serial shorts and stuff like that), where it’ll feature some hero doing heroics and stuff like that, like the old Batman shorts or something, it’ll always end on a cliffhanger because they want you to watch the next installment or whatever. And so it’ll be like, “Oh, the hero’s in a car, and the car went over a cliff and it crashed. And it exploded. How will the hero escape?” And then the next episode, it’s like the hero got out of the car before it went over the cliff. And they weren’t actually in any danger, and that’s the worst way to pay off a cliffhanger.

Chris: That happens a lot with the “Oh, I know! Let’s create a threat by making a character that does not actually mean any harm/look threatening,” or having them end on a dramatic line that suggests they’re mad when they’re not actually angry.

Oren: My favorite is when it’s just like, “Yeah, it was just the thing you guessed it probably was, but we’re going to pretend like that was a surprise.” In Red Seas Under Red Skies, which is a novel I otherwise actually like a lot, but it starts with this flash-forward of, “Oh no, my friend is betraying me!” And of course, as you’re reading, you’re like, “Okay, these characters are tricksters and they all are constantly pretending to betray each other.” So he’s probably only pretending to betray you ’cause you’ve done that several times at this point. And then you catch up to that point in the story ’cause it’ll flash-forward and yeah, he was pretending to betray you. Whoa, whoa!

Chris: Yeah, there’s a lot of places in books where I can tell a line is just too dramatic, and so the storyteller is definitely just inflating a hook because there’s just no way that they can follow up on that. I think a good example is in The Alchemist. There’s this chapter that ends with saying this character “saw something and realized that the world would never be the same again.” And it’s like, “Okay, what? I very much doubt…” And then the next chapter it’s like, oh, he saw some people robbing the shop. That’s what it was. That’s your chapter hook.

Oren: The worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone.

Chris: World will never be the same!

Bunny: It’s like the trademark trailer lines that are just like in there to have a soundbite that sounds intriguing and dramatic but doesn’t actually have much to do with anything.

Oren: It’s like lines that don’t make sense in context if they actually make it into the show or the movie.

Chris: Right. Sometimes they don’t.

Oren: In season two of Discovery, they have Pike say, “We’re going to go exploring and have a little fun along the way,” and you think, you stop for a second, you’re like, “Why would he say that?” That is a weird line in context. That doesn’t sound like something he would say to his crew. But the reason he says it is that in the trailers, they’re trying to let us know that season two will be less grimdark than season one.

Chris: And it was a lie.

Oren: Yeah, it was kind of a lie. But they knew that we thought it was too grimdark. So there was marketing about how it was going to be less grimdark this time, and that’s why that line exists.

Bunny: I didn’t see him do a sarcastic eyeroll and finger quotes. “Let’s have some ‘fun.’”

Oren: Oh, another one that is just one of the most annoying kinds of cliffhangers ever is when it seems like the story is over, and then, to create a cliffhanger, the author undoes the victories that the protagonists just won.

Chris: Rude of you to attack Stranger Things 4 that way.

Oren: Yeah, rude of me, except I’ll never apologize ’cause I was right to do it.

Bunny: It’s the anti-resolution.

Oren: It’s like, Stranger Things 4, they go through this whole thing of blowing up the bad guys and doing all the stuff, and they win and they have their hard-fought victory. And then at the end, oh no, the bad guy did the thing he was trying to do anyway. I guess he just did it after you left. Good job, everybody.

Bunny: Oops. Should have stuck around another five minutes.

Oren: Yeah. Come back in five years and you’ll maybe see a resolution to this. All of the children will be in their late twenties by then.

Chris: In the category of having a cliffhanger and then skipping over the actual resolution to that cliffhanger in the story, which happens for a couple reasons, I think, and sometimes it happens just because the story doesn’t really have anything to do there, like a character walks dramatically in, is like, “We need to talk,” and then they just skip the conversation ’cause they didn’t have anything for them to say. Like in The Last of Us, where the characters are in a really tough situation to get out of, you know, as they’ve just been shot, and we end there, and then, “Oh, look, they’ve arrived at safety when we open the next episode, please forget where they left off.”

Oren: There is another kind, and you can argue whether this is a cliffhanger or not, but it’s certainly related, and this is where you end the story, not on a new conflict, but right before the resolution of your conflict. So, like, the conflict is over, but you haven’t seen the resolution yet, and that is especially awkward because you can’t start the next story with resolution, ’cause that’s boring. That means the next story would start off on a really boring note. But it also means that the next story, if it doesn’t have that resolution, then it will make the first one feel unsatisfying. And I’m not just talking about the first two Star Wars sequel movies, but I am definitely talking about them, right? Because The Force Awakens, the whole movie is spent trying to find Luke, theoretically. And we find him, and then the movie ends before we can get the resolution. And Rian Johnson gets a lot of flak for having Luke just toss his lightsaber away and having that be the opening of Last Jedi. Or not the opening, but that’s like where it starts with Rey, right? But on the other hand, what else was he supposed to do? Like, just have the Rey sequence be, “Alright, you found me. Now we’re going to do uncomplicated training”? No, that should have been the result of the last movie.

Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely… I feel like that plays into the sort of weird, staggering thing that you talked about earlier, where things resolve in the middle because you want to constantly have cliffhangers at the end.

Oren: Yeah. Gotta keep bullying me into coming back, ’cause you couldn’t just make the show good.

Bunny: That’s hard, Oren.

Oren: You gotta withhold satisfaction from me.

Chris: It might be worth giving some tips for. Okay: if we do want something at the end of the chapter, then we create it without something that’s annoying. I do think that just having a resolution first helps, again, so people get some satisfaction. Having it so that you have, for instance, a chapter plot arc that actually ends before you bring up something can be helpful. A lot of times I don’t think you necessarily need to add a new problem to create a hook; you just have to remind people of the plot that’s already there that hasn’t been resolved yet. So if you have your big throughline for your story, whether it’s defeating the big bad or going through a dangerous journey, right? talk about what step is next and why that step is going to be dangerous. That can help. You can raise questions that are not somebody dead walking in the door, but then just be like, “Hey. I thought back about this. How come this happened? Or why did this person do that?” to bring a little curiosity in without having a huge twist right at the end.

Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the biggest one is just keep it relevant. Don’t completely pivot. It should have something to do with what you’ve already done and where you’re going.

Oren: Admittedly, the current project that I’m trying to work on, I do really want to end it with the long-dead spouse walking through the door, but I probably shouldn’t. The urge is real.

Bunny: You’re putting it on record saying you think that is bad and should not be done.

Oren: Do as I say, not as I do!

Bunny: You’re shaming your future self into avoiding the worst temptations.

Chris: I do think, as storytellers, we’re naturally drawn to the big, dramatic things. In addition to things that are clever, of course.

Oren: We do love to be shocking and clever at the same time.

Chris: Yeah, I think often a little hook is just about advertising what’s next, right? Because presumably you’ll continue to have cool, exciting things in the next section of the story. So if you have the ability to bring those things up and remind readers of them, that can be a good way to do it.

Bunny: Yeah, really, if you have that, you shouldn’t need cliffhangers per se. Like, you can have them, but if you’ve got this other stuff going on, you shouldn’t need them to get the reader invested in continuing to read or watch or whatever.

Oren: All right, with those words of wisdom, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you felt satisfied rather than annoyed by this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who have never left us hanging. First, there’s Aman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Music]

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

Generative AI is everywhere these days, whether we like it or not. And to be clear, we very much do not like it. From LLM slop crowding out real search results to image generators putting artists out of work, we are not at all fans of this Franken-baby created by unregulated tech companies and amoral venture capital. But, zooming in a little further, today we’re talking about how so-called “AI” affects writers and storytellers. We’ll talk about our own experience with it, why the ethical implications are so important, and why this feels like the Metaverse all over again.

Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Oren: Oren 

Chris: and 

Bunny: Bunny. 

Chris: I’ve got it. The new podcast creation tool of the future. 

Bunny: Ooh, what could it be? 

Chris: Okay, here we’re gonna just republish our previous episodes, but then re-edit it to mix them up. So every episode will be a clip show, ’cause people love clip shows, right?

Oren: Famously. 

Bunny: Yeah. You gotta put those on TikTok. 

Chris: Yeah. So you see the future is really the past. It’s so deep. 

Bunny: My brain just curled into a knot. 

Chris: Oh shoot. I just realized something. We need new ideas, of course. We’ll just take them from other podcasts. It’s fine. You know, we could ask permission, but they might say no.

Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: So I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t ask permission. 

Oren: Right. ’cause we wouldn’t wanna give them a chance to inhibit progress. [sarcastic]

Chris: Yeah, we’re being very innovative, okay? [sarcastic]

Bunny: Don’t they know this is the internet and therefore they should have known what they were getting into? [sarcastic] It’s just a thief’s paradise. 

Chris: If they didn’t want us to use pieces of their podcast and insert it into our own podcast, why did they make it public? Okay? It’s publicly available. [Laughter] Clearly. It’s a fair game.  [sarcastic]

Bunny: [Laughter] Slam dunk. 

Oren: Or it might not be publicly available. [Chuckle] Maybe we’ll just buy a big stack of private podcasts and pirate them and then use them for our clip show. 

Bunny: Oh, even better 

Chris: Or sneak past their paywall to steal their podcast and add it to our clip show.

Oren: Crime is the answer, okay? We have discovered entirely new ways to commit crimes.

Bunny:  Podcast crime.

Chris: So innovative. So we’re talking about machine learning, commonly called AI and in particular generative AI or large language models. 

Bunny: Thanks. I hate it. [Laughter] 

Chris: Now, I have to say I’m not all against machine learning stuff, not all of it.  I’m not just “the technology is bad.” I do like to differentiate the actual technology from how it’s being used. I don’t even hate all generative stuff. 

There are definitely use cases where it is helpful and makes tedious work faster. I think the big problem is that for tech companies, what they want to advertise is replacing creative workers because that’s flashy and gets them all the investor bucks.

And that’s the whole “move fast and break things” mindset where they identify a new niche and then they try to raise tons of money really fast and move into the space really, really fast and claim territory before anybody else and be “disruptors”.  

Oren: Right. Because the investor class doesn’t care if you’ve created a piece of software that can help analyze burned scrolls from Pompeii to help us figure out what they say, which is a real thing that machine learning is being used for and is super cool, but that’s not gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money.

What is gonna get you a billion dollars of investor money is telling people that you found a way to not have to hire writers anymore. 

Bunny: So unfortunately that is the main thrust of a lot of the hype, and I don’t know, for me, I feel like I have… some of my friends and my parents call this kind of a basic view of AI. And maybe it is. 

But my fundamental problem with AI is that the way the current models are trained. I feel like the ethics question — you can’t talk about the ethics of AI without that — and I think that’s pretty patently unethical. So is there a way to use AI ethically when it was trained in this way? I don’t know. I don’t think so. 

Chris: Yeah. I feel like AI, generative AI that’s being widely advertised is like an ouroboros, where it has a basic conceptual problem, which is that it depends on training data, which it also destroys, right? [Laughter] By competing with it. 

Again, I’m not an IP lawyer, so take any legal stuff I say with a grain of salt. But everybody is citing this Google Books court case because if somebody wants generative AI to be fair use, they will make the argument that it is. That’s just how it works. Just like they’ll make the argument that, oh, well, this is just the inevitable future, so there’s no point in fighting it. There’s just a lot of disingenuous arguments that come with it. 

But the Google Books case was ruled fair use. Google was taking everybody’s books and it was scanning them in, but it is not creating a competing product with the book. If you’ve ever had a Google Book search result, it shows you only a really small portion of the book. You can’t read the rest, right? So it’s not replacing a book sale and that’s really crucial to one of the reasons why it was ruled “Fair use”. 

Generative AI is just a very different case. Because it has a huge effect on the market of the original and can destroy its own training data by putting all the people who create that training data out of business, which is just shortsighted from the tech perspective too. But when everybody is afraid of getting left behind and they’re all racing to claim the space first, they don’t really stop and look at what is the long-term viability. 

Bunny: It’s definitely bandwagoning. I noticed this in just a lot of websites that suddenly have AI features where none are necessary. LinkedIn now has an AI feature and Quora has one. 

Chris: Don’t even talk to me about Quora. 

Bunny: [Laughter] Okay, I shall not say its name. But my roommate’s book recommendation app. The point of the app was to ask people for book recommendations and now it’s got like a stupid little AI thing that responds in addition to those. And you can’t turn it off. 

There are just AI things in a bunch of places now where they don’t need to be. Even putting the ethics aside, it’s really obnoxious. 

Oren: It’s also definitely hit the point where the people who have invested so much money in this are now also invested in making you think that this is gotta be the way of the future, ’cause they’re so committed. 

It’s like how Facebook wouldn’t shut up about the Metaverse for several years because they had invested so much money in the metaverse. And fortunately it was only Facebook. This is like if everyone had invested in the Metaverse. 

Chris: Mm-Hmm.  

Bunny: Oh boy. Quora is part of the Metaverse, now.

Oren, Chris, Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: Again, there is a way to fix this problem with the technology. It’s simply to pay for the training data. It’s that simple because if the training data is paid for, then that supports the creation of new content. So it’s no longer cannibalizing itself anymore. And of course companies don’t wanna pay and they say they can’t.

Oren: That wailing you just heard is all of the companies claiming they can’t afford it.

Chris: And they’re probably lying, but we don’t know for sure. There’s other expenses involved. It’s impossible to know for sure. At the same time, Adobe has an actual licensed image generator, but it did it in a very underhanded way where it had Adobe stock and some pre-existing contracts that were agreed to before the existence of generative AI. 

But the language just allowed for the creation of new products. So a lot of people who did not actually wanna agree to this have a contract that technically allows it. At the same time, it seems like it could be viable for, for instance, a large stock photo site to get mass buy-in to create generative images. So that’s one reason I think they’re probably lying. But at the same time, if our choices are between AI and the creative workers who actually create new ideas and are actually innovating in countless areas of knowledge, I’m gonna have to choose the creative workers.

Obviously, I’m biased since I am one, but…

Oren: If I can’t afford a hammer, I don’t just get to demand that I be given one. That’s not how it works, man. Did you all suddenly forget money? That’s the premise of our economy. And I should just be clear. I do wanna mention that the thing about content holders using their contracts with creators really underhandedly with AI? That is a real problem. 

I don’t want people to think that OpenAI is the only issue here. Because if Simon and Schuster decides that, oh, actually all of those contracts that you signed with us to publish your books, those all expand to AI now. And there’s no legal precedent saying they can’t do that? That would be a disaster. So let’s keep that part in mind too.

Of course, this brings us to the very existentially uneasy question of: can AI write fiction? And the answer currently appears to be that it can write bad fiction with some human input. It can use probability models to create a block of text, which resembles bad fiction.

I’ll put this in the show notes, but I read an AI generated novella for this podcast, which was not pleasant. Both just because AI makes me feel bad at the moment, I feel like I’m under siege by it. But the story itself was also really bad. 

Nothing made any sense. Characters appeared from nowhere. The plot never went anywhere. The super genius hacker was really surprised that there were electronic defenses around the big government thing he was hacking. 

But I also should note that it wasn’t like it was uniquely bad. There are humans who write this way too. So I, I don’t wanna sound like I’m trying to make some kind of appeal to the human soul.

Chris: Do you know if this novella had any human intervention at all in it?

Oren: Yeah. So the process, according to the person who made it, is–this was done using a specialist writing LLM. It wasn’t done with standard ChatGPT. 

And what this person did was they typed up a brief synopsis of this cyberpunk story they wanted. They fed that into the program. The program then spat out a chapter by chapter summary/outline, and then the human rewrote the outline to the point where it was largely unrecognizable and then put that back into the app, and then the app spat out the text itself. 

Chris: One thing that I personally think is the toughest is the small stuff. Sentence by sentence is definitely easier to predict than the large conceptual big picture stuff. My prediction when this started was that I didn’t think AI would write good novels anytime soon. And so far that seems to be true. And my reasoning was, it’s all about concepts. And this is something we talk about actually fairly regularly with lots of people trying to create plot structures that are too concrete and too specific. But real plot structure is based on very loose, abstract concepts that are based on emotion. And those are the very things that machine learning has trouble with. It doesn’t understand concepts. It only sees patterns in words and the correlation between concepts and emotions and specific words is a very loose correlation.

And it’s not that it’s not theoretically possible, but I’m not sure there are enough novels on earth to train an AI to actually write a good novel.

Bunny: There’s also just the issue of people disagreeing on what a good novel is, which is maybe a very basic point, but I feel like if we’re going to be heading towards a space where I type “write a good novel” and an AI spits one out, it feels worth mentioning. That in itself is not obvious. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean there are definitely differences in opinion for sure. At the same time, there are also some works that people agree are good generally, or that more people agree these works are good. So we can honestly, [laughter] with some data, that’s something that machine learning is fairly good at, like creating an image that resembles images that people have rated highly, with the data.

Oren: And with this story in particular, it’s notable that the prompts being put into it were not good either. And I don’t mean to knock the person who was doing this. I’m sure this was for a work assignment. I don’t think they put their A game into it, but if I was getting this outline that they created as a content edit, I would be like, okay, what’s the throughline? What is the bad guy trying to accomplish? How does the hero feel about it? Where did these two characters come from? They come out of nowhere in the outline too. 

But this also speaks to something that people were asking me when ChatGPT first hit the scene. There was this question of, can I have a rough idea for a novel and ask ChatGPT to write it so I don’t have to think about the difficult choices of what actually goes into the novel?

And as far as I can tell, the answer is no. 

It’s possible that the software has gotten better since this article was written, but I haven’t found any other coverage of it. So that suggests to me that it hasn’t, if it’s even possible.

Chris: As far as I know, the most effective way to use AI to make a fiction work is to, again, start with a high level outline, right? You still have to have all the storytelling knowledge yourself to make a good high level outline, and then have ChatGPT or whatever, expand it, and then fix that, and then do it again, and then fix that [Laughter] So that you are creating the high level conceptual structure because machine learning does not know how to do that.

Oren: And could you fix the prose that it spits out? Maybe, but I’m not convinced that would be less work than just writing it yourself, because that prose is really bland. You’re gonna have to do a lot of work to make that prose any good. 

Chris: I’ve heard of people who have said that it speeds up their work. I suspect if you’re super picky about your prose, it won’t.

I think that if I try to use something like that. Every sentence it put out would be like, no, that’s not the sentence I wanted. [Laughter]

Oren: There was an article, this one’s even older, about an author whose business model is to write super fast and put out, I think it was at least one novel a month, maybe more, and they were like, oh, it’s great for this.

And I looked at their books. I looked at some of the ones from before they started using this software and some of the ones from after. And admittedly I couldn’t tell the difference. But it was bad before. it was just generic and bland. And sure, I bet it can replicate that. 

Chris: Again there are a lot of writers, especially indie writers,  who are just under a lot of pressure to write really fast to make their living. And so that’s probably where it will make the most inroads. Because under that pressure, a lot of people who are catering to a more sort of niche group and selling more books to fewer people, are I think where that comes in. And there may be people who are okay with planned prose if the story is exactly the type of story they want because it’s niche.

Again, on an ethical level, we should probably separate concerns because a lot of people are reacting very, very negatively to the idea of AI in fiction writing. And often, some of it is for very good reason, but there’s a difference between just being disgusted at the idea of having sentence writing be automated and the concern about those automated sentences being based on stolen works, works that were just outright pirated,  [laughter] or whether those automated sentences aren’t very good.

I, personally, as a person who likes word craft and cares about my sentences, I don’t like the idea [laughter] of the computer doing that work for the human. At the same time, I don’t think that’s enough reason to be opposed to it. 

If we had a situation where writers were all choosing to pool stories together to train an AI that would automate that process for them and everybody was choosing to do that and choosing to contribute… But that’s not what we have right now. 

Instead, we have stuff scraped from AO3 and the Omegaverse showing. If anybody’s not familiar, the Omegaverse is a whole area of fan writing that is raunchy and people found Omegaverse elements coming out, I think it was in the software SudoWrite, which revealed that Archive of Our Own had been scraped and fed into it. People were not happy with this. They did not consent to that. 

Bunny: Even if it were a bunch of artists pooling their work, which critically would be an opt-in system rather than the opt-out one, and right now we can’t opt out. So it’s just a no-opt system with how it currently works. 

Oren: Currently opt-less. 

Bunny:  We’re currently opt-less, unfortunately. Even in that case where it’s an opt-in, I feel like we kind of, no matter what, run into this Ship of Theseus situation. How many elements of AI do you add or remove until it becomes your own work? Or the AI’s work? Or the stolen person’s work? Even in that scenario–

Oren: I mean, from a purely abstract standpoint, you would probably have to apply the same standard you would use if you were deciding whether or not to credit someone else as your co-author.

Just in terms of nonfiction — this comes up on the site sometimes — usually when Chris and I do editing on each other’s work, it’s pretty minor. It’s like, “Hey, this part’s not working. Can you fix it?” Stuff like that. And we don’t list each other as co-authors for that. 

But sometimes Chris will change a big section of my text or add a new subsection or whatever. And when she does that, I list her as a co-author because that’s her work. And so it’s the same level, I would say, if you’re doing something like that with an LLM.

Even if you’ve solved all of the other ethical problems, the LLM is your co-writer at that point.

Chris:Yeah. I do think that labeling is good because I just believe that consumers should have a choice, especially right now because of the ethical problems with training data.

If we had a world where that was taken care of, there would still be a lot of people who just want to know where the art came from and how it was created. That matters to people. And knowing even if machine generated text was normalized, people would still care whether or not it was created by a human. And so I think that we should always have those labels.

Oren: Yeah. At least we will. Who knows? Maybe if you’re young enough, it’ll all seem completely normal. I don’t know. 

Chris: These days, if you have, for instance, a photo that was not put in Photoshop, that would be unusual enough that the person would advertise that photo as “no, this is the original without any Photoshop enhancements”. Because Photoshop is just a normal part of working with photos these days. 

So that could happen. I would prefer it not to, but that could happen. 

Bunny: Yeah. I guess all this leads to where will it go from here? And the answer to that is, I don’t know. I hope it dies. [Laughter]

Oren: It certainly feels like on the whole, at least as far as the average public facing stuff, it’s been a huge net negative, right?

It’s like we have all these problems and then as a side benefit, also way more energy consumption. 

We have seen some positives, right? Some mild positives. Now, if we shut down all of the unethical uses of this stuff, is the technology gonna be worth keeping around for figuring out what these scrolls from Pompeii say? Or is that gonna be prohibitively expensive?

I don’t know the answer. I’d like to still know what those scrolls from Pompeii say, but I don’t think I’m willing to pay this price for it.

Chris: Just to go into other uses that are not competing with training data. 

Bunny: Oh, I thought you were gonna say that are not Pompeii scrolls.

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: Not Pompeii scrolls. We have things like automated transcriptions. A human can listen to speech and copy it down by hand, but that’s pretty tedious work. That’s not creative work we really want to be doing. It can improve transcriptions, it can do some more audio filters. It can’t replace an audio editor or engineer, but it could take away some of their tedious work.

On the image side. You know, I have been looking at Photoshop’s Remove tool that has become suspiciously good. But again, all it does is if I have, for instance, a book cover and I wanna feature this book and I want part of this cover to be the feature image of the post ’cause we’re gonna discuss it. We get a lot of awkward situations where part of the title is cut off, so we have partial letters and the background is really complex so you can’t just easily take them out.

The tool assesses this irregular complex background and fills in a plausible background to remove the letters so that the image looks a little nicer. Again, it’s not impossible for me to go in and create that effect, but it would be pretty tedious and I’m not really worried about it replacing an artist by doing that.

So it can do good things, but it’s a lot more of an incremental “make things that we have better” type of a change in many cases, and that’s just not sexy enough.

Oren: That’s not gonna get five bajillion dollars in venture capital funds. 

Bunny: I wish that was the sort of thing that money would go to. It’s a shame that it’s not being used on Pompeii scrolls rather than thieving the internet.

Chris: I will say a couple things as Mythcreants. We’re talking a lot of fiction writing, but obviously Mythcreants itself has a really large stake in this, and the biggest threat to us is honestly probably Google. [Laughter]

So Google is responding to this by creating AI generated answers to search results. And Google, because it has a huge search monopoly, has become a huge choke point in the internet and has increasingly decided it would like to keep all of that traffic for itself, please. 

Oren: Yeah. Why would you wanna go to a website? You can just stay on Google forever. 

Chris: You could just stay on Google forever and it’s taking people’s content. The only way to get Google to stop is to just not be on Google’s search engine, which for most websites, that’s just professional suicide. Because again, people just use Google as a utility. It’s like a basic navigation feature of the web. I feel like it probably shouldn’t be a private company. 

There’s even this new search engine that is trying to raise money right now called Perplexity. It snuck past Forbes paywall–and apparently Forbes is not the only website it has done this with — to steal content. 

It doesn’t even have links like Google. It’s just an answer engine. I would advise not investing in them. I do think they’re gonna get sued. In fact, I feel like the New York Times and its lawsuit against OpenAI can just use Perplexity as an example for why the courts should side with them. 

Bunny: That feels pretty clear cut.  It’s really blatant. 

Oren: I hope they get sued. It just feels wrong that they’re just allowed to do that. Someone should stop them. 

Chris: That’s exactly how I felt when ChatGPT and these other image generators came out. I was like, what’s happening? Where is everybody? Where are the people stopping them from doing this? Stopping them from violating copyright?

And is it that all the businesses that should be stopping them think that they will profit from this? Or does it just take a long time? And the answer was both. 

Lawsuits take a long time, so they probably will get sued. But I think that people hire lawyers, they talk about it, they do data gathering.There’s a whole lot of steps to filing a lawsuit and it just takes time, which is why there’s this whole strategy of we’re gonna become so big that courts don’t wanna side against us because they’re afraid of destroying us because we’re too big now.

Bunny: I think I heard — and I don’t know the exact details of this–but I’m pretty sure Google, even before all this AI stuff really hit the scene, Google was facing a lawsuit in Australia because of those little preview things. You’d look up how to change a light bulb and then it would have a little dropdown. It was already doing this. It’s just accelerated. 

Chris: Google was absolutely already doing this stuff. 

Bunny: Yeah. But it’s gotten way worse. Absolutely. And I am glad that finally I have a workaround to get away from that AI and just use the web like it was. It’s frustrating that it’s something you have to go out of your way to do. 

Chris: All the social media companies are doing something similar where they’re also algorithmically hiding things that have external links because they wanna keep all of the traffic for themselves.

And it’s just… But at least most of the time when they’re doing that, they’re not actively stealing your content and using it to keep the traffic to themselves. 

Oren: When they started talking about walled gardens, I assumed the walls were to keep people out. I didn’t realize this was a Berlin Wall situation.

Bunny: [Laughter] It’s also just the issue of now we’ve got AIs that will be writing for a search engine optimization, and then the Google AI is picking those out. And so it’s just AIs writing for AIs. And are we kinda losing the point of this whole internet thing, guys? Let’s pull back a little bit and think about the users.

Oren: Hang on, hang on. Are you suggesting that a user does not want to be trying to find reviews of an older book and find a review that doesn’t really make a lot of sense at the top of the search result and realize that it’s because it’s an AI generated site trying to sell me off-brand accessories? I could have bought a really cheap purse, and if you all have your way, I would never have seen that purse.  

Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]

Bunny: Oh Oren, what a specific example. I’d almost think that’s what happened to you. 

Chris: Just a really hypothetical thing, you know. 

Chris: And I should also add, a lot of these AI content farms are deliberately targeting articles and other websites and plagiarizing those articles.

So they’re not just making up random works. They’re taking original investigative journalism and just rewording it. Just plagiarizing it. And so it’s very blatant. Investigative journalism was famously just fine before this all happened, so I’m sure that these extra knocks aren’t gonna cause any problems for it. [sarcastically]

Bunny: [Laughter] 

Chris: Just as a last thing, ’cause of course we’re going over time, I just wanted to add that if you were somebody who is copyright skeptical, obviously we have a different position, especially since most authors can’t make a living on their work and really do need those copyrights. But I think it’s worth pointing out that tech companies are absolutely not on the anti-copyright side. Hilariously, OpenAI recently did a copyright take down request on a ChatGPT fan Reddit that was using their logo. 

Bunny: Oh my God. It really is an ouroboros, isn’t it? 

Chris: And they really get mad when they find other machine learning that are training on their AI.

This is a thing that’s happened. It’s apparently a faux pas in the machine learning community if you train your machine on their machine. 

Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: So they are willing to take everybody else’s work as training data, but oh they get mad if somebody uses their work for training data. They are absolutely not anti- copyright, they just want to be able to take other people’s work when it’s convenient and protect their own copyright and their own machine generated outputs, which are not copyrightable right now. But they certainly want it to be. 

Oren: Alright. Well, with that, I think we will call this podcast to a close and we will all give a silent prayer that this ends up like NFTs, but we don’t know. We’ll just have to see in the future. 

Chris: And if you’d like to help us keep going as the internet collapses, potentially consider supporting us on Patreon. It really does make a huge difference to whether or not we’re able to continue in our budget. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

 Bunny: Help us fight OpenAI single handedly in a brawl. 

Oren: That’s what we’re doing. Imagine us as the plucky hero against OpenAI. And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will talk to you next week. 

 [closing theme]

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

Thousands of novels are published every year. No matter how niche your genre, other people will still be writing in it, to say nothing of all the previously published books out there. Clearly, we all want our stories to stand out. But how, exactly? Should we just focus on making the story really good, or does it need a gimmick? That’s what we’re talking about this week, and as always, the answer is: it depends.

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Oren with you today is…

Bunny: Bunny

Oren: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: Every podcast needs something to help it stand out. Look at Mythcreants: We’ve got Chris’s superb understanding of Wordcraft. We’ve got Bunny with philosophy and plant knowledge, and we’ve got me. I’m mad about wizards.

Bunny: Um, Oren, fungi aren’t plants.

Oren: Whaaaaat?

Bunny: That’s what I’m here for.

Oren: See, this kind of cutting observation isn’t something you could find on other podcasts.

Bunny: [snickers]

Oren: So today we are talking about making stories stand out, and this is partly because I have read a bunch of stories recently that did not. And I found myself describing them in terms like generic, bland, or even derivative.

Whoo! Spoooky!

Chris: I have thought about this word derivative, that lots of people like to sling around.

I understand the impulse to use it as a pejorative, but I don’t think it’s the right word. Because there are lots of works that are intentionally derivative for very good reason. Any kind of adaptation, for instance, is a derivative work. Any retelling of a public domain work is derivative.

It’s just done in lots of positive ways. There are some stories that I think go so far is to be copycats because they’re so intentional and try to copy everything about a story at every level. If it’s copying both the plot and the word craft, then that’s a little too far. But that’s really unusual.

Honestly, and that’s not what people are talking about.

Bunny: You would say that, Chris, wouldn’t you? You have a stake in the adaptation game, don’t you?

Chris: [laughs] Guilty as charged. Yes, I did do a fairytale retelling recently, which is basically an adaptation. And adaptations are hard. They come with lots of constraints, so don’t be mean to us, okay?

Oren: In my experience, when [people] say derivative, what they usually mean is bland or generic.

Cause there are a very small number of stories that are actually copying another story in a way that is bad. We all are fine with endless remixes of Sherlock Holmes. We want the new Sherlock Holmes to have something new to bring to the table. We’re not upset that they are remixing Sherlock Holmes. What is upsetting is if it’s just another Sherlock Holmes story that we’ve seen before.

And people might call that derivative, but it’s not really the derivativeness that’s the problem. It’s how bland is it.

Chris: It’s the fact that it doesn’t have anything new to bring to the table. It’s not the fact that it has things that are copied. The fact that it doesn’t have anything that’s not copied.

Bunny: I think in visual media too, the aesthetics play a big role in figuring out whether something seems derivative in the negative sense or too copycat. Like that new moo… moon rebel—rebellion, rebel… rebel moon? Rebel Moon. Man, that’s so derivative, I forgot the title.

Oren: Rebel Moon is definitely taking really heavy inspiration from both Star Wars and War Hammer 40K in terms of its aesthetics and certain plot points.

I don’t know if I would care if it was good. Rebel Moon’s real bad and the fact that it’s real bad makes the parts that it borrowed from other stories feel worse.

I’m told that the opening sequence is extremely similar to the opening sequence in Inglourious Bastards—which is intentionally spelled wrong apparently—but I’ve never actually seen that movie, so I’m only told this. I can see how that would be annoying if you’ve just seen Inglourious Bastards than you put on Rebel Moon. It’s like, hang on a second. Why is this scene the same?

Chris: Rebel Moon stands out in that it feels like a bunch of scenes clipped from other movies just mashed together, and that really is something.

Oren: But like if Rebel Moon, for example, wasn’t two hours of gathering the party, which is basically what Rebel Moon is, we spend the whole, almost the whole movie doing that, then I might not care so much. I’d be more willing to let it slide. I’d be like, okay, yeah, that weapon is clearly a lightsaber. But sure. Other sci-fi settings have laser sword type things and yeah, those guys are clearly wearing armor that’s inspired by Warhammer 40k. I like big shoulder pads and blocky guns, so I’ll, I’ll let it go.

Bunny: Yeah, you’d be right at home in a 1980s businesswoman outfit.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Certainly there are a lot of things about Rebel Moon that look visually cool. They just, everything is so underdeveloped except for the wheat for some reason.

Oren: Yeah. There’s so much time on the wheat.

Chris: I mean, the wheat is different. It does stand out. People keep talking about the wheat, so there’s that.

Oren: The wheat is an interesting example of the topic we’re talking about today, actually. Because it does stand out, but not in a good way because it’s not interesting.

It’s not cool space wheat, nor is there any kind of interesting contrast between the fancy high tech world and the nitty gritty farming reality of the wheat, the way that you might expect in a show like Firefly. Or in the Fallout games, there’s some interesting parallel between the world that’s besieged by super mutants, but also people need to grow corn.

But there’s nothing like that in the movie. It’s just a lot of wheat harvesting, which doesn’t end up mattering at the end anyway. And so, it stands out. It’s the meme now, which I guess you could argue is better than no one knowing about it, but it’s still not great.

Chris: And if I understand, the wheat harvesting could just take place in the real world. Is it fantastical wheat harvesting in any way?

Oren: Hard to imagine real world wheat harvesting being in that slow motion. But otherwise…

Chris: [laughs] What was it, like Gladiator or 300 where the character spends a lot of time gazing out over a wheat field?

Oren: If it was 300, that would fit, because that’s also a Zack Snyder movie, so maybe Zack Snyder is just telling us something about his wheat interests.

Chris: I mean, it does go to show that something that’s not gonna hit home as well if it is superfluous, which is a problem with the wheat.

And generally, again, we talk about speculative fiction, that’s our whole thing. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, what have you. Those things should matter to what you’re doing.

So, if it really was about the wheat harvesting, you could have a space fantasy weed harvesting if you wanted, but there should be a reason why the wheat harvesting is happening in a space fantasy setting. And that should change the harvest in some way. It shouldn’t just be the fantastical elements sitting alongside a perfectly normal wheat harvest.

Oren: Yeah. Like maybe talk about how it’s difficult to grow wheat in an alien planet, something like that. Again, not to keep beating the dead Fallout horse, but that’s what they do in Fallout, right? You have to deal with trying to grow plants in irradiated soil. So it feels like it’s part of the conceit, part of the premise instead of just, oh, and also there’s wheat.

Chris: Part of this being called a Mars Western. When you have a story where the speculative elements just don’t matter and don’t make any difference or have any impact, the idea is that you have a shootout and it happens to happen in Mars. But it could have just been a Western and it doesn’t really make any difference. That’s something we don’t see all the time, but we see sometimes like in Grimm, in the early seasons of Grimm show.

Oren: Yeah. This is obviously just a police procedural and supposedly some of the bad guys he captures are magical, but they would have the same plot if they weren’t magical.

Chris: And that one is so funny because there’s an obvious reason for it. It’s that he needs to be able to report the crime is closed to his boss, which means that he needs a non-fantastical explanation for how he closed this crime. And as a result, all the fantastical stuff doesn’t matter. And it would be exactly the same without it. And I’ve heard that this does get fixed in later seasons.

Bunny: That’s such an unforced error. They could have made him the boss, for one thing and for another, maybe the boss knows.

Chris: The Secret Fantasy Police Division or whatever, do X-Files style, right?

Bunny: Right! But fantasy, no, I’d be into that. Not just police procedural, but we swear there’s magic somewhere.

I haven’t got as much of a finger on the pulse of what’s standing out in the larger scheme of things. Oren, you’ve been discussing and reading the midlist.

Oren: Mm. [indeed]

Bunny: …And I guess I would have trouble picking the midlist out of a lineup based on anything other than advertising, just because I feel like a lot of standing out is advertising and in this case, quality for sure.

Oren: Spoilers, you have probably never read a midlist book, or at least not very often.

The term midlist is a publishing term. What it means is no or very little marketing. And if there’s no or very little marketing, you’ve probably never heard of these books. That’s why reading them was kind of a shock because I was looking at books that do have something that makes them stand out. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good, but they at least have something that you can imagine someone being like, oh, that’s neat. And focusing on that either as a sales point or just as a thing they remembered from reading the story.

Whereas some of them are just straight up bad, right? Some of them have serious problems that are not addressed, but others are competent, but not exceptional in any way, and they don’t have anything that makes them feel special.

One example, and this is a problem I think particular to the subgenre, is military sci-fi. I read a military sci-fi novel that I actually liked okay. But it was really low novelty because the whole point of military sci-fi is to replicate the feeling of being in the US military. So that limits your opportunities for novelty. And so, for a lot of the story, it felt like we weren’t really in space. Every once in a while, we would mention, oh yeah, we’re on a space station. But mostly it was the minutiae of army bureaucracy.

Chris: I do think it’s fair to say that stories end up on the midlist for a whole variety of reasons. This is not a comprehensive take.

Not standing out though… We’ll talk more of a high concept. Publishers love having an idea for the book that they can pitch and sell easily. So, if it doesn’t stand out, it’s less likely to be high concept, so they’re more likely to put it on the mid list if it’s otherwise competently written.

And of course, there’s unfair double standards when it comes to marginalized writers and authors for sure.

So, I don’t wanna generalize about the midlist too much because there’s a whole different variety of works that are on the mid list for various reasons. But these are the books that the publishers decided not to risk tons of money on trying to market or replace large bets on, let’s say.

Oren: Yeah, and I’ve certainly read books that were heavily marketed and I thought they were bad, or even I thought that the thing that they were marketed on was a lie.

I recently read Magic Bites, which is a fairly famous work of urban fantasy at this point, and the marketing for it, including the sales blurb, makes a huge deal about how this is a setting where magic and technology take turns working. So you’ll have a magic tide will come up and now magic works. And then the magic tide will recede, and now technology works. And that’s huge. That is in the sales blurb where they talk about how when the magic tide recedes, it leaves behind stranded monsters that cause problems and the protagonist has to deal with them.

And that is a lie. That is just straight up not true. That is not what the book is about. That never happens. And they do mention the magic tide thing a little bit in the book, but it’s so ancillary. You could take it out completely and the book would not change. It’s just a standard urban fantasy. But you can tell that some marketer was like, Aha, I can sell that! So high concept isn’t necessarily the same as a good story.

Chris: Also, bland books can also end up getting big marketing pushes if they’re on trend. That’s another thing. So books which you might look at and be like, Okay, I feel like this is just copy without any heat energy put into it, can get pushes because that particular thing that it’s focused on is just really hot right now and is selling really well. And it was similar to other books that sold well.

And again, marketers that are doing sales assessments for all these large companies that manage creative works. Always looking for a sure bet. Something that, oh, I’m sure that this will sell. I’m sure that it will make us money. And it’s always somewhat in conflict with creative work because things get less interesting the more they’re used. And so safe bets means we don’t get cool new breakouts either.

Anyway, that’s what they like. So sometimes you’ll have something that is very bland, that is pushed, and there are a few people who do try to write on trend, but for the most part, by the time it’s big, it’s too late. And you have to get lucky for those to work out.

Oren: Yeah. Unless you’re really fast.

Chris: If you’re really fast, yeah. But even then, a publisher usually takes two years.

So, I think this is very relevant for a lot of indie works. If you’re fast and you’re an indie writer and you can publish it quickly too, then writing on trend can make you big without making your story stand out.

Oren: Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should have done this earlier, but to define high concept real quick, it’s specifically means a simple, easily sellable idea. And I know that’s a little confusing. I thought high concept meant the opposite of that. For a long time, I thought it meant something really like…

Chris: [pretentious voice] high concept.

The word high makes it sound like it’s supposed to be snooty or something.

Oren: Yeah, no, it means the opposite. It means very commercial.

Bunny: I did not know that.

Oren: Yeah, that confused me for a while too. And there are plenty of other examples. A lot of them are from, interestingly enough, the role-playing Game space. It has a lot of high concept games because role-playing games depend on Kickstarters a lot. And a high concept is a great way to get people signed up for your Kickstarter.

So, you can have Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, which is a vampire game that is sold under the tagline, drink the Rich. And that sounds pretty neat. People love that. They latched onto that with their little vampire teeth, and it made tons of money on Kickstarter.

I’m not saying that’s the only reason. I’m not saying the game’s bad, I’m just saying that was definitely a bonus for them.

Bunny: Is the game bad?

Oren: I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it.

Bunny: Okay.

Chris: And there is a distinction between something that is unique and has things that make it stand out and high concept, because I think what marketers like the most is something that is otherwise fairly familiar but has a big thing they can pitch, that makes it stand out. Because that often makes it easier to explain. Whereas some works are very unique and they’re unique enough that it’s not easy to explain anymore because we don’t have as big of a frame of reference.

So if you were to say, oh, this is Twilight with zombies instead of vampires, then Twilight is your frame of reference. You can get works that have wonderful, unique ideas and are great reading and are high novelty but aren’t necessarily pitchable because it takes too long. Again, a novel has a fair amount of time to set up the world and explain. It’s not necessarily gonna be easily condensed down into a two second pitch.

Whereas there are also things that are unique that I would maybe put into more of the bizarre category. And some people do like bizarre stuff, like a lot of the avant-garde crowd, but it tends to have more niche appeal. I think with a lot of the unique elements that are bizarre, there’s a question of like, why? Why do this? This is totally out of the blue.

Interestingly, The Book Eaters, which is a bestseller because of the premise of vampires that eat books, which is a high concept premise. There were a lot of people who felt that was actually also bizarre. And it has a lot of scenes of people just nomming on pages, on the physical pages of the book.

Bunny: So it’s not like they drink the knowledge or anything, it’s that they just…

Chris: The thing about The Book Eaters is that the premise which is used to sell the book, is actually only a small portion of the book. So, it’s another one of those cases where the publisher latched onto part of the book as high concept and then marketed that. And then some readers come in disappointed because they expected it to be a bigger deal. But they also absorb the knowledge, but it doesn’t matter very often it’s not very impactful.

Whereas a lot of the description is just focused on what the texture of these pages is like to eat, for instance. What does the ink taste like? The physical process of just nomming on a book, which I think people might have found a little bit more bizarre.

And again, some people have a taste for that stuff, but I do think that’s when storytellers can lose people too.

Oren: We’ve talked about high concept a lot, but there is another way to make your book stand out. And I’m not saying this make your book like have sales success because I don’t necessarily trust publishers.

But as far as with readers go, you have our good friend, the ANTS, which are Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction. Which we talk about a lot. We call them the critical factors that make stories popular. And the reason we call them that is if your story has a lot of them, it is both better to read and people are more likely to remember it and it will stand out from the other books that do not.

Bunny: You will stand the ants.

Chris: Unfortunately, ANTS will not give you a marketing budget

Oren: [snickers]

Chris: …but it does mean that somebody reading the book is more likely to like it.

Oren: Yeah. Novelty is the most obvious because again, novelty tends to line up better with marketing. Not always; The broken Earth is very novel, but not easy to market. Not impossible. You can talk about it’s a world of endless apocalypses, but that doesn’t really get at what it is and why it’s so interesting.

Chris: And novelty really does represent the things that are different in an entertaining, fascinating way. So, it is definitely the one that is gonna make your work stand out the most.

Oren: It’s also a lot based on whether some other book has done this before. Before 2015, I think it was? Whenever it was that Weir published his novel. Before then, the concept of an astronaut trapped on Mars and having to escape would be a lot more novel than it is now because there’s a very famous book and movie about it.

Chris: But I will say that novelty is not the same thing as originality. I try to discourage people away from originality because I think that standard is just too unrealistic with 8 billion people on the planet trying to find something that nobody else has thought of is just… don’t torture yourself, please.

There are some things that are just not used very often, and that’s enough. Or they haven’t been used in a really long time, that could be enough.

Bunny: And recontextualizing things like existing things is something that I’ve seen work a lot. Legends & Lattes did this with its orc main character, and that was also doing the thing where you fill a niche and a genre that’s beginning to grow.

Cozies existed, but I feel like Legends & Lattes gave them a huge boost.

Chris: Yeah. I think the plot is the thing that stands out in Legend & Lattes. A novel element, because yeah, there are definitely other stories about doing things like creating a coffee shop or stuff that’s similar to that. But they’re just not that common, and especially not when combined with that D&D-type setting.

Oren: Legends & Lattes also brings up another thing that can make your story stand out, which is wish fulfillment. Maybe we need to add that to the ANTS and have it become the WANTS, but we haven’t done that yet. So right now, wish fulfillment is its own category.

Chris: I consider it to be secondary. I have a list that I have not yet written about.

I’m starting to write about it in the blog, what I would call like secondary engagement factors. Which means that they do add entertainment value, but they are usually lower priority than the main ANTS. So, you don’t wanna trade off where you get them at the cost of the ANTS, for instance.

Oren: But in this case, with Legends & Lattes, it manages to have really high wish fulfillment without sacrificing too many ANTS. And the ones that it does sacrifice, I think were unnecessary. But the wish fulfillment of We get to open a really cool cafe and have coffee and delicious baked goods and really cool friends who we found who will help us with our business enterprise. Everyone liked that.

Bunny: Baked goods that are maybe a little too delicious, if we’re being honest.

Oren: They’re fine, okay. There’s a magic baking rat in there and he can make a croissant that is frankly a little higher than PG-13, if I’m being honest.

Chris: [laughs] Now, if people want to buy anything, any croissants at their coffee shop, they have to bring some government issued ID to prove that they’re 18 or older.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: Not appropriate for minors, these croissants.

Legends & Lattes does sacrifice some tension. Not like all tension. It still has some, but it does sacrifice some tension because it would be harder to enjoy the wish fulfillment if the coffee shop was constantly under attack.

But it still has decent ANTS in other areas, especially in attachment. It does pretty well there and in novelty.

Chris: I will say that The Wandering Inn, which has a similar setup where somebody’s creating an inn. That one had a lot of tonal whiplash where the attacks were just way too grimdark compared to the rest of the story. But we build up the battle a little bit more, we deal with some goblins, like that could have worked okay if the goblin attacks weren’t quite so grim.

But in any case, there’s definitely a place for stories that are not so tense, but Legends & Lattes still does have tension. It still has a plot. It’s just not as high stakes.

Oren: One book that I think did a really interesting job, and I’m not really sure how to categorize this, is the Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It is about a person who signs up with a scientific mission to go study Kaiju.

On the one hand, it has some recognizable ANTS as I would describe them, right? There’s definitely some novelty to going to another world to study kaiju. And the protagonist is a fairly selfless, likable person, so there’s some attachment there. But they’re not super high. Description has never been Scalzi’s strong suit. So the kaiju are vague in their general description, and the other characters are a bit one note.

But the book still strikes a pretty good note. I think it’s because we really like Kaiju and this story allows us to have kaiju without the weird problem that Kaiju movies have of having to focus on boring humans for so long,  because who cares about the humans in a Kaiju movie? Who does? And this book is about a human, but it’s about a human who is there to study the kaiju. So you cane  in their perspective. And I think it solves that problem and I think it fills a want that people had.

Chris: I think if you’re looking to make your story stand out one way is to just break it down to the different areas. In speculative fiction, we talk about worldbuilding a lot. And worldbuilding is obviously one area it can stand out. A famous example being Dune with its giant sand worms and other stuff. That was work that really stood out because its world was different and there’s lots of others like that. The Expanse too, made waves because it had a world that was different.

But that’s not the only area you can stand out. If you have an interesting main character who just has unusual character traits. Like Murderbot and the Murderbot Diaries, for instance. Murderbot basically makes the Murderbot Diaries.

Bunny: Yeah. Speaking of another author whose description is maybe not the strong suit.

Oren: The world of Murderbot is exceptionally bland, but Murderbot itself is an amazing protagonist and is really what sells that series.

Chris: Or, as I said, the plot like Legends & Lattes, a very different kind of plot for that setting.

There are cases when we usually focus on the story aspect, but if you like wordcraft, having a distinctive style does make a difference. I think that the book This Is How You Lose the Time War has an interesting preference, but I really do think it’s the style that really sells it. It’s two lovers on opposite sides of a time war writing back and forth to each other, writing love letters, and it just sounds like poetry. It’s just a very elaborate style. That’s very distinctive.

Oren: It definitely struck a chord with people who are a fan of certain Doctor Who dynamics. You can also just have a story that is not a 10 in any one area, but if it’s generally high across the board, again, that will help a lot.

Lockwood & Co. is one of my prime examples of this. Lockwood has decent characters. They’re not amazing, but they are better than average, I would say. And its world is cool, not as interesting as something like Broken Earth, but pretty neat, right? Ghosts becoming a public health problem and needing freelancers to deal with them. That’s neat. And then it has a pretty good plot with pretty strong tension and strong satisfaction.

And those are all high enough that it is a memorable book, even if, I wouldn’t say that any one category is exceptional.

Bunny: I think it might be helpful to just briefly mention what doesn’t necessarily make a story stand out that people tend to give a lot of credit to.

And we touched on this, but one of those is just the idea, talking about high concept. But that’s not necessarily gonna make your book stand out because ideas are easy and execution is hard.

Oren: Or you could end up with a situation where a marketer markets the idea and then you make a ton of money, but you get some maybe not super great reviews of people being like, Hey, I thought this was gonna be something else. And it wasn’t so…

Bunny: Annoying people called Oren!

Oren: [laughs] So, I think we can all agree that is a fate worse than death.

Bunny: That’s true.

Chris: I’ve definitely read books that had a world that could have been interesting. But the author poured absolutely zero energy in it.

Like again, I talked recently about the Vampire Royal series that I started and didn’t finish. And I don’t actually know the intent behind this work, but when I read it on the page, I just feel like there’s a complete lack of passion on the author’s part. And maybe that’s just the style. But it’s kind of like vampire post apocalypse because vampires came and everybody’s technology went away. And that could have been interesting, but there’s no detail given to it. It’s not elaborated on at all.

And it just makes me wonder if this was a book where the publisher came up with the idea to mimic other bestsellers and then with an IP work and then hired an author to write it. Because it just feels like there’s no interest in that actual subject matter of the book.

Bunny: We were talking about stories being derivative earlier, and this one is pretty explicitly The Selection and Twilight, right?

Chris: Yeah. But again, the problem isn’t that it’s taking inspiration from the selection and Twilight, I think it’s that it doesn’t have any of its own life. It doesn’t feel like it has its own passion, its own distinctive feature that really brings it to life. So it just feels a little bland and generic.

Oren: Okay. I think that is an excellent note to end the podcast on. Now that we have shared all of our wisdom, I think you can agree that this definitely stands out as an episode.

Chris: And if you would like to stand out to us, consider becoming our patreon, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patreons who definitely stand out, cause we mentioned them at the end of every episode.

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

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

What if one thing was representative of another thing? Bet I just blew your mind. No? You already know about metaphors? That’s probably good because otherwise this episode wouldn’t make any sense. Today, we’re talking about fictional metaphors, specifically the kind that don’t work because those are always the most fun. We talk about parallels for race, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, and also British crime dramas, for some reason. If you think about it, this podcast is basically a metaphor about listening to three people discuss things. Whoa.

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: Chris

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And I wanna run a little thought experiment that I think will be illuminating for our audience who maybe haven’t thought hard enough about certain issues. So I want you to imagine a world that hates podcasters. Podcasters are just too sexy, we’re too smart, and we’re too brave and too successful.

Chris: Are you saying we don’t live in this world already?

Bunny: It’s true. Podcasters do have it pretty rough.

Oren: I referenced a meme earlier about how having a podcast means you’re unemployed. Everyone hates us ’cause of how cool we are.

Bunny: Exactly. You have to understand how downtrodden podcasters are in this world. Just everything is about how podcasters are the worst, and we’re crimes against God. Religious zealots and bigots and pundits wanna take us down. There are zoning laws that restrict where podcasters can live because everyone hates podcasters. And there are anti-podcaster hate groups that hate crime podcasters too, because they’re jealous of podcasters.

Oren: Of how cool podcasters are. They could never record half an hour of dialogue a week. That’s just, they couldn’t do it.

Bunny: Exactly. Resentful.

Chris: All the people who oppress us secretly wanna be us. That’s definitely how it works.

Bunny: It’s all about jealousy, and you can see thinking about this world that it’s sad and bad, it would be a bad world. And so I hope we all have learned that oppression is bad and a very serious issue for us podcasters.

Oren: I guess I feel like I did learn something. I learned that oppression is bad, maybe.

Bunny: Yes, we’ve learned something significant about bigotry and the way it works.

Chris: Definitely very accurate things about bigotry and the way it works.

Bunny: Bigots just be jealous, really. Thankfully, we do not live in this world and can therefore go about our podcasting ways, even having learned something important. So keeping this in mind, how potentially oppressed we could be in an alternate world, us podcasters… today we’re gonna talk about bad metaphors and analogies in fiction.

Oren: [sarcastic] I don’t know why! That was a perfect metaphor. This is not an appropriate topic, Bunny.

Bunny: I’m introducing the topic by doing it well so that we can talk about doing it poorly.

Oren: Ooh, that’s clever. That’s good.

Bunny: It’s very smart. People who are in the Discord will understand where this is coming from because I’ve recently been griping about a book called The Sleepless, which inspired this and made me start thinking about the ways, especially oppression, but many other issues are depicted through these metaphors and analogies and fiction that use essentially a parallel for some issue to discuss that issue in a speculative way. And I feel like I’ve seen more negative examples than positive ones of this. But then again, there’s kind of a question of what counts, because one could argue that just about any conflict that you can base a story around could be potentially read as an analogy for something, but there are some that are more obvious than others, shall we say.

Chris: I will say it is hard to depict any kind of fictional oppression that does not map directly or at least to some category of real-world oppression. Anything that you can come up with if, again, if it’s actually a good oppression analogy and not something that nobody would ever oppress, you can usually map it on to some category of marginalized people in the real world.

Oren: And even if you’re not doing that on purpose, there are only so many ways that people get oppressed. So there’s gonna be language shared to a certain extent. And if you’re not, I would question whether or not your story is actually about systemic oppression.

Bunny: Certainly there are many stories that are trying to be about that and many parallels for real-world oppression, that’s trying not to simply tell a story about that oppression, but tell a story through the oppression of a different group to illustrate something. And I feel like that’s the main reason people do this. Okay, we can talk a bit about why storytellers do these. I think that one, to shed new light on it or look at it from a new perspective, that’s like a high concept one. Another one is just that a story wants to talk about racism without showing brutality towards black people, which is completely understandable.

Chris: Done well, it can just reduce the sensitivity of the material. So it hits less hard and gives people a little bit of objective distance on contentious issues. And that can be useful. And we can talk about all the downsides, but when done well, it does do that.

Bunny: I think another one is like the reduction to absurdity, which I think is reductio ad absurdum, which is showing how ridiculous a certain form of bigotry or oppression or some sort of social structure is when presented in a different context. Wasn’t there that Star Trek episode where people are oppressed based on… what color what side of their face is?

Oren: That one is definitely trying to make a point about real racial oppression with varying degrees of success. I think it was certainly valuable at the time. Nowadays, I think we can probably do better, but I appreciate it for what it was.

Chris: I do think for some real world issues, not necessarily talking about oppression here, using an analogy can add novelty. So for instance, when people use zombies as a parallel for a pandemic. That’s not usually an issue of oppression, but maybe readers don’t really wanna read all of the details about how pandemics work. But if you’re like, “it’s zombies,” then they do wanna read it.

Oren: Zombies are a lot more fun to deal with than actual pandemics, just like straight up. They’re much more entertaining.

Bunny: What if you could chop up the virus? What if you could shoot the virus? I think people also sometimes just include things because they seem deep and relevant and have Insight with a capital I. Even if they are none of those things, ’cause I do honestly feel like sometimes storytellers just put them in because that is a deep thing that people have made comments about.

Oren: It’s hard to guess at a storyteller’s motivation, but I have certainly read or watched stories where some weird parallel will come up and it doesn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the world. And I’m just left wondering, why was that in there? And it gives the impression that maybe the author or the writer or whatever just wanted some recognition for having deep thoughts, but maybe they had another reason and they just didn’t accurately portray it very well.

Chris: Maybe it used to be part of their big vision and then they made revisions and it’s left over, or… there’s so many things that can happen.

Oren: And this isn’t always about bigotry either. We’re talking about bad metaphors or bad analogies or what have you. You can also have one of my favorites. I read a book recently called Priest of Bone. It’s clearly Peaky Blinders, but reimagined in, I guess a Renaissance, maybe late medieval fantasy setting. And there are certain parts of it that just don’t work super well and the degree to which they don’t work will matter more depending on how much you’ve studied this period. Some of them are pretty obscure, like it really bothered me that this society had mass conscription. Because that’s not a thing that this type of society would have. But I don’t think most people are familiar with the details of the history of mass conscription and how it was invented in the French Revolution. I don’t think that’s common.

Bunny: No, I don’t think that’s common.

Oren: But what more people might notice is that it kept the part from Peaky Blinders where the fantasy gang hates the government and distrusts them and feels like they can’t trust the government for whatever reason. And in the show, that’s because the gang is made up of Roma and Irish travelers. Who are both marginalized groups, so they have a really obvious reason why they don’t trust the government. In this story, that’s not the case. Everyone seems to be part of the same race and ethnic group. Now, it could be class solidarity, but it doesn’t seem like it. None of them really seem to have that much sympathy for poor people who aren’t their friends. So it’s just this weird like, yeah, that was in the show, so now it’s in the book too.

Bunny: Ah, weird.

Chris: I do think that with analogies, probably one of the biggest cons is that it’s just really easy to create a situation that doesn’t map over well.

Bunny: The moment you have an analogy, you are saying something that seems like it should have a parallel, like whatever you include, because it’s an analogy, it seems you are saying something about the thing it’s an analogy to. And if you, the storyteller, forget that, things can get really weird really quickly.

Oren: Like in the Voyager episode Jetrel, they wanted to do a big atomic bomb parallel. So they bring in this guy and it’s like, “you invented the space atomic bomb, and it killed a bunch of people. Think about what you did!” And it’s like, all right, okay, sure. But Voyager could do that with one torpedo. This isn’t a new technology. We live in space. Like this stuff is pretty common at this point, so, hmm. Hmm!

Bunny: Me just bringing Oppenheimer onto my show to scold him for a while.

Oren: Yeah, I have some issues with that episode beyond that portrayal. But if you are paying attention to the way that the sci-fi premise works, you will immediately notice that. It’s not like you couldn’t do a sci-fi weapon of mass destruction storyline, you just need to think about it a little harder.

Chris: We were talking about oppression analogies, and there’s just so many ways that oppression analogies in particular can go very wrong. Persecution flips, we’ve talked about that, where you make the powerful people oppressed. I was just reading the Vampire Royals series, clearly supposed to be a reveal, but there, again, are vampires and the royals, but we’re clearly going to reveal that they were the ones who were mistreated all along.

Oren: Oh no!

Chris: And humans need sensitivity training. The idea is that vampires have, you know, intervene when a new vampire is made to keep them from killing anybody, but they still have an impulse to attack and feed on humans, and they’re obviously invincible and way more powerful than humans.

Bunny: I was gonna say, they have superpowers.

Oren: They also conquered the humans and made them all live in poverty, so… heck ’em.

Bunny: The kings are the real oppressed people.

Chris: I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find out… I did decide to discontinue this book ’cause I could see where it was going, but I’m pretty sure we’ll come up with some explanation for why it was totally okay for the vampires to take over the humans and take all their stuff.

Oren: They had to do it!

Chris: They had to do it!

Bunny: The humans were too mean! What were we supposed to do, if not seize control and rule with an iron fist?

Oren: Often bad analogies happen when you want something to be an analogy for more than one thing at the same time and those things are not compatible. So in the novel Winter Tide, which I really like, disclaimer, the Deep Ones are clearly a parallel for the interned Japanese in World War II, and in fact, they are interned in some of the same camps as the Japanese. I mean, they meet and form family bonds, which I thought was pretty neat. Those are my favorite parts of the story. But the Deep Ones are also a giant undersea empire from the ancient times, and it doesn’t work. They can’t be both of those things at the same time, ’cause it creates all kinds of questions like why didn’t the giant Deep One undersea empire use any of its extensive resources to try to free the Deep Ones who were taken prisoner? And the answer is… there isn’t one, ’cause if they had, they would have succeeded. So that’s just an example of why you want to think about what kind of parallel you’re looking for, and make sure that the thing that you’re doing it with is not being placed under too much stress.

Chris: The other thing to look out with any oppression analogy besides, okay, what is supposed to be the marginalized group is way too powerful to be oppressed. There’s also, I guess they call it gray-washing, where you take an inherent black and white situation and try to make it gray, and it has problematic implications. Basically, these are story scenarios in which we make the marginalized people to blame for being marginalized to some extent. So Bright is notorious for this, having orcs that are dressed up to embody stereotypes about black people. But they also had the backstory where they used to like, serve some dark lord or something, as in that was used as a justification and it’s like. Now we’re actually coming up with real things this marginalized group did to make the situation feel less one-sided, but oppression is one-sided in real life. That’s how it works. Doing anything like that, making marginalized people dangerous, to any degree, anything like that.

Oren: You have to think about, what is it a parallel for? Because you can have oppression scenarios that are not super one-sided. They can be more complicated. They can have a complicated history if you are prepared to deal with that and make sure you’re actually exploring it. But these orcs are just the most clear parallel for black people that the show could make them to a cartoonish degree and then being like, oh yeah, and it was because they were bad guys and attacked humans. Okay, that’s where it breaks down because you already made it clear who they were a parallel for, and spoilers that’s not part of racism against Black people in the United States, in case anyone was unclear about that.

Bunny: Black people do not serve a dark lord.

Oren: Generally not.

Chris: Another one that I tell clients who are doing this that I see is if you are doing any kind of oppression analogy, don’t erase the people who are actually being oppressed in real life. This is the thing with X-Men where we use “have you tried not being a mutant” and there’s no characters in there that are obviously queer to viewers, but we’re using that as an analogy for oppression against queer people. So if you’re gonna do anything like that, if you have a racial oppression analogy in there and almost all of your characters are white, that doesn’t look good. It really doesn’t.

Oren: You could make arguments about how at a certain time we couldn’t have those characters on TV or in popular books, so all we had were parallels. And sure, maybe that was true at some point, but if you’re writing a book today, it is not true anymore, especially if you are of a privileged background yourself.

Bunny: I think we’ve been gesturing at this, but another problem that I’ve seen in a couple places that really bugs me is just going to the most obvious place. With your parallel. Okay. I haven’t finished this book yet, but the reason I’m having trouble getting into it is this is a book called When Women Were Dragons, which is about, there was a mass dragoning where a bunch of women in the 1950s turned into dragons and I was like, that’s a really cool premise. But then they’re using the dragons as an analogy for sex ed, where talking about the dragons is like this awkward thing. And then it’s treated like quote/unquote “women’s issues.” They’re dragons. They turned into dragons. 

Chris: Ah, the story is running on analogy logic, as I like to call it.

Bunny: It’s exactly that.

Chris: It’s when the actual details of the story stop making any sense because now we’re going by “what if the analogy is the reality,” not what’s actually in the story, and it causes a lot of dissonance. The big story I remember this from is in World War Z, which again has zombies as a parallel for a pandemic, but like the writer really wanted false positives for, because that’s the thing that happens in pandemics where people think they have it and they don’t, and that like messes up the data, but you don’t usually have false positives for zombies. So he adds these people called quislings who’ve decided that they’re loyal to the zombies and they pretend to be zombies and bite people. So then we have false positives, and it just makes no sense, it’s like nobody would do that. That would not be a thing.

Bunny: Quislings?

Oren: So the term quisling, if anyone’s not familiar with it, refers to a guy named Quisling who was the leader of the civil administration that the Nazis set up to be like, “hey, Norway, you’re being run by other Nordish people, don’t look at us.” And so they picked this guy. He was obviously a traitor. And so his name is now synonymous with people who betray their own country or whatever to serve the enemy. And in this particular case, I’ve seen people talk about the quislings in the light of Covid and compare them to people who went around spreading Covid, either, usually just by ignoring safety precautions and occasionally on purpose in some truly bizarre situations, but it doesn’t really fit. Because again, these people aren’t spreading the zombie virus, they are just pretending to be zombies. You can do the thing where people spread the virus by ignoring safety precautions or maybe even on purpose in a zombie apocalypse, ’cause there’s a zombie virus, and that’s not what the quislings are.

Chris: There’s no equivalent to false positives in a zombie setting. So we just made up something that didn’t make any sense so that we could continue our analogy. That’s analogy logic, which is another problem I see. And I don’t know if some people, if they read the story and the analogy is the only thing in their head, and they’re not thinking about the situation literally at all. Maybe that’s, for some people that would be fine, but it drives me up the wall.

Bunny: First and foremost, it’s a story and it has its own eternal logic. And even in an analogy, like you’re making a parallel to something, but you’re also doing the parallel. The parallel in itself has to make sense. It can’t just be the other thing, because it’s a parallel.

Chris: That is the reason you’re choosing the parallel is for the layer that it adds to the original issue. And so if they’re dissonant… I’m sure there was some symbolism there with the women turning into dragons and being a dragon being a woman’s issue.

Bunny: It’s definitely doing that, but I was like, well, this just felt like the most obvious way to take it. We have this really interesting event that’s called the mass dragoning and what we have to say about it… it’s kind of taboo and awkward to talk about. It’s like talking about periods. I don’t know. It’s turning into a dragon.

Oren: It feels like it would be a little more interesting than that. I haven’t read this book, but a movie that I can think of that actually did the same thing really well is Turning Red, which got a lot of hate because people figured out what the analogy was and were like, “ooh, no menstruation, ew.” And so that one is clearly, among other things, a metaphor can be about more than one thing, it is clearly a metaphor for menstruation and puberty in general, but it makes more sense. It makes more internal sense. It’s not just, “hey, you’re becoming a panda. Here is your panda pad.” You know, it’s not that literal, although they do mention actual menstrual products in the movie, which also made people mad. So as far as I’m concerned, A+ move.

Chris: Yeah, A+. And in Turning Red, everything that happened in the story still made sense and there were just clearly parallels to the analogy of growing up and going through puberty, but we never had things that didn’t make sense literally because we prioritized the literal interpretation first, and then had the analogy as a second layer.

Bunny: It needs to make internal sense.

Chris: Another issue that can happen with analogies is a lack of clarity about what it is that you are covering and what point you’re trying to make. That can allow things like misinterpretation or appropriation of your message, particularly if the people that are involved are erased from it. So the poster child for this one is The Matrix, because The Matrix was intended as a trans analogy, and one of the reasons it doesn’t come out that way is because the studio basically, there was supposed to be a person who was essentially genderfluid that was taken out by the studio, and The Matrix has some very powerful symbolism in it, but it was not clear that it was a trans analogy, which meant that it could be appropriated by misogynist groups.

Bunny: I, yeah, I never would’ve guessed that.

Oren: And it’s also like the symbolism in general is something that is very broad in its appeal, which helped The Matrix as a film, but it also means anyone can interpret it however they want, ’cause it involved things like realizing you’re not who you thought you were or realizing that society has been lying to you and things like that. And those things happen and they are real, but they also are things that everyone kind of imagines happening to them often in ways that are fake. And so that’s how you get the guys who are like, “ah, what this means is that society has been lying to me about women. And the truth is that women are evil. And the truth about myself is that I am a double alpha man who will go my own way, but also sleep with lots of women.” And so you can see how that analogy, by being general, also made itself very easy to co-opt.

Chris: Whereas just as a counter to that, like the movie Space Sweepers. It’s not a perfect movie, but it does have some very interesting messaging in there. And one of the things about it is that it’s very clear who it stands for and against, because there’s a specific character in there that is like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos put together.

Bunny: Oh yes. Good friend, Elon Bezos.

Chris: Elon Bezos, the villain of Space Sweepers. That makes it really hard to misinterpret or misappropriate, ’cause we can see there’s a specific person who is a stand-in, and when the people are erased, if we’re trying to represent them, that’s when it becomes the most unclear.

Oren: Space Sweepers also managed to have a message that was both clear and widely popular. So it can be done.

Bunny: It can be done. I think another issue, and this is me circling around to The Sleepless because I want to rant about that.

Chris: Yeah. I think we’re ready for the Sleepless rant.

Bunny: Are you ready for me to unleash this? Every issue we’ve been discussing, just about every one, applies to this depression metaphor and The Sleepless, which is trying to be a metaphor about everything, every kind of oppression, using language that’s explicitly used against specific marginalized groups. It’s very deliberate about this, despite being in an otherwise egalitarian near future setting, which made it like extra weird because this is supposed to be a world we recognize, but then it’s like the author just took a bunch of bigoted rhetoric and copy-pasted, find-and-replaced any mention of groups with the word Sleepless. So you get the exact rhetoric of like “crimes against God” and “unnatural” and “chasers.”

Oren: “Coming out.”

Bunny: “Coming out.” Yep. Coming out is what it’s called when you reveal that you’re Sleepless to someone else. Chasers are people who fetishize the Sleepless, which is a really weird thing to fetishize. Gets so abstract like, “oh, I’m turned on by the fact that you don’t sleep.” It’s like being attracted to insomniacs. There’s also like, okay, all of this, you have to accept that this sleeplessness is like this thing worthy of being oppressed. But at the same time as we have all of these religious zealots calling for zoning laws and trying to keep Sleepless people in the closet or whatever. At the same time, we’re also meant to believe that everyone wants to be Sleepless. There’s a huge semi underground pharmaceutical industry.

Chris: As there would. Realistically, yes, people would want to not have to sleep.

Bunny: Because objectively sleeplessness in this world, which is like a capitalist quasi dystopia, sleeplessness would be a massive asset. And so they’re talking about how oppressed they are, and then they’re also being like, also, I’m really fit and healthy and I have all these skills and I learned jiu-jitsu and I work multiple jobs because I don’t need to sleep, and so I’m filthy rich. And it’s like. These people should be running the country. Why are you making them parallels for homosexuality? Oh my God, there’s just so much to talk about. There’s so much that doesn’t make sense.

Chris: My favorite from what you mentioned on the Discord was that even the environmentalists want to oppress them.

Bunny: And the thing about the environmentalists is like, okay, that’s one that I could see more than the others because whatever, you have your lights turned on more or something.

Chris: By that measure, Americans should be very impressed by the environmentalists  because we use way more energy per capita than most other countries.

Oren: Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there would be some environmentalists pointing out that the more people that become Sleepless, the more resources we’re using. But the jump from there to “and now the environmentalists want to regulate us out of existence” is like, they haven’t come from me or my computer yet, so I’m okay. When they start hunting Bitcoin miners in the streets, then maybe I’ll reconsider.

Bunny: Now we need that story as long as it’s not an oppression analogue. Here’s the thing, is that sleeplessness could have made a really good discussion of labor, but not because Sleepless people are oppressed, because they are a risk to non-Sleepless people, and a market that would prioritize workers who don’t need to sleep. That would be a labor issue. People would be, what do unions have to say about this? That could be really interesting, but it’s not that Sleepless people would be the ones on the short end of the stick. They are poised to have so many advantages here and the book kind of limp-wristedly is like “corporations exploit us.” You don’t have to work multiple jobs. You could just play video games for eight hours while everyone else is sleeping. Yeah, corporations do exploit, and maybe you could say more about that if you wanted to with the sleeplessness thing, but like in conjunction with everything else, the Sleepless are very well positioned in this scenario.

Chris: I can imagine an interesting story where everybody suddenly doesn’t need sleep. And then there is a battle over whether employers get to claim that time, right? For the same level of pay. And a kind of movement to try to make that into free time for people and not more work time. I can imagine that struggle, but when you only have a small portion of the population not needing sleep, it’s hard to imagine that being a big issue.

Bunny: It’s like a quarter of the world population. I think they specify that. That’s what frustrates me about this book is that you could have some really interesting emotional and even philosophical points to think about when it comes to this idea of what would it mean for a society to be sleepless? Would you give up sleep if you could, that sort of thing. But it’s just this lazy oppression analogy that uses the exact same language as like gay rights. I didn’t even talk about the villains. The villains are a hate group of Sleepless people who are like, Sleepless supremacists. And then the main villain is like a Sleepless CEO, which is like, yeah, the Sleepless people would be CEOs.

Oren: But have they come out yet, is the question? Has the Sleepless CEO come out?

Bunny: As the Sleepless supremacists say explicitly, they are out and proud.

Oren: Oh. Big oof.

Bunny: I’m not kidding!

Chris: It’s just painful to create a scenario where a group can be both supremacist and oppressed at the same time. That is not how that works. That is so painful. Oh my goodness. 

Bunny: But is also like yo-yos between whether the supremacist group is like, people consider it a real threat and like we are told that someone who is a member of this group did a suicide bombing on a research facility that was trying to figure out how to prevent sleeplessness or something. Like they have actual acts of terror, but then people are like, oh, they’re just a bunch of harmless kooks. Make up your mind!

Oren: We are pretty much at the end of our time, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

Chris: Indeed. If you would like to prevent us from being sleepless, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

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

The most important skill in dating is being able to see things from your partner’s perspective. In storytelling, we can make that literal! But what happens when you give the love interest as well as the hero a viewpoint? What are the costs and benefits? That’s our topic this week, and, with our three perspectives, hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of things.

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

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

Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me here today is 

Oren: Oren. 

Bunny: and 

Chris: Chris. 

Bunny: Okay, so you guys, long ago, you remember this, episode 446, we established that we encountered a dark and brooding podcast that daringly fought fanragers on our behalf, and it seemed maybe a little interested in us? Yeah? You remember that?

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Oren: So dreamy.

Bunny: And I thought that we’re too humble for such a suave podcast to notice, but you guys, I encountered a super secret soundbite of the host saying the same thing about us.

Chris: What? We are super special.

Oren: What?

Bunny: That’s true. 

Chris: Naturally, another podcast would notice us. 

Bunny: Yeah. I understand why they’re so attracted to the Mythcreant podcast and now we have intrigue. Will they email us? Will they like, comment and subscribe? Will they even invite us on? 

Chris: Oh… 

Bunny: That would be a lot. I guess we have to keep listening to those super secret soundbites to find out.  So once again, trying to avoid the awkwardness of implicating the hosts in an episode about romance.

Oren: Yeah, that is tricky.

Bunny: I have pulled on Chris’s earlier joke in order to introduce this episode about multiple POVs in romance, which are pretty much a trope or expectation of the romance genre itself by now? From what I understand.

Chris: So what do you mean expectation? Because a lot of romances are not multiple POVs. It’s common, but I would not call it an expectation in terms of the average romance is expected to have them. Would you?

Bunny: Yeah. Maybe expectation is the wrong word, maybe. I guess it would be at least as expected as having a single point of view, which isn’t the case in just about any other genre. Does that make sense?

Chris: Yeah. Certainly more common. I do think that there are different types of romances that might lean towards one or the other.

Bunny: Maybe I’ve just encountered a higher volume of romances that are multiple POV.

Chris: Here’s a question for you, Bunny. What percentage of romances do you read are queer romances?

Bunny: Uh, quite a few.

Chris: Yeah. So from what I, again, casual observation, I have not looked at numbers, but I do think that hetero romances are more likely to be single POV. Not that they can’t be multiple POV or that queer romances can’t be single POV, but I think there might just be trends there. Because generally in a single POV romance, the focus tends to be more on having a single relatable point of view character, and then a really impressive mysterious love interest.

And the assumption then, in a straight romance, is that people are gonna read and identify with the same person who has their gender, right? So, you know, we have a straight female main character. The assumption is that straight women are gonna read that and identify more with her than with the male love interest.

Whereas I think that often in queer romances, that’s no longer an assumption anymore that the audience is going to relate to one person a lot more than the other person, and so I think that they might tend more to having multiple POVs in that case.

Bunny: That’s an interesting theory. I think that might hold water.

Chris: Yeah. I think a lot of the multiple POV romances I’ve read are queer romances. Again, I’ve read some hetero romances that are also multiple POV, but I’ve certainly read most heteromances–most hetero romances, hetero, heteromances, hetero romances–  

Oren: Heteromances!

Chris: –heteromances I’ve read, and a lot of these are romantasy, are single POV. More often than not.

Bunny: Interesting. Yeah. The most recent romance I read was a dual POV straight romance. I think maybe my sample size is skewed as to how common that is in the genre as a whole. Just thinking about the romance genre, generally, straight or queer romance, I think it makes sense that there would be a higher proportion of books with dual POVs or multiple points of view.

Just because in romance, the romance is the central part of the plot, whereas in something like romantasy, the romance might still be pretty central or even the central part of the plot, but when you think romantasy, you also think of a larger conflict beyond the romance, like House of Earth and Blood had this whole city conflict going, but it’s also romantasy.

Chris: Yeah, well there’s often higher stakes. It’s still designed to make the romance front and center, I think a lot of the time.

Oren: Chris, quick question. You’ve read Maas’s more famous series, Thorn and Roses, is that single POV?

Chris: I’ve only looked at the first book, but yes, it’s [single] POV and Feyre’s viewpoint.

Oren: Okay. I wonder, ’cause Crescent City, the first one, has at least two, it’s possible it goes off into some other POVs. Honestly, I lost track, but at least Bryce and Hunt each have their own POVs. So I wonder what the thought process was there.

Chris: I do think that YA is more likely to be in a single viewpoint. So Thorn and Roses is YA and Crescent City is not.

Oren: That makes sense.

Chris: So that might be one reason.

Oren: It’s so baffling in Crescent City, why we gave Hunt his own POV, because he has his own little secret plot that he’s on is just a completely different story that we don’t hear about until about three-quarters of the way through. And then we find out he’s been doing this other thing that is completely unrelated to the actual story, except that it gets him in trouble to create some drama. It’s like the most convoluted backstory I’ve ever seen for the love interest getting sent to jail.

Bunny: You see, that is the opposite of the reasons that love interests usually have their point of view, which is to reveal things about them not from the start, not to suddenly reveal that they have a reason to go to jail.

Oren: Yeah, that’s so weird. It was really weird. Normally you would do this specifically because you want the reader to know more about the love interest, but not this time.

Bunny: That is very confusing and yeah, I would say that’s, if not the reason, definitely one of the major reasons is just by definition, the lovebirds are all mostly equally as essential to the story as each other because them getting together is the driver of the plot in a pure romance.

And so you get to know both of them. I think that’s the main reason. And so if one of them is hiding something that would be pretty important for you to get to know about them, that’s a little odd choice there.

Oren: Yeah. Although, to be fair, Mythcreants is one of the few places that I have seen that even talks about what a meta mystery is. I see a lot of authors do this, so it’s very likely that Maas just did not consider that a problem. Just, yeah, whatever. It’s not gonna make a difference that Hunt has this entire secret plot that he’s on. It’s like the character equivalent of finding out about a secret family. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.

Bunny: Now that would be a romance twist.

Chris: Yeah. It’s funny from our perspective. ’cause why did you give him a viewpoint just to introduce a meta mystery. Makes no sense.

Oren: Yeah, but then you remember everyone does that. It’s also interesting sometimes, at least from the very limited sample size of stories that I’ve read that do this, another motivation for giving the love interest a second POV, is that you have the theoretical main character, which is usually the woman in a heteromance as we call them now. And then you have the love interest, who is the guy. But the guy is the only one doing the plot because he’s the one with all the power and agency. And so if we didn’t cut to his POV sometimes–

Chris: Oh no.

Oren: –we would never know what was happening. That’s what happens in The Fading Lands, which is some old-school romantasy, and by old-school, I mean 2014. The ancient year of 2014, where our protagonist is theoretically the main character, but she doesn’t do anything for basically the entire story. She just hangs out at her house and feels bad. Whereas the love interest is this super hot, powerful Fey guy and he’s theoretically going around doing stuff. His point of view is also boring, but he’s at least, in theory, fighting the bad guys. So we gotta cut to his POV as often as possible. Otherwise, it would just be the protagonist lady sitting in her house for chapter on chapter.

Bunny: It’s the thought that counts.

Chris: Mm-hmm. I will say in Thorn and Roses, the idea is that the love interest is keeping a lot of things from the protagonist that frankly, the book would probably be better if she knew. Like, ’cause the plot and the stakes and all those things–a lot of the book are just, people just refuse to tell her anything. And that’s, I guess, better that we’re not showing his viewpoint, but it’s still a bit frustrating. So yeah, it, I think it would’ve made more sense if she’d been more involved earlier. 

Oren: Once you tell the protagonist something, you can’t use it for a reveal anymore. So just never tell them anything.

Chris: Basically, just leave a blank page and it’s the most basic form of suspense. But personally, I think that the main reason to use multiple POV in romance is so that you can focus more on internal obstacles to the relationship and misunderstandings, and tell it from both characters’ perspectives.

So you can clarify that they’re still into each other when their actions suggest otherwise. Or you can explain misunderstandings they have with each other. If one person might look like they’re being super unreasonable or doing something bad, you can explain why they’re doing that. And I think that when you do have a lot of obstacles that are psychological or emotional, that is really helpful to be able to dig into what’s going on [with] both sides and see exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing and better empathize with both of them.

Bunny: And if one of them starts acting, from one character’s perspective, rude or unpleasant, we can go into the other character’s head and understand them for that perspective. And I also feel like if a character has a point of view, we’re just primed to like them more because we’re literally with them. At least that’s the hope. And it can explain why the lovebirds don’t just get together as well. We can see their emotional reasons for that, like Chris said, rather than just one being like, “No, I can’t!”

Oren: Although it could still end up happening if you don’t have a reason.

Bunny: Yeah, you do need a reason.

Chris: Yeah. When it comes from one person’s perspective, I think it leans a lot more on not knowing if the other person is interested, and that often doesn’t last for the entire romance arc, but at least for a portion of it.

Oren: It lasts a lot less time if you cut over to the other person’s perspective and find out that they are in fact interested and there goes the conflict, there goes the obstacle to your romance.

Chris: Yeah, but a lot of it’s just what kind of romance you want. I think people get into trouble when they want a romance that is really heavy on the wish fulfillment of having somebody really hot and powerful be into you. And so to provide that wish fulfillment, we have lots of scenes and it could be in this person’s POV or not, fawning over the protagonist and then we have a lot of burden to figure out, okay, why aren’t they together? Whereas if you like the type of romance where your protagonist is, oh my gosh, that super awesome hot person would never love me, then you can keep that going for longer and use one POV to do that very well.

Bunny: Yeah, having multiple perspectives also kills the mystery element of some romances where the love interest is mysterious and you want to seek to understand them better through the protagonist, but if the mysterious love interest just has their own point of view, then unless you’re doing a meta mystery, I guess, which don’t. It’s not that mystique so much.

Oren: Yeah. You definitely don’t wanna give a POV to a character who’s supposed to be mysterious, and that includes your protagonist.

Chris: Your protagonist can’t be mysterious. I’m sorry. Your main character should not be mysterious.

Oren: Yeah, we need to know about them, but the POV is useful for a love interest who is more relatable. And you can set up the fun little dramatic irony where you’ve been inside the other person’s head, so you know that they have a hangup around or they’re really touchy about phone calls, so then the protagonist is like, “Okay, I’ll just call them instead of going over to their house,” and you’re like, “No, don’t do it!”

Bunny: [mock horror] “Their parents were killed by a phone call!”

Oren: Yeah, phone calls haunted their dreams!

Chris: I think it’s worth mentioning that I think comedies, right, often work really well with multiple POVs in this case because a lot of it is about misunderstandings often and just humorous exchanges, and those often work a lot better if we understand. Again, we can have a dramatic irony where we know more than either character knows alone, so that works great.

Oren: So whenever we’re talking about multiple POVs, we should of course think about the normal costs that are associated with them. The good news is for romance, it is more likely that your characters are involved in the same story since presumably you want them together so that you can do romance if that’s what you’re writing. You’re less likely to have a problem of the, “one POV character is on continent A and the other POV character is on continent B, and maybe they’ll catch a glimpse of each other at the end of the story.” But I’m not gonna say you’re immune to it. I have seen stories that start off with this point of view of some random guy and you can’t figure out why he’s got a POV and then 10 chapters later it’s like, oh, it’s ’cause he’s the romance interest. That’s why.  It’s like, the solution there is to introduce him earlier, not to give us a split POV until he finally shows up.

Chris: Yeah. So book one is the lovebirds on different continents, just being lonely. And then I’ll make the readers wait for them to meet for the entire book. And then at the end they’ll just see each other and then it’s done. As soon as they glimpse each other. Why book two?

Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the way I’ve seen it done that works pretty well is that especially in a story where you have more or less equivalent viewpoints between the love interest, but maybe one is slightly more central than the other one, and that’s usually the character whose POV opens the story, that we see that character and then the character meets the love interest, and then we get the love interest’s point of view. I think that serves as a natural transition between the two, rather than having continents as the divisor.

Chris: Yeah, that’s definitely a good way to do it. And I think another thing to note about multiple POV is that one thing that often pops up in romance is usually the writer puts a lot more thought into why the protagonist likes the love interest than vice versa. And it’s not that every reader will notice, but it’s just better if we have an understanding for what is so special about the protagonist for the love interest, and I do think that putting the love interest’s viewpoint in there does encourage more of that thinking. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s well thought out or that it’s in there, but it’s more likely to be in there.

Bunny: Yeah. It’s not just that they have heterochromia and purple hair.

Oren: Yeah. Although you could just be in for more chapters of, “Wow. So hot.”

Bunny: Look, I basically–so the last book I read was this book called Digging Up Love, which was a fine book, but the characters were so horny over each other to the point that it just got absurd. And then the chapters did really just feel like they were about to drop their pants at any moment. And then we didn’t even get a sex scene.

Oren: I have noticed that at least some authors have a tendency of making their characters really, really horny, and at that point you do have to start asking, why are they not just having sex? And there can be a reason, but often the author doesn’t include one, because then it would be awkward when we do want them to have sex.

Bunny: No, [they] didn’t even mention it. We learned that they’re Catholic, but they’ve just been so horny throughout the entire book. That feels like an afterthought. It almost feels like they dialed the horniness back after they started dating, which they do halfway through the book. It’s not really a “will they, won’t they,” because then the author would have to justify why these two people living in the modern world, who are sweating all over themselves at the sight of the other person, are not banging.

Oren: That’s the sort of thing where if you’re hitting exactly the wish fulfillment goal you want for a very specific audience, that can work. But for anyone else, the same feeling repeated over and over again is gonna get repetitive, even if it makes sense in character. It’s like having a character who’s angry all the time. It’s just constantly angry and that’s the only emotion they have. That’s just boring. Gets repetitive.

Bunny: Right, yeah. And they should have feelings about each other that aren’t just animal lust. That’s my hot take. I mean, you can have that, but then you might not be writing a romance. 

Oren: I’ve also noticed–this is more in client stories than in published ones–is you often will have the protagonists who start off together and get their different POVs as their romance starts, but then the story splits them up and, okay, great. Now we’re on the continent A and B situation.

Bunny: Yeah, that’s also not good.

Oren: And that can happen with any two characters. That’s not just a romance thing. But the point of doing this was to give the two lovebirds their own POVs so that we could understand their romance better, and that is ruined if you then split them up in addition to the normal problem of having completely separate POVs for most of the story.

Bunny: I will say another issue I had with Digging Up Love is the characters feeling inconsistent when we jumped heads, and I think this was a function of the author maybe not knowing how to write a point of view where the character doesn’t feel perpetually inadequate, I suppose. The moment that we moved into the other character’s point of view, that character became ridiculously bumbling and clumsy. And the character whose viewpoint we were previously in becomes so smooth and suave and sexy. And it’s not just that they feel like they’re being bumbling, but they’re actually being suave. It’s that they literally become bumbling, they start falling over each other. Are they clumsy or not? And so it just felt like two of the same character who were one person when you were looking at them from the outside, and a different person when you were in their point of view.

Chris: That’s a neat idea. Right? I could definitely get behind a romance where the point of view character is insecure and looks at themself one way and then looks at the person that they’re crushing on and be like, that person is so cool. I’m so inadequate. And they’re both secretly thinking that, and their viewpoints reflect that perspective. But I think when you do things like, they literally fall over, it has to stay in the subjective arena.

Bunny: Right, and it’s very much physical descriptions of them being bumbling and doing meet-cute behavior. And it just started feeling repetitive because both characters were acting the same way, but also inconsistent.

Chris: Maybe the writer had a certain habit of writing in a specific way with specific types of jokes, and just continued to do it. But something that was like that but was clearly about subjectivity when it comes to viewing people and viewing yourself could be cool. Could be a neat thing.

Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. That’s definitely one of the things that multiple points of view in romance is good for, right? The outside versus inside. You can’t really do that when you just have one inside point of view.

Oren: Yeah, I mean it was interesting that Crescent City did not have that problem, but [the] reasons why are fascinating is ’cause, so Hunt, the dude, he is exactly one personality trait, which is that he’s mad. He’s very mad and, okay, well, that’s not fair. He’s also possessive.

Chris: Typical powerful love interest asshole.

Oren: Yeah. And he is like that whether you’re in his POV or not. When you’re in his POV, he’s constantly thinking, Bryce, I must have her. I’m so mad that I can’t have her and she can’t be allowed to do things I don’t want–

Bunny: Ugh.

Oren: –because of how much I want her. And then when you’re outside his POV, he’s like, Bryce, don’t do things I don’t want, ’cause I want you.

Chris: That sounds like a very uninteresting POV. It’s like, why go in his head at that?

Oren: I’m just calling it like I see it. Meanwhile, Bryce’s character just changes depending on what chapter we’re in. Sometimes she’s very relatable: “I’m just like you, I’m just a normal lady.” And then in other chapters she’s like, “I’m basically James Bond.” And when you’re outside her POV and watching her, sometimes she acts all like, “I’m just a normal lady and I can’t do anything.” And then other times she’d be like, “I’m basically James Bond and I know Kung Fu.” And it’s the same character no matter what. You gotta give Maas that much. They are consistent about being bad characters.

Bunny: Consistently bad. Don’t write bad. That’s my advice.

Oren: Only write good characters.

Bunny: Yeah, avoid bad. Write good. Thank you for coming to Mythcreants.

Oren: Well, with that, in my point of view, I think it is time to call this episode to a close.

Chris: And if you want to help us hook up with that other dark, broody podcast, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants to support us.

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

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

Most people have encountered language barriers at some point in their life, but they’re rarely a problem for fictional characters. And when an author does include a language barrier, it’s usually overcome in short order. Is this the right way to do things? Maybe. Sometimes. It’s complicated. Good thing we’ve got an entire episode to talk about it!

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Music]

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

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: And for the rest of this podcast, I am going to be speaking entirely in droid beep boop sounds. boop boop boop…

Bunny: Oh yes.

Oren: beep boop

Bunny: Of course.

Chris: That’s no problem. I’ll just use my magic autotranslate technology that’s never sampled this language before. And it’s a completely unknown language, but it can, you know, know exactly what you’re saying.

Oren: beep boop beep

Bunny: Oh, that’s a great observation.

Oren: I think I made a good point, and thankfully, now that you have a magic translator, it can translate what I’m saying for the convenience of anyone listening, but in character, I’m still speaking in beep boops, just so we’re clear.

Bunny: This is going to be true for the rest of the podcast’s mortal life.

Chris: Somehow the technology also silences all the beep boops and has audio to create a new voice for you, and we just can’t hear the beep boops anymore.

Oren: Yeah, and if I occasionally want to do something just in beep boop for emphasis or as an idiom, it will know to let that through.

Bunny: Well, now you’ve gotta start punctuating your points with very loud beep boops.

Oren: Yeah, I will definitely remember to do that. We have a history of keeping our opening bits going like that. I think everyone can agree. So today we’re talking about language barriers in fiction and whether or not you should have them or not. Maybe you don’t want them, ’cause I’ve seen stories that have them and don’t handle them well. And then of course there’s the running joke of “everyone speaks Common.”

Chris: Somehow I miss this running joke, maybe ’cause I’m not on social media really.

Oren: It’s mostly a D&D joke. Common is the language everyone speaks by default in D&D for some reason.

Chris: Is it really called Common?

Oren: Common.

Chris: It comes from the country of Commlandia.

Oren: RPGs have it a little harder because they have to actually tell you what’s going on, whereas a lot of settings just don’t say anything, but if you look, you can still tell that the languages in the setting don’t make any sense. Like in Star Wars, everyone speaks Basic, except for, I guess, Hutts for some reason. There are two languages in Star Wars. No, three: there’s Hutt, Basic, and Wookie.

Bunny: And I guess droid, but everyone just… See, I feel like in Star Wars everyone just understands what everyone else is saying, and then the dialogue from the characters speaking in English convey to us what they have said.

Oren: Yeah, it’s real… They can all basically tell what their droids are saying. With Wookies it’s weird because Wookies have names that Wookies cannot pronounce. So it’s just the languages in Star Wars are just a mess. None of them… they don’t make any sense.

Chris: The Wookie thing is a metaphor for how people of other cultures are assimilated into the Basic culture.

Bunny: They’re all so basic.

Oren: I would accept that as an interesting explanation if Star Wars at all explored it. But it’s… Anyway, I understand why people don’t want to do language barriers, because if you’re not interested in them, they are a huge pain. Like they just get in the way, your characters can’t really do anything complicated if you have a bunch of language barriers and they can’t understand each other, so it’s just easier to be like, “No, everyone just speaks the same language. It’s fine, whatever.”

Chris: No, no, but there’s a solution to this. You just have the characters look into each other’s eyes, and then you could describe, “Well, he gave me a look as though he wanted me to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish while eating pretzels.” We know eye contact can communicate anything in fiction.

Bunny: That’s the real common.

Oren: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen magic hand gestures. Like, don’t get me wrong, hand gestures can communicate, and people have used them to communicate, but there’s a limit to how complicated information they can get across, especially in short periods of time that tend to be relevant in high-stakes fiction. Sure, if you have plenty of time and you don’t share a language, you could use gestures to arrange the sale of something, right? You could point to the thing and then point to the money, and you could work that out, right? That could take some time. But in a high-stress situation, are you going to be able to communicate “A flanking maneuver over the third ridge,” like, when you only have 30 seconds? Probably not. That’s just not going to work. And I’ve seen stories that do that because the author clearly just got tired of the language barrier. And at this point, I would rather there just not be one.

Chris: The essential problem is that at first a language barrier makes it feel real that people come from different cultures and adds realism. But as you continue, that gets old and it’s still in the way of the plot.

Oren: Yeah. Your mileage may vary on how much of this you tolerate. Chris and I were watching Ark, the animated series recently, and the premise of that show is that people get grabbed from across time and space and brought to the magical dino island, and so they speak different languages from wherever they’re from. That seemed like it was going to be realistic, and the first time we met a guy who didn’t, you know… The first person we met was from the United States, so he spoke English. Then we met a Roman guy who had recruited like a British scientist, so he had a reason to speak English. But pretty soon, everyone they meet just happens to speak English, except for one Finnish woman. She’s the only person on the entire island who doesn’t speak English.

Chris: The Finns famously cannot comprehend English in the slightest

Oren: And it’s like it just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for English to be the common language everyone speaks in the context of the show. It probably should have been Latin, ’cause that seems to be the biggest power block on the island, is from Rome. But instead it was English. And honestly, for me, I wish they had just said the island has a magical translation field rather than doing that, ’cause to me it just called attention to how silly it was. But it was also cool to see the multiple languages. So your mileage might vary there.

Chris: I wonder if there was… I don’t know much about the techniques using kind of visual media for this, but to do the premise where they are actually talking in Latin, but then still express it to the viewer in English. Because if we have a conqueror who speaks Latin, and we’d have a main character who speaks Latin, you could say that, well, everybody was forced to learn Latin. The main character already knows Latin, and then still have the occasional character who hasn’t managed to learn Latin and then use the language barriers there. It would just be easier in prose, because in prose you can just say they’re talking in Latin and express in English. It’s a little stranger when you’re watching something and hearing audio, because they’re obviously speaking English. And if the entire show takes place in another country, you can go with the premise that they’re all speaking another language, but when you have language barriers built into it, that’s a little weirder.

Bunny: What if they spoke English but with an accent?

Oren: With a Latin… What is a Latin accent in English?

Bunny: I don’t know. You put like eus at the end of most words.

Chris: I guess it’s a dead language, right? So we don’t know.

Bunny: Yeah, that’s true.

Oren: Maybe in Pig Latin. The character’s constantly talking “ex-nay on the upid-stay” sort of situation. But okay, so they could have done what Shogun does. Shogun, of course, is the poster child for integrating language barriers into the story, both the book and the show. In Shogun, Japanese is Japanese on screen. Portuguese is English on screen, and no one speaks English in the entire show. Technically, Blackthorn presumably can speak English, but he never does. So they could have done something like that, right? They could have had a character who is not an English speaker, but I don’t know, starts off speaking her own language, whatever that is, maybe she’s from… I don’t know, maybe she’s from China, she speaks Chinese, and then, when she gets to this island, we translate Latin as English, which is the one that everyone is speaking. I think that could have been done. The transition might be a little awkward, but I think we could manage it.

Bunny: Yeah, that would be one way to do that.

Oren: Speaking of Shogun, the way that Shogun uses its language barriers is, uh, first is it has translator characters and it works them into the plot. Having a translator character in a story where you’re not taking advantage of them is awkward because it basically means that your main character has to have an extra character with them all the time, and that can be logistically difficult. Protagonists tend to go through pretty high-stress situations in which an extra character may not fit.

Chris: Can I just say, though, that Mariko is a terrible translator?

Oren: But she’s so great for drama!

Chris: That’s just the funny thing, is that in a show, it would be a little different. Again, ’cause in prose you can handwave things that you can’t if you are watching, you know, film or watching a video where you have to see what’s happening. In prose, you could just be like, kind of summarize that somebody is translating it first. You can spell it out and then you can handwave it and just have the conversation happen with the assumption that there’s a translator there, but not really narrate all the translation. But in video we have a translator there who’s literally translating every line. And if she was actually a good translator, it would be really boring, because we’d basically be hearing, ’cause we can understand what the main character is saying. ’cause he’s, you know, it’s supposed to be Portuguese, but he’s speaking in English for us. And so then she would just say the same thing and it would just be really dull. So instead, she’s just this terrible translator who is always summarizing what he’s saying and always adding her own agenda.

Bunny: So for story purposes, never have a translator unless they’re a bad translator.

Chris: Well, it makes it interesting, and again, this is a person who doesn’t understand Japanese etiquette, so he says things he really shouldn’t say, and then she smooths it over, right? By paraphrasing or even changing what he says.

Oren: Yeah, which has given us a beautiful new meme format where you have Blackthorn say something like, “Tell Lord Toranaga that I currently run three podcasts,” and then Mariko translates that to, “The Anjin says he is unemployed.” I love it so much. It’s my favorite new meme format. And in most cases Mariko has pretty good reason when she is altering the translation. Not 100%, there are a few points where I wonder, “Mariko, why did you change that? That’s an odd change you made.”

Chris: There are also places where she’s actually called out for inserting her own agenda. So she’s not supposed to be a perfect person.

Oren: And there are also some instances, you see this more in the book, they had to cut some of this from the show for time, where Blackthorn’s translators are just straight up hostile to him. In the show you see the little bit of this where they call the Portuguese Catholics to translate for him and he doesn’t like them, so they translate what he’s saying badly or sometimes just make up stuff and claim he said it. Uh, so that also adds some drama. Shogun also takes place over a long enough period of time that Blackthorn can slowly begin to learn Japanese, whereas if your story takes place in a short period of time, the urge to have your character magically learn the language really fast is strong.

Chris: I’m also thinking, okay, what if you wanted a situation like Blackthorn and Mariko, where you can… the readers understand both of them? You’d probably need to use either omniscient or it would be from the translator’s perspective. So you’d have a character who’s like, “Oh gosh, this person who doesn’t understand our culture is constantly being rude to really powerful lords, and somehow I have to translate in a way that makes it better.”

Oren: I mean, a translator having to manage a rambunctious VIP sounds like a fun story. I’d read that.

Chris: That does!

Oren: I don’t know if it could support a novel, but by the same token, it doesn’t have to. Language barriers don’t have to be all or nothing. They can come up sometimes, so that could be like a thing they have to do for a little while and then the story advances.

Bunny: Right. I’ve noticed that, and this is unsurprising that in stories where the language barrier is handwaved away by a universal translator, the universal translator then breaks. And hence shenanigans.

Oren: Yeah, they like to do the occasional episodes where the translators break. That’s fine.

Chris: I do like reminders that, if we’re going to… if there is supposed to be a language barrier and it’s downplayed a lot, by using technology or something, I think it is nice to get reminders that people are actually speaking different languages, but I think it’s really hard to keep that consistent, because every time Star Trek, “Oh, the Universal Translator breaks,” it just feels very contrived when it works and when it doesn’t.

Oren: Yeah, especially since if you’ve stopped thinking about it for a second, most of the human characters would be speaking different languages. Like maybe they all learn multiple languages in school, just ‘cause. I suppose that’s possible.

Chris: But would Picard be speaking English, British English, or French?

Oren: No, we’ve established that Picard’s family are actually an émigré family from the UK and they live in a little enclave in France and refuse to learn French. That’s the backstory on the Picards. I do think that the Star Trek-style universal translator is similar to aliens with bumpy foreheads in that it’s something we let Star Trek get away with, but it would be pretty hokey to do that in your novel. I think you would want something a little more believable than that.

Chris: Yeah, if you have a really advanced space opera setting with really high technology levels and you want to just handwave language barriers, I don’t think that’s a terrible way to do that. I think you could just state it once and then not call attention to it again.

Oren: Yeah. That, maybe. I do think, if you want to try something that’s a little bit more immersive, we made fun of Common earlier, but the concept of a lingua franca. That is perfectly legitimate. You can definitely have a language that people learn as their second language for the purposes of communication. You just want it to make a little more sense than “every fantasy species has one language, and the human one is called Common.”

Chris: That’s a little funky.

Oren: Typically speaking, a lingua franca is going to be the language of some powerful group. And it can be as simple as whoever the most powerful state around is. Their language is the lingua franca, and maybe they even enforce learning it. That’s the thing that can happen. It can also be a state that is not militarily powerful, but has a lot of commerce. Arabic is a lingua franca and has been historically, because Arab traders went around all over the place, so speaking Arabic was a good way to talk to people you’d otherwise wouldn’t share a language with.

Chris: I do understand the impulse to call some language Common or Basic because, again, it’s avoiding adding one more word the readers have to memorize. But if you already have a powerful country, empire, or another well known name in your setting, then you can just potentially reuse that, as long as it sounds similar enough that people can guess, “Okay, that word is for the language that people in this place speak.” So people don’t have to learn, “Oh, what is that again? Oh, that’s the name of the language.” Especially since people don’t necessarily talk about the name of their languages that often, so it’s hard to remember.

Oren: First, you need to introduce the concept of a lingua franca and then explain that the lingua franca is not French. It used to be, but now it’s a different language.

Bunny: And Picard does not speak it.

Oren: And, of course, depending on the scope of your setting, you can probably just handwave it and say that whoever the main character runs into happens to speak whatever language they speak. That might get hard to believe if your character is going, you know, is well traveled and goes around a long way, but if your character stays relatively close to home, that’s fine. Even if they meet a foreigner, it’s reasonable that foreigner would know the language of the country they’re traveling in.

Chris: Yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do if your scope is smaller. Like the issue with the Ark show is, of course we’re taking everybody from around the world in all time periods and putting them together, which is a really difficult position to be in when it comes to language barriers. But if you just have a few travelers going to a different country where they speak a different language, then you can just be like, most of them learn it, or a few people are fluent, one person has it rough but can get by, and you’ll be okay. Or if they’re just going to one place, you can have a local pidgin that everybody uses that works well enough. It’s when you’re doing a lot of combined people from all over the place that it just gets hard.

Oren: Yeah. Oh, and also, I’m sure we should have mentioned this with the Ark thing. I’m sure there’s also a group of people who wouldn’t mind if most of the dialogue was in Latin with English subtitles. That would probably have reduced the show’s audience, so I suspect that’s why they didn’t do it.

Chris: I just think that would be hard for the all the voice actors.

Oren: Sure. But on the other hand, how many people know Latin and can tell they’re messing it up?

Bunny: You haven’t met the Philosophy Department.

Chris: Think of how hard it would be to memorize your lines if they were in a language you didn’t know.

Oren: They do it. They don’t do it at wellness.

Chris: I mean, I just don’t think that’s how you’re going to get the best acting.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: Philosophy is how I learned, through one of my philosophy professors who used to be a Classics professor and studied Latin, that philosophy pronounces the phrase prima facie wrong. It’s actually like prima fak-ye or something. So that’s a… prima facie is a good way to get Latin enthusiasts annoyed if ever the need arises.

Oren: Look, there are a lot of actual Latin pronunciations that sound pretty silly by modern English standards, and so we’ve massaged how we say that.

Bunny: I would just say that if we had to go with only actors who knew Latin, we wouldn’t get Michelle Yeoh in there. And that would be very sad.

Oren: That would be sad.

Bunny: Hey, maybe she secretly knows Latin.

Oren: She could. We don’t… we just don’t know.

Chris: Michelle Yeoh is really having a moment right now, I gotta say.

Oren: So let’s assume that you… instead of doing all that, you want to have bridging the language barrier be part of your story. A prime example of this is in the novel Hail Mary, where our protagonist meets an alien and has to figure out how to talk to him.

Chris: Yeah. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Oren: Yeah, that is real challenging. And Hail Mary manages it. It’s like decent, but it did at the time strike me as a little handwavy. Like they do a lot of work. He figures out some computer programs and assigns sounds to it and that’s neat. But it just… it did feel like he probably accomplished that much faster than he would actually be able to do it.

Chris: Yeah. I’m okay with a little fast forward. On something, I think for practical reasons, stories do that for all sorts of things. The training montage, for instance, whenever a character learns how to fight, they somehow do it really fast. And languages take so long to learn. I think a little fast forwarding, a little bit, is not going to throw too many readers out. But he really did put a lot of emphasis on it, and I think it did help that there was computer software that was programmed to do the translation for him also involved. Again, not perfect, but that’s probably, besides Arrival, that’s probably the most I’ve seen a story focus on translation. Arrival is neat because it has an actual linguist who actually has to figure out how to speak with aliens that, again, you can’t just translate, because it’s a completely new language. So even a universal translating program doesn’t have the ability. There’s no data. So she has to go meet these aliens and start working with them to develop a vocabulary. Um, and that’s also what happens in Project Hail Mary. It’s just… I don’t think she gets all the way there. I don’t think it needs her to get fluent with them in the same way that the main character has to get fluent with alien in Project Hail Mary.

Oren: Right. Like she doesn’t have to construct complicated engineering devices with these aliens. She does have to learn time travel though, so, but that’s like a function of the language apparently.

Chris: That’s… yeah, she just gets that as a bonus.

Oren: Yeah, strong bonus power.

Bunny: Yeah. The harder you think in the alien language, the more time travel you get.

Oren: One other thing with lingua francas I forgot to mention, which is that, especially in a sci-fi setting, you could probably manage it so that everyone speaks a constructed language. Space Esperanto. That’s more believable to me in a sci-fi setting than in a setting that’s more historical.

Chris: So here’s a question: if they had Space Esperanto, would they just call it Common or Basic?

Oren: They might call it Basic. Okay, I’m willing to believe they might call it Basic.

Bunny: They would call it Esperanto, no matter the context.

Chris: So maybe in Star Wars they’re just speaking Esperanto, which is called Basic.

Oren: If you go into the Extended Universe…

Bunny: Well, let’s not go into the Extended Universe.

Chris: Oh, no! What have I done? I have podcasted too greedily and too deep!

Oren: I do not remember what the origin of Basic is in the Star Wars Extended Universe.

Chris: Gosh, I remember our early podcast episodes, when Star Wars would come up, and then you and Mike would just go off onto long tangents about the Star Wars EU.

Oren: Let me tell you about the time Han Solo kidnapped Princess Leia and took her on a romantic vacation to rancor planet.

Chris: I had to interrupt and be like, “Let’s talk about Buffy now.”

Oren: Hmm, I think it’s time to talk about rancor planet, Chris. I’ve got an essay prepared.

Bunny: So, for the purposes of say, the odd person who might be writing their language barriers in written medium that does not have sound, do you think, and I think I know the answer to this, but do you think it’s ever worthwhile to write down the actual sounds that the other language is making, or do you think it should always be description? I don’t know, “She spoke something in a low voice.”

Oren: As opposed to writing the phonetic spelling?

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: I do have a couple articles on this, if you want to have a conlang in your story, for instance, but that’s where it tends to come up a lot, because people make their conlangs for their worlds and then they really want to show them off. Naming is usually the best place to do that. So you can name places or things like that after words in the language, but I think there are other things that are like repeated phrases, like greetings, for instance, a standard greeting or a standard goodbye. If you want to show that off, it’s a good place to do that. Things that are like repeated phrases that your readers can slowly learn. But just like a normal dialogue, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reason to do that.

Oren: Yeah. Especially ’cause this is not like a language that some of your readers might know, right? This is a made up language. No one reading this book will know it. And it’s just a very high barrier. And if you don’t know how to do conlangs really well, there’s a good chance it’s just going to come across as silly, so I’m not going to say there’s never a period where you might want to do more of that, maybe you are really good at con languages, in which case that could add some fun novelty to it, but the authors that I’ve worked with who’ve tried this have not been at that skill level and have honestly not been interested in committing the time to do it ’cause they just want to tell their story.

Chris: Yeah, I would think of using it for proper nouns, like place names, and then maybe you could teach your reader 10 words during the course of the whole novel. Something that’s just… really, you gotta set your ambitions a lot lower, and writing an entire dialogue line in a language the reader can’t understand just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just not going to be a good experience.

Bunny: Yeah. I will say I’ve seen the stunt quite poorly, where it feels like the character starts unlocking words because suddenly certain words are in English, but we’re meant to be understanding that they’ve just realized what those words mean, which is really awkward.

Chris: Speaking of which, we haven’t even talked about The 100, which is one of the more interesting uses of conlangs in a TV show, where the funny thing is, the characters have been in a space station since the apocalypse, and they come back down to Earth and they meet people who have been on Earth, and technically, it’s only supposed to have been 100 years, but every time they say that, I just plug my ears and go, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.” It’s ridiculous. So then they find that the people there have developed their own language called Trigedasleng. But they also speak English, because that would be too much for them to have the language barrier. But I have to say, I still like the language. During the course of the show, you learn a lot of words and then later, when they travel somewhere else, by that time, all the characters who used to be in space have learned this language, and now they can use it, so that the other people can’t understand them, which actually makes it useful in the plot, whereas it was never useful in the plot before.

Oren: It was so goofy, though, when they were talking to this guy and trying to understand his language, and then he just switches to English. What?

Chris: I mean, yeah, there’s multiple things here. Like how do they develop a language so fast? If they were going to develop a language so fast, how is it that they still know English? Yeah, that was interesting.

Oren: It’s cool later on, when they actually use it for something, but I don’t think that was worth the cost at the beginning, is my hot take. As opposed to my favorite language barrier that doesn’t make sense: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Chris: Yeah, Darmok and Jalad! Their arms open!

Oren: Where they all speak in memes. Nothing about that makes any sense, but I love it anyway, and therefore it’s perfect.

Chris: Shaka, when the walls fell. I’m probably getting all those words wrong, I don’t know Darmok very well.

Oren: Look, it’s fine. It’s a meme. What’s important is the meme, okay? That’s like… the fact that you speak in memes, you can also say things like, “Surprise white guy, his eyes blinking,” and there, now you’re in the spirit of things. Okay. Speaking of which, I think we are about out of time for this episode. So remember I’ve been speaking in droid bleeps this whole time, so if it sounded like English, it’s just ’cause that’s how great our translator is.

Chris: And if you would like, or to continue speaking in something that sounds like English instead of beeps, we need to keep that universal translator working. So consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

[Music]

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

We all love to exercise our imaginations in the infinite land of storytelling, but what if we can’t just do whatever we want? What if we were limited by things like our previous choices, poor special effects, or our inability to kill off a major villain? This week, we’re talking about the kind of constraints that stories get put under, from the famous movie examples you’ve probably heard of to the more mundane kind that we novelists have to deal with. Plus, how nice it feels when your next story isn’t under a bunch of constraints.

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Bunny: Bunny,

Chris: And:

Oren: Oren.

Chris: You know, I think this episode will be more successful if we meet some additional requirements, don’t you?

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: I mean, heck yeah.

Oren: They could be very logical and not at all arbitrary.

Bunny: What if we didn’t say the word “the?”

Chris: Great, great idea. Also, I should mention we have a sponsor, Wraith McBlade, attorney at law. And so we do have to mention Wraith McBlade three times during this episode and very naturally. Has to be worked in a conversation.

Oren: He’s a very real lawyer.

Bunny: I mean, with a name like that, I think you just walk in and they just hand you an attorney certificate.

Oren: He’s on the cutting edge of the law.

Chris: Ooh.

Bunny: Ouch. That cut me deeper than the Wraith McBlade did.

Chris: Also, I was thinking the Goddess of Podcast, Podcastia, absolutely has to be happy. And she doesn’t like it when we mention books or movies because that’s competing entertainment media so we better not do it.

Oren: It’s all right. I listened to a lot of audio dramas back in the day. I’m ready. I’ll complain about We’re Alive, the zombie audio drama.  No one alive today, ironically, remembers that show. But I’m ready. I’m ready to talk about it.

Bunny: I don’t wanna risk anything and then get smited, so maybe I’ll just be silent.

Chris: Alright, let’s go. This is gonna be a great episode. Sponsored by Wraith McBlade, attorney at law.

Oren: Very natural.

Chris: Very natural. Number one, down.  So anyway, talking about constraints and storytelling, firstly, why constraints? When I was thinking about this episode, I did not realize that Bunny loves constraints. [laughter] So we may have to do battle. But no, really, I wanted to talk about it, because in many cases it does feel like it’s the invisible force sabotaging your story and making your job hard, and you may not realize that it’s there.

Bunny: Yes, we’ve established pretty firmly that I’m the villain of this podcast, and even though I was reformed a couple weeks ago, I think this is my villain turn again.

Oren: So you’re just Sylar then?

Bunny: Yes, exactly. Because I do think constraints, I think they’re a net good, but Chris, elaborate.

Chris: So it’s not that constraints are necessarily, like any constraints are bad, but I do think that stories inherently have lots already. You know how to tell a good story; there are certain things that the story needs to do just to keep readers entertained, and so that already comes with a lot. And if you add tons more, then it just becomes a problem and you may not realize that you’ve, added constraints or how many. And I think new writers are especially vulnerable to this because they’re usually very ambitious and like to take on big challenges, but are also sensitive to feeling like failures because they don’t have lots of stories under their belt. Whereas a more experienced storyteller will realize, oh, this particular project is just really tough. When it’s your first project, you just assume that’s how it always is. And it means you’ve written yourself in a corner in some way.

So this is the reason why sequels and prequels, as a rule, are not as good as the original. They can be. They can, and sometimes even be better, but even in the best of conditions, if you were to average it out, I think you would always find that originals have an advantage over sequels because they just don’t have so many constraints that they’re working on.

Oren: I mean, you could say that the fundamentals and best practices of storytelling, or the rules of storytelling—spooky—are constraints, depending on how you wanna define the term. When I heard the topic, I assumed we were talking about constraints that are not for the purposes of making stories better, but you could say that having a throughline is a constraint. Because now you can’t tell a story that doesn’t have a throughline, if you’ve decided that your story needs a throughline, which it should.

Chris: Yeah. My point is mostly that storytelling is hard enough without adding additional requirements.

Bunny: I see. Okay. Maybe I was tracking…

Chris: …or prescriptions. We wanted rules, prescriptions. We are prescribing things like some prescriptivists.

Bunny: [jokingly] No, not the constructivists.

Oren: If you zoom out really far and someone doesn’t know what they wanna write a story about and they’re told to write something, and it can be about anything. Well, right now I have analysis paralysis, but usually by the time authors get to the stage where they’re seeking out our kind of writing advice, they at least have some concept of what they wanna write their story about. The alchemy of their brain has produced that set of constraints. But we do occasionally get people who are like, we have, I have no idea what I wanna write about, what should it be in? The only thing I can tell them is they have to go figure that out for themselves.

Bunny: I guess I was thinking about this more along the lines of what Oren mentioned, but as someone who does get analysis paralysis and blank page syndrome quite a bit, I think on the whole constraints can be quite helpful.

Chris: Yeah, certainly there are times when they provide writing prompts. For instance, a lot of the structures that I would call pseudo-structures that I don’t think actually provide good plotting advice; I do think that one of the reasons that people enjoy them is they give them ideas for what to do.

Oren: Yeah. I mean that they can be useful for that. The problem is that, again, they tend to either be so specific that they’re just counterproductive, or so vague that they’re not really restraining anything. They’re not really constraints at that point.

Chris: I don’t think the point though, is necessarily to constrain. I think it’s to give ideas. It gives something to start with.

Bunny: It might help a moment here to define constraint because I feel like we’re working with two different parallel, but both definitely constraint-y definitions. So one form of constraint is like you’ve written, this is the one you mentioned, Chris, you’ve written a story and now you have to write a sequel that the constraints are, you have to follow from the first one in a way that makes sense. But a different kind of constraint could be something like a production constraint, which, maybe it was more along the lines that I was thinking, like famously the shark animatronic in Jaws was a piece of crap. And then the director had to use it pretty sparsely, and then that ended up being good because it turned out using it that way ended up creating better feelings of tension and ominousness. And then another form of constraint could be bickering in the writer’s room, right?

So there’s a couple different types of constraint, and I feel like some of them might be medium specific. Like you probably won’t have bickering in the writer’s room if you’re not writing a TV show or a movie if you’re just sitting alone in your room. But yeah, maybe we need a little definition here.

Chris: I would think of constraint as any requirement that your story has to meet, and it can be imposed by you. So if you’re writing a sequel, for instance, a requirement would be you need the same main character. That main character has to be in the story after, in the timeline, after the previous story, for instance. That would be a constraint. If you have an animatronic that’s bad and you’re not supposed to show it, that certainly removes your options. And I think that’s what constraints largely do, and that’s a situation where I think it’s really rewarding for somebody to come up with a good solution to a problem that they have. Okay, I can’t show this shark, right? And here I did something clever, and that’s really rewarding. At the same time, we don’t necessarily know that if the effect had looked better that would’ve been worse.

Bunny: That’s true. However, consider the million Jaws knockoffs that slap the shark across the screen like it’s a dead tuna.

Chris: But this is one instance and I think that a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction over, hey, I had all of these constraints I had to work with and look what I came up with. And that’s a really satisfying thing to do. But in many of those scenarios it may not turn out better.

Oren: And there’s a certain amount of survivorship bias when we’re talking about production constraints because we tend to hear about the ones that turned out well, because those are the ones the creators wanna talk about.

Bunny: That’s fair.

Oren: We hear about the shark one. We hear about the cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Because the human cylons was not part of the initial conception of the 2004 reboot of that show. That was something that they did pretty late in production because they realized that having robot cylons on screen all the time would be really expensive and look bad. So they were like, aha, there could be human cylons, and that was pretty cool. But also they didn’t have any idea what was going on with that. And so it turned out when they told us they had a plan, that was just a lie. Because by, by the end, it was just like, why are there human cylons? [mumbles] I don’t know, God maybe.

Chris: [ominously] There’s cylons, they have a plan. Hear that every episode. It’s like, they don’t have a plan.

Oren: Then you also hear about it with the new thing people love to talk about is the constraints of practical effects make the movie look better. And I’m not really convinced that’s true. I think it’s that special effects are cheaper. And so you get, you know, there’s this idea that you can do anything with CGI. I should say now special effects, that’s too broad, but you can do anything with computer animation and that’s something studios want you to believe because it’s much cheaper to do it that way. But as a result, it ends up not looking as good as if you had used more expensive practical effects.

Chris: I’ll say, here’s a couple examples of where constraints are really helpful. And not that you necessarily couldn’t go without them, but that you have to use much better judgment. ‘when we’re talking about, for instance, point of view. One of the reasons we’re really critical of multiple points of view is because having a single point of view is a constraint that is usually very helpful because it encourages good practices. It encourages you to keep things focused on your main character and keep your plot tight, and not jump around and fragment your plot all over the place. So that does mean less freedom. And you can use multiple POVs to great effect, but it comes with a lot more judgment calls. You have to be more disciplined.

Same with having a limited point of view versus omniscient. If you’re using a limited point of view, that just sticks in the character’s head and you can only write what that character knows and their perspective. Again, it, it encourages you to stay focused on them and stay focused on the story and not go into diatribes. And so that’s a constraint that is really helpful and helps you make good choices. Whereas, once you’re writing an omniscient perspective and you’ve got a narrator who knows everything and could tell the reader about literally anything, at that point, you have to make more judgment calls. You know that [dramatically] freedom and power comes with responsibility. So yeah, in those cases, I would call those in many cases good constraints. Not constraints you’d want for every story, but helpful.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s interesting looking at which types of story give you constraints in exchange for something, because a sequel, for example, is going to have some constraints. You’re going to need to address whatever happened in the first one, or leave a really unsatisfying story, I guess you could just not address it. And you’re going to need to work with the same characters and stuff like that. But as a trade off, you get more attachment because the readers or the audience has been with these characters for longer. You can build a more complicated story than you could in just one installment, so you can build up to an even more satisfying ending. So you have lots of benefits there as well. Now, some stories will impose so many constraints that the sequel is basically impossible, but on the whole, sequels can work decently, especially if this original story was set up with sequels in mind. Prequels… [laughter]

Bunny: I was like, when is this coming? If he doesn’t mention it, then I am jumping on this one.  

Oren: We gotta talk about prequels, because prequels have even more constraints. And few, I would argue none, of the benefits in most cases.

Bunny: Yeah. I think a world without prequels would not be a worse timeline than the one we’re in.

Oren: Yeah. It’s not that there are zero good prequels, but I’m not sure I can think of any stories that were better for being prequels.

Chris: I think the reason to do prequels is because you’ve already exhausted all the potential storylines in the sequels, but you wanna tell another story about the same characters.

Oren: Yeah. Or not even the same character. Sometimes it’s just a different character who we saw once in a frame somewhere and it’s like, hey.

Chris: That’s not really a reason to do a prequel. [she laughs] They will do it, but at that point you might as well just use the same world and setting with a completely different character that hasn’t appeared.

Bunny: Look, you two can stop dancing around it and just say money. [laughter]

Chris: Yes. The benefit of prequels is money. You got the constraint, which is that the story is awful, but the benefit is money.

Bunny: That’s the trade off.

Oren: It’s sometimes money. Although, I’m not sure it’s always money. Some of these projects really look like passion projects. I could be wrong. Maybe Miller thought that Furiosa was gonna make him a ton of money. I don’t know. But from the general reporting I saw around this movie, it just really felt like this was a thing he wanted to exist.

Chris: But didn’t he make it in conjunction with Fury Road originally?

Oren: Yes. 

Chris: Right, so I don’t know. Did he make it as a prequel or did he make the story about Furiosa and then write Fury Road, and then end up making Fury Road first?

Oren: As far as I can tell, Fury Road did come first, but this was made at about the same time. It’s not really clear which script they wrote first, but I think it was Fury Road. But some version of the script for Furiosa existed while they were filming Fury Road. Charlise Theran, excuse me, Charlize Theron, yeah— is on the record saying that she looked at the script for Furiosa for inspiration on how to play her character and a deeper understanding of her character, which suggests to me that either A, uh, she’s a bit of a fibber, or B, the script has changed at some point because I don’t know what insight we were supposed to get on Furiosa from watching the movie Furiosa other than some of the things they suggested happened, happened, I guess?

Chris: Maybe she looked at it for insight on her character, but she didn’t actually get any. [laughter]

Bunny: That could be.

Chris: Then she glossed it over for a press meeting.

Bunny: It’s not a lie, it’s misleading.

Chris: I did look at it for inspiration and insight.

Oren: It’s really weird that Furiosa— the one thing about Fury Road that suggests a prequel, and I’m not saying this would’ve been a good idea, but it does suggest one, is that Furiosa talks about needing to atone. So that kind of raises the question, atone for what? And according to  Furiosa the movie, the answer is nothing.

Bunny: Well, yeah, I feel like this project was, I mean, I still think it’s like… To be clear, I liked the movie, but I think it was also kind of doomed from the start by the fact that we understand from the original that she’s done bad things.

Oren: Hang on, hang on. I should put a spoiler here for the movie Furiosa. I forgot to do that. [he laughs]

Bunny: Oh, that’s right. Yes. [sing-song] Spoilers.

Oren: I haven’t actually given anything away, I just mentioned a thing that didn’t happen. Okay. So we’re good.

Bunny: So we’re continue knowing this is spoiling Furiosa, but yeah. We don’t do see her do anything truly morally reprehensible, like she killed Dementus, but we already knew that was going to happen, or she planted him in her tree.

Oren: I don’t quite know what to make of that. Yeah, that was just, okay, I guess that happened. Maybe. It’s not actually clear if it’s supposed to have happened! It was a little too cartoonish for this world that they’d set up.

Chris: So I think it’s worth talking about—okay. It’s beyond… We can talk more about prequels and sequels. There are plenty of things that can be dissected there, but it’s worth talking about what imposes tons of constraints besides that, because that’s not the only one. One thing is a work that you are adapting. Any adaptation is dealing with all of the constraints of the original, depending on how faithful it stays is original. In some movies that are adapting books, for instance, if you’re adapting a whole novel into a movie, it’s actually a much shorter story. So you have to take some level of liberties. I think we saw Mortal Engines that was trying to stick very closely to the book; did not work out. Yeah, that one can be a big one.

I’m just having finished a retelling of a fairytale. I will say that now that I am plotting a novel that is not an adaptation, because I did stick fairly close to the original fairytale, it’s amazing how much easier it is to plot than when I was doing an adaptation and trying to figure out how to stay close to the original fairytale while actually making it work as a plot. Because fairytales, they’re usually summarized, and that makes a huge difference. You don’t really have to have engaging conflicts, and a lot of those things don’t work as well when you expand them. Or some future cool scenes that you are want to add that you first dreamed up and you haven’t added yet. Those can, again, kind of like the prequel effect. There are some premises we can talk about that inherently hem people in a lot, and are just hard to pull off.

Bunny: I have suffered from this, I must say. As much as I think constraints can spur creativity, I have been trapped in a locked room with ideas that I want to carry out and cannot figure out how to get to.

Chris: Is this something you haven’t written yet?

Bunny: Yes and no. It’s something that I’ve plotted, but that I spent a long time banging my head against because of part of this. Okay, so this was the thesis I wrote as part of my senior project, and I wanted a twist at the end. Spoilers, but maybe I’ll change this. I wanted this reveal that there’s been a spooky cult essentially. And as this is a mystery and a speculative fiction, I feel like I can lay the groundwork of there being spooky, supernatural things. But some of my readers were like, oh, this seems like a story about the relationship between these two characters. And then suddenly spooky cult comes outta nowhere. Now granted, this was just them reading my outline and being like, that seems contrary to the rest of the story. But looking at it, I’m like, okay, I can see why this slow burn mystery suddenly having this flipped switch into this cult plotline. I can see why that would feel strange and like I hadn’t set it up properly. So it’s partially a question of setup and partially a question of whether it’s the type of story where that sort of reveal would feel satisfying.

Chris: Yeah. Any storyline that relies a lot on withholding information or secrecy or has a big twist, those generally come with more constraints, because if you’re trying to withhold information, you have to figure out how to plot the story without revealing things. And that can become a problem if, for instance, that information is needed for a good story, but you also want it to be a twist. Or a lot of twists and reveals, they rely on a double interpretation, right? So you have to look at it before the reveal and be like, okay, I’m looking at X. And then after the reveal, you have to go back and think back on it and be like oh, that was really Y. And what that means is when you’re writing it, it has to fit the requirements of both X and Y. Or like stories where, this could be, this magic is real, or it could be imaginary.

Bunny: Oh, I also caught that issue with that same thesis. [laughter] It’s ambiguity. I want ambiguity in the room for spiritualism, but also…

Chris: Any time you add an interpretation because you’re doing a reveal or you want ambiguity, you have to then extremely carefully maneuver everything so it can be interpreted in multiple ways. That adds a lot of constraints to the project. Or just antagonists that are just misunderstood, and aren’t actually bad. Those ones… I have written some plots where people just needed to work it out, and there’s always so much harder because I just can’t have an antagonist that’s really malicious. That means they can’t do a lot of the things that they would normally do to create tension in this story. And it becomes so much harder to plot. Anything where the plot is spoiled if two people just talk to each other is the worst.

Or you can have characters that are too powerful, I think is another one that makes the premise hard. You know, a powerful ally that you have to constantly keep them away, or a villain that you have to constantly come with reasons they don’t squash the protagonists, or worse yet puppeteers and string pullers where oh look, now I have to make it so all of these events could be masterminded by some character. Those are all things that just make the whole process of plotting have to fit additional requirements. That makes it hard.

Oren: Yeah. You can do the same thing with any villain you want to do a redemption arc on. Assuming that you want the redemption arc to be satisfying, you’re now operating under constraints. Because you can’t have them do anything too bad, because if they cross the moral event horizon, that’s just gonna be upsetting if you try to redeem them at that point.

Chris: Yeah. How many times can I have them just toss people to the side? And then just have them roll. I trying to remember what show we saw where they were just throwing people off of buildings and being like, no, really, they’re okay.

Oren: Everything’s fine. They’re fine.

Bunny: Don’t worry about it. They’re all rubber people made of rubber.

Chris: Okay, but here’s the big one actually, as far as constraints that we work with all the time, is your existing draft.

Bunny: [dramatically] Noooo!

Chris: Your existing draft that you were revising. [she laughs]

Bunny: My enemy.

Chris: But this is a big deal for if you’re working on a big project for a number of years and you get better as you go, but you made your entire, like all the ideas from your story and how you constructed it and all the events, you made those when you knew nothing, oftentimes, or you knew less than you do now, but you are attached to all of it. And you’re trying to make it work, and you’re trying to make the story better while changing as little as possible. That’s a huge one and it can be really crushing. And again, if this is this first work you’ve worked on, you don’t realize just how crushing it is.

Bunny: It’s also, again, speaking from experience, really hard to go back to old projects that you were once super duper into, but knew way less about. You can just feel like it’s better to cut that one loose than it is to edit it.

Oren: That’s the reality of most of the clients I’m working with, is that’s one of the reasons why I spend so much time asking them questions and getting their buy-in; because you can give someone the best recommendations in the world to improve their story, and if they’re not able to make those changes, then that’s all useless. A large part of what I work on is, what changes can we make to improve this? And at the very least, what lessons can I teach you so that you’ll know better next time? It happens all the time.

Chris: So I, I think that this episode wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t at least mention the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Bunny: You knew it was coming.

Chris: I mean, everybody of course has ranted about them, but this really is just the epitome of how constraints can sink something. Not that the directors were making great choices on their own, but there was no way for that third movie to be good. It was impossible.

Oren: Yeah, by the time you get to the end of the Force Awakens and it’s like this isn’t a great place for to start a second movie. It does not open well, and then you get the Last Jedi, which is just, I’m taking my ball and going home, I don’t want to deal with any of the things that were in the last movie, and then you get Rise of Skywalker, which at that point I don’t know how to fix Rise of Skywalker. Given the constraints of the previous two films, I’m not sure it can be done now. Obviously that movie also takes its ball and goes home even harder. [laughter]

Bunny: Goes home with a vengeance for sure.

Chris: The biggest constraints, the biggest problems that it was put under, was the fact that the villains had been completely destroyed, and then Rey had then been given powers.

Oren: Yeah, she has more powers now, but her powers were super vague.

Bunny: She makes rocks float.

Oren: The villain thing is the biggest constraint. The villains have been all destroyed, but also so have the good guys, like the Resistance is completely gone. What are we supposed to do with that?

Chris: Because usually each story in a series is going to increase the scope to make things more epic than before, and at least definitely in a series like Star Wars, that’s what people expect. You would have a big Starship battle. But if you’ve destroyed all of your starship fleets,  that’s hard to do.

Bunny: But Chris, you could just raise some up out of the water, fully crewed.

Chris: [laughs] Yes, you could do that. Which is, if you’ve ever seen, oh, there’s a big time jump right in between seasons of a show, especially, one of the biggest reasons that people do that is to give things a soft reboot to try to get rid of constraints. Because if we just made it so, okay, five years passed, now more things could have happened in between that time and it feels more realistic to change up things more. If the last Star Wars sequel film took place 20 years later, then it’s more realistic for them to have fleets again.

Oren: Yeah. But no, instead everything’s fine. We’re back. Don’t worry about it.

Bunny: And they did that. They did jump forward for the Last Jedi. Oh, wait.

Oren: The Force Awakens?

Bunny: Yes. That one jumps ahead to an identical scenario, which is about the most disappointing thing you could do with a time jump.

Oren: The Force Awakens was definitely the least constrained of them other than constrained by the fact that its director just seems to want to have done Star Wars again. But even it was under some constraints. It was clear that people wanted the original characters, but also clear that the original characters could not convincingly do a Star Wars movie because they’re all much older now. So that was the biggest constraint that the first film was working under. And that’s a challenge in its own right. And then it decided to just do A New Hope again. Because why not?

Chris: I do think though, that as we’re talking about the sequels. We should probably praise Obi-wan the show. It’s not a perfect show, but it’s a mid-quel. And considering the fact that it’s a mid-quel, I think they did a really good job. Yes, if you watch A New Hope, you’re not gonna believe that Leia and Obi-wan have ever met before.

Oren: Not only met, but gone on this bonding adventure. It’s like, no, that is, that did— no.  There’s no way that happened in the New Hope timeline.

Chris: But honestly, that’s the kind of minimum thing that they could do, is to fill in things that we didn’t believe were there, but at least aren’t directly contradicting really huge parts of the setting and storyline.

Oren: Yeah. Obi-wan being as good as it was is frankly a miracle. I was really not optimistic when I heard the premise.

Bunny: I noticed that neither of you have mentioned our sponsor since the beginning of the show, which was one of the stated constraints.

Oren:  Call now, Wraith McBlade, good legal advice.

Chris: Yeah. If you’d like to save us from Wraith McBlade, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want thank a few of our existing patrons, which is technically a constraint. We do have that in our Patreon rewards, but we like to do it, so it’s not really a constraint. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. 

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

Have you ever wondered what it was all about, maaaaaaan? A lot of writers have, and they love to put such philosophizing in their work. When it works, we get The Good Place. When it doesn’t, we get weird interlude chapters that exist for no purpose but to lecture us. This week, we’re talking about how to get closer to the former rather than the latter. That means a discussion of moral dilemmas, what certain philosophers said, and something called “gothstatic wronging.” Or maybe it was “dogtastic wronging.” The world may never know.