Delicious food, spacious housing, and a supportive partner: what do they all have in common? They’re all forms of wish fulfillment, and that’s our topic today! Wish fulfillment is an important element of storytelling that rarely gets talked about, and when it is brought up, it’s almost always in a negative context. There are reasons for that, but the idea is so much more than its worst examples. Listen on for a discussion on how wish fulfillment works, the best ways to add it, and why it should come in the form of cats.

Show Notes

• Why the Term Mary Sue Should be Retired 
• Candy and Spinach 
• The Room 
• The Name of the Wind 
• The Raksura 
• Pride and Prejudice 
• Animal Companions
• Morwen’s Cats
• Legends and Lattes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is:

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: And:

Chris: Chris. 

Oren: We don’t actually have a topic today. We’re just gonna talk about airships and Discworld and why oppressed mages are bad, and all of my wishes will be fulfilled. 

Bunny: Well, I’m sold. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s basically the same as having an episode, right?

Bunny: Yeah. A+ episode design. Would listen, would talk again. [laughter]

Oren: So we’re talking about wish fulfillment, which is not a term that we coined or anything, but it does feel like we might be one of the few sites that talk about it in any depth.

Chris: Or in a positive way, in some cases.

Oren: It is really commonly derided, and I understand why to a certain extent. It is often associated with various forms of garbage-ness, often touching on various systemic injustices, but it’s not inherently bad and it’s very useful.

Chris: It is sad how many people are just like, oh, enjoyment bad, entertainment, bad. Liking things in your story is bad. It is like, what do you think we’re doing this for?

Bunny: Are you having fun? Stop that.

Chris: Yes, we can give people meaningful or quote unquote “challenging” experiences, but if we don’t do anything else…

Bunny: Silly Chris, you know you can’t be challenged if you’re also having a good time.

Oren: God forbid anyone enjoy a story with a deep point to make. That would be weird and wrong.

Chris: Everybody knows the level of enjoyment is subtracted from the message. They have an inverse relationship.

Oren: So now that we’ve established where we stand philosophically, what is wish fulfillment? This is something that we probably should define at least a little bit, and the way that I think of it is that it’s something that the audience wishes they could have for themselves on various levels. You do sometimes get some wish fulfillment that is a thing that sounds nice, but maybe you wouldn’t actually want it in real life if it happened.

Chris: I think a good example of that is love triangles. It is wish fulfillment to have these two dreamy guys are lusting after me and they want to be in a romance with me, and I want to be in a romance with them. Oh, what will I do? But in reality, that was probably gonna be a pretty stressful situation. I would consider wish fulfillment to be pleasure gained by living vicariously through a protagonist. The reason why I would specify you’re living vicariously through a protagonist, because I do think that the protagonist matters in this, so if you have various characters and one character is just like a jerk, and that character gets lots of cool stuff, you not generally get the same enjoyment from that.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Whereas definitely with some of these stories, there is a sense of if the audience strongly identifies with a character or at a lesser extent relates to them or is just attached to them, then I do think wish fulfillment becomes more effective.

Oren: Yeah, it’s certainly harder to have wish fulfillment through the villain. Not impossible, but it’s usually gonna be through the main character or maybe a major side character. And the famous ones that you’ve heard of are definitely things like food porn or having a really hot significant other, that sort of thing. But they also can include having a nice house or solving a systemic problem. Things that are fantasies people have in real life.

Bunny: When I was younger, I had a very particular – like if you read through the stories I wrote when I was young, you will notice this because it was a plot point in just about every one of them. I think it’s bound to be wish fulfillment, even though it’s something that I wouldn’t want to happen to me, which is a heroine sacrificing herself for a cause, and then everyone weeps over her, and then she gets brought back to life. I would not want that to happen to me in real life. That sounds very PTSD-inducing, but it was definitely wish fulfillment for me.

Oren: But what if there were no negative consequences? What if psychologically everything was fine? [laughter]

Chris: That’s a big example of candy. Candy is definitely wish fulfillment. Just to catch people up if you’re one of the few people who is new to this podcast, instead of having listened for a while, we’ve talked about candy and spinach as far as characters go, but candy is basically anything in the story that is designed to glorify a character in some way. And it’s often very powerful as a form of wish fulfillment, which is why people like it, and one of the reasons that people use it a lot and overuse it. This is why I think it’s important to think of it as living vicariously through the protagonist, because with candy, if you are attached enough to the protagonist and if you identify with the protagonist enough, the candy is great and it’s great wish fulfillment, and it’s very fun. But if you are not, then it absolutely backfires and destroys your attachment to a character.

Usually it’s that dynamic, but definitely a character dying [laughter] and having everybody gather around and weep about them because that’s just like a lot of praise. That’s a lot of social recognition, which is, I think, really powerful wish fulfillment. And yes, the character is technically dead or temporarily dead, as the case may be.

Bunny: It is temporary. You, you have to have her come back so she can like invent democracy or something. I think one of my protagonists literally did do that. 

Chris: But sometimes these wish fulfillment characters, they do just die so that people can weep over them. Sometimes it’s like in The Room. [laughter] Okay. Just like in the movie The Room, the whole setup there is that people wrong him and then he dies as a result, and then everybody’s so sorry.  He really showed them.

Oren: The whole ‘character fake dies or pretends to die or whatever so there can be a funeral where everyone says how cool they were,’ that plot device shows up in both Voyager and Babylon Five. And I used it back in my early explanation of why we call some characters Mary Sues and others not. But both of those are just these super candied captains whose candy includes having all of their subordinates think they’re dead and gush about how great they are.

Bunny: Oh man, it’s so insufferable on Voyager. If you love Janeway, maybe you’ll enjoy that scene.

Oren: I also hated it on Babylon Five. If you identify with one of those characters, that scene could be fun for you. But otherwise, this feels weird. I don’t like this.

Bunny: Obnoxious. Wish fulfillment is legally distinct from candy, right? 

Chris: Wish candy would be a type of wish fulfillment. It’s much more specific. We’re talking about specifically anything in the story that glorifies the character, and when I talk about candy, it can include traits of the character, like this character has blue hair and violet eyes and is really attractive and is the best at everything immediately. Those would all be forms of candy, but it’s really about what the author’s choices are. There’s a big difference between a character where, yeah, that character technically has blue hair and violet eyes and is skilled, but the story puts very little emphasis on it. The story instead focuses on where that character is lacking. They have all these skills, but the one skill that’s important to the plot, the character doesn’t have that and their face is constantly being rubbed in that. That’s very different from a narrative where the character has all the skills and the narrator is just constantly being like, oh yeah.

This is what happens in The Name of the Wind with Kvothe where other characters show up just to be like, oh wow, Kvothe, you’re amazing. A guy shows up to the end be like, oh, you are that singer. You have the best voice in the entire world. I wanted to cry. It’s the amount of emphasis that the author puts in validating that character and glorifying that character in the narrative.

Oren: But you can also have wish fulfillment that is not directly part of the character and that’s the classic. Really good well-described food is the classic wish fulfillment because we all love food. It’s a thing. People like it. Most people don’t have the time to have lots of really nice home cooked meals.

Chris: RIP. Redwall feast bod.

Oren: Yeah. That’s a thing that a lot of us wish we could have more of. And maybe it’s less effective for billionaires with personal chefs for every meal. I don’t know. That’s not a demographic I’m very familiar with.

Chris: I’m reminded of Martha Wells’ Raksura books, where in the second book there’s like the whole beginning is all the characters who are in this, you could call it the clan, in this group, going back to their ancestral home, which has just been waiting open for them. Even though they left it, nobody’s taken it, and it’s a giant mountain tree, but they live inside and it’s so perfect for them because apparently their ancestors magically grew the tree to their own specifications just to be their house. And it’s giant and has all the things that they ever want.  And since they left, it’s just been left open waiting for them. And all they have to do is go back in. And that’s definitely there for wish fulfillment purposes.

Oren: And there were plot reasons they left. I promise there were plot reasons. They totally make sense. Shut up. [laughter]

Bunny: So I’m curious about wish fulfillment in angst. I was thinking about this and it does seem like angsting can be a form of wish fulfillment, and I think people love brooding heroes, and I think part of that is because they’re brooding over important things and not like, taxes. I do think that angst, even though in and of itself it’s quite negative, you don’t want to be in a situation where you have a lot of angst. We do have heroes where it seems like the angst is part of the appeal.

Chris: There can be a difference between, hey, I think angsty boys  are attractive, and I want to be in a situation where I’m angsting, and that can be a hard distinction to make. But there are definitely some situations like, for instance, the character that is right, but everybody doubts them so they can be vindicated later; in which they face a lot of obstacles, but it’s like those obstacles are designed to validate them in the end, like from The Room. Some characters may angst as a form of almost showing how moral they are, because doing this thing that’s… They were forced to do something unethical and it just hurt them so much, so therefore they must be a really good person. I guess I would consider wish fulfillment to be mostly kind of focused on positive experiences and positive anticipation. You can get anticipation for wish fulfillment, just like you could get anticipation for tension, which would be like negative anticipation because you’re anticipating whether something bad would happen. But wish fulfillment can also be, you are looking forward to good and fun things happening. And I think that happens a lot actually. 

Romances lean a lot on wish fulfillment. Just, there’s a huge variety and they work in many ways and engage in many ways. And one, it’s the kind of Cinderella romance, where oftentimes it’s not really so much about the chemistry between Cinderella and the Prince, for instance. He’s barely a character. It’s about all the cool stuff that comes with marrying the Prince. And Pride and Prejudice absolutely does this. In the beginning we don’t know Darcy barely at all. And we don’t really have that much reason to really be attached to him as a character, really be invested in his relationship with Lizzie, just because we don’t actually know him that well yet. But when he like walks in, we establish that he’s like good looking and he’s very rich, and the fact that he looks down on everybody means that it’s great wish fulfillment if he then falls for Lizzie, because he didn’t like anybody else.

Oren: I’d also point out that there is another thing that, at least in the BBC movie version that I watched, is that Lizzie also looks down on everybody, just not as hostilely as he does. Lizzie is definitely portrayed as the smart one in this town and so there’s a certain amount of connection where that’s one smart person to another. I’m not sure how much that figures into it, but I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

Chris; Although it is really funny in Pride and Prejudice because Elizabeth basically falls in love with Darcy’s house.

Oren: That was a thing. [laughs] That’s her wish fulfillment.

Chris: She goes and like tours his home and it was like, wow, this is some really hot mansion you got here. Some really steamy grounds. These gardens. [laughter]

Oren: He’s got huge tracts of land, as it were.

Chris: And it’s funny because canonically, that makes a difference to her, but it’s also a way of emphasizing the wish fulfillment of marrying Darcy.

Oren: I do briefly wanna return to the question of angst based on the way I have seen people describe certain YA stories in particular, and I’m not a psychologist. I cannot guess at what the mechanism behind this is. But it does feel like there is, at least for some people, a certain amount of wish fulfillment in a story that takes their big feelings seriously and is like, yeah, actually your big feelings are really important. Now, that doesn’t have much appeal to me because I spend a lot of my life trying to avoid depression, so I don’t really want big feelings. But different people are at different stages in their life, and that at least seems to be an appeal that some of these really angsty stories have. That is just me going off of what various people have said. It’s not a phenomena I understand well enough that I would recommend an author try to duplicate it.

Chris: That seems reasonable, though.

Oren: That at least is a thing that I have seen people talk about. So just on the angle of different things can be wish fulfillment to different people… But there are some things that are gonna have a broader appeal that I think are worth talking about. Things like a nice house. There’s an unfortunate number of people for whom that is very effective wish fulfillment.

Chris: I think rare and cool pets, especially in speculative fiction. All those fantasy books where people get an animal companion that they have a psychic link with –

Bunny: We all have animal companions.

Chris: – So that we don’t have to deal with our animal companion jumping on the counter all the time. You can just talk to it and reason with it.

Oren: It’s still an animal. In my experience, once it starts to become a person, the wish fulfillment fades, but you could still kind of get it to do things like it was a person that, with an animal, I guess maybe aside from a really well-trained dog, that wouldn’t work. You can’t just tell your pet to do stuff most of the time.

Chris: Well, if you have, again, if it’s a character, it can still sometimes be like, for instance, in Eragon. He’s mentally linked to a dragon and she can talk, but at the same time he still has a cool dragon he rides.

Bunny: I think that’s also true of Morwyn’s cats in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. They’re often snarky little jerks, but in quite a fun way, and they’re cats and they hop around and help with stuff.

Oren: That makes sense. I do love having magical cats, so you know, I’ll take that. I’ve also found that having supportive friends can be a good one, and I don’t even know if this has to do with whether or not you have supportive friends in real life. I don’t know. I find that to be pretty wish fulfillment-ty and I’m not lacking in friends. Humble brag. But maybe it would mean more to someone whose friends group isn’t great, but it seems to have a pretty broad appeal in general, finding people who want to help you with your dream or whatever. That seems to be pretty big.

Chris: I know a lot of people are very attracted to the found family feeling and getting that kind of support.

Oren: There is, to a certain extent, an aspect of these people are going to put a lot of work into what I want instead of necessarily what they want. Or just coincidentally it happens to be the same thing. That’s certainly the friends in Legends and Lattes, who are a lot more focused on the same goal that Viv has than most friends in real life who have their own pesky ideas about what they want. Rude.

Chris: I will say sometimes the characters in Legends and Lattes really feel like they’re like an entrepreneur’s wish fulfillment. I need the perfect employee that, like, doesn’t want much money and does amazing work and will never leave and I don’t have to train ’cause they already know how to do their job perfectly. Like Baking Rat.

Oren: Magical baking rat is a lot. [laughter]

Bunny: But the wish fulfillment croissants, though.

Oren: Those are, I think, officially rated for adults only. I don’t think kids should be reading about that. It’s too steamy.

Bunny: There is a line about how the succubus character gets hot over the croissants or something.

Oren: Oh goodness.

Chris: In my opinion, wish fulfillment can go in any story, but it does tend to go very well with lighter stories. I think it’s because it focuses on more positive things, so it just has more kind of overlap with a light story like Legends and Lattes, where there’s problems in setting up this business, but also a lot of the pull is the fact that we get to do all the fun parts of starting and running a coffee shop without any of the actual hard parts.

Oren: Jobs can be a good form of wish fulfillment in my experience. Just money on its own isn’t great wish fulfillment ’cause it’s too abstract, but a really cool job where you get paid money to do great – like fun, creative things. That is definitely a form of wish fulfillment.

Chris: I do think money can definitely play in. You wanna translate it to what’s tangible, but if you have a character that levels up in anyway, so there are lots of stories that are like rags to riches that talk about, okay, character does this and then makes a little money and then they take some money and put it into the next thing. And then they start a bigger business venture and then you show them go up in the world, for instance. That would definitely involve some wish fulfillment.

Oren: Yeah, I have read LitRPG. [laughter] Kind of wish I hadn’t, but I have.

Bunny: I think wish fulfillment can also be just part of the story’s context as well. So it’s pretty wish fulfillment for me to read a story that’s in a setting without much bigotry, like a pretty egalitarian setting.

Chris: I should mention that the prequel to Legends and Lattes –

Bunny: Bookshops and Bone Dust.

Chris: – Definitely involves some author wish fulfillment that’s in getting people to read books.  Because the bookshop, honestly, is often not that important. It’s not nearly as essential as the coffee shop is in Legends and Lattes. But the character who runs the bookshop asks people questions, and then always finds the perfect book that they love and just gets people to read. And as an author, I can imagine how attractive that wish fulfillment would be. [she laughs]

Oren: Buy my book.

Chris: Can you please buy my books?

Bunny: Is there any commentary about how people are spending too much time reading the news bulletins and they have no attention span anymore? [laughter]

Chris: Thankfully, the author is not particularly grumpy about current times. It is funny though, because he does do the thing that a lot of people do, where when they talk about novels and novel writing in an abstract way, they get way more like literary and romantic in their language, and it’s just very weird. It’s like, you know what you’re writing, right? This is not the type of books you write. It’s very funny.

Oren: It’s like, well, this is not the kind of book that people like that would enjoy. Who is this part for, exactly? We’ve talked about what is wish fulfillment. I think we should now talk about when is wish fulfillment. ’cause if you spend too much time on wish fulfillment, sure you’re gonna get the people who that wish fulfillment really speaks to. But you’re gonna lose everyone else. You do need to consider, is this the appropriate time?

Chris: I do think that wish fulfillment in many cases isn’t too hard to multitask. It’s only if you make choices that will actively reduce tension or do it instead of something else. So for instance, an example of wish fulfillment would be dressing up and going to an ornate masquerade ball. That in itself is an experience that’s wish fulfillment, but that is 100% compatible with having a plot event where you need to find the assassin at the masquerade ball. They definitely don’t have to choose there.

Oren: But once you get to the ball, you are gonna have to do some assassin finding. You can’t spend the entire scene describing how great the canapés are and how beautiful everyone is. You can do some of that, but you do need some assassin finding in there.

Chris: And similarly, in something like Legends and Lattes, I do think that there is a balance between making it so that building the coffee shop comes with enough problems, but is not too bogged down in boring business details, or solving them so easily that you don’t really have any tension. I would’ve honestly liked some of those problems to have been a little bit more rigorous instead of instantly solving them, which could be good for wish fulfillment, but also make some problems feel cheaper and less satisfying when they’re solved.

Oren: I feel like if Legends and Lattes had a little bit of a harder time solving some of those problems, I don’t think it would’ve lost any of its current fans, and I think it could have gained some people who don’t like it. Now, we’ll never know. I don’t have an Earth 2.0 to run a test on, but just based on my understanding of stories, it seems unlikely that anyone would’ve walked away if Viv had had to work a little harder to get customers in the door.

Chris: I should also mention, a lot of wish fulfillment I do think has a novelty aspect. We’ve got the attachment aspect and you have a protagonist you’re usually living vicariously through. But also, obviously these are experiences we don’t have in everyday life or they would not have the same impact on them. So there is a novelty element that can wear off. And sometimes timing, like if it’s pretty powerful wish fulfillment.

Like in the beginning of the second Raksura book, them coming in and being like, hey, cool, we have this giant tree house, and we spend some time going and seeing the features of the house. We can sometimes get away with a few scenes doing that. And I think honestly, it helps that it’s a sequel because if somebody’s reading the sequel, they probably already know the characters in the first book or they’d never get to the sequel. Whereas I think opening a first book with a sequence like that would’ve been a big mistake. But not, again, doing it for too long before we get our plot hook, which in the case of the second book is actually somebody did steal something from this tree and it’s gonna slowly die unless we get it back.

Bunny: [dramatic voice] No!

Oren: No precious wish fulfillment tree!

Bunny: The tree house!

Chris: Which shows you that those scenes actually had an extra focus is because saving this tree is the stakes. And so by focusing on it in the beginning, we’re both showing why this tree is cool and why it should matter, that we save it. And getting some of that wish fulfillment in.

Oren: I also think just from a wordcraft perspective, I should emphasize that details make wish fulfillment work. You can say, and then there was delicious food on the table – that is not wish fulfillment. You gotta describe to me the crispness and the spice and the savory. I wanna know what it tastes like or what it would fictionally taste like; if it actually wouldn’t taste that good, that’s fine. Lie to me. [laughter]

Bunny: That’s like the fruit and mushroom thing.

Oren: But the tree house is the same thing. It’s like, yes, here’s this tree house, but let me describe to you all the cool rooms and the way it was made and how a nice place to live this would be.

Chris: It’s a form of novelty in that aspect. Absolutely. And so again, if it’s really novel, you can sometimes get away with some scenes devoted to it. It can be tricky for people to judge. I usually tell people not to rely on something being super novel, but in most cases you can find out at least if you have beta readers, ’cause they will say. If something is novel, they will say that they like it. They will point it out. Even if you don’t ask about it.

Oren: Beta reading can be challenging sometimes when you’re trying to identify certain qualities of your story, because if the story is tense, there’s a good chance your beta readers will just keep reading and not comment. But if it’s got high novelty, they’ll stop and be like, hey, that thing’s cool, I like that, and they’ll leave a comment. So that’s pretty easy to spot. Okay. I think with that, my wishes have been fulfilled because we talked about wish fulfillment, which was the thing I wanted to do the whole time. Haha, tricked you.

Chris: Well, if your wishes for a wish fulfillment podcast have been fulfilled, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We’re all familiar with plants and animals, but there’s an entire third category that doesn’t get as much attention: the humble fungi. From tasty mushrooms to creepy parasites that hijack insects, this unique kingdom of life always does its own thing, including in fiction! From colorful zombies to galactic stardrives, we’re talking about the many ways storytellers have used fungi, and hopefully a few ways they haven’t thought of yet.

Show Notes

• Minecraft Mushrooms 
• Entangled Life
• Badger and Coyotes Teaming Up
• Destroying Angel 
• Velocity of Revolution 
• The Spore Drive 
• Wood Wide Web
• World’s Largest Organism
• Ophiocordyceps
• Ladybug Wasp Virus 
• Fungi and Medicine 
• Last of Us
• Annihilation 
• Lichens 
• Panspermia 
• Three-Body Problem
• Zelda Cooking 
• Heterotrophic Flowers 
• Fungi Predators 
• Macrovirus

Transcript

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]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I am Bunny. And with me today is:

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: And…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And maybe I should call this the Mycocreants podcast, the Mushroomcreants podcast,  because today we are talking about the fungus among us.

Oren: Ah, I could have sworn I got rid of that with that cream. I got. Damnit.

Bunny: Now it just keeps coming back. It’s everywhere. It’s in the floor, baby. It’s in the sky. It’s in the soil of a spacecraft.

Oren: It’s a good thing I’m renting, not buying. This is someone else’s problem. Get the heck outta here.

Bunny: We are talking about fungi today, and allow me to start with my pet peeve, which is that there’s only two types of fungi in Minecraft, which is personally offensive.

Chris: So is there either the weird, creepy fungus or the very cutesy fungus?

Bunny: Minecraft is just blocky fungus. There are mushrooms, which are the cute kind of fungus, and they’re also cows, but there’s the red-spotted fungus and there’s brown fungus, and that is quite boring, Minecraft. Do better.

Oren: Minecraft discourse! It’s as if 2010 was alive and before my very eyes.

Bunny: I know! Comment and subscribe. So I just wanna start this episode by calling out Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which more or less inspired this. As you probably can guess after the episode about senses, I am on a bit of a nonfiction reading kick currently. So we are talking about fungus and fiction, what it does and what it could do, and the answer is lots of things.

Oren: It makes Mario big.

Bunny: That’s true. Doesn’t it also turn him into an elephant now?

Oren: Is that a mushroom? I know that’s a power he has, but I don’t know anything about the latest Mario game.

Bunny: I don’t either, but I hope it’s a mushroom.

Oren: He gets fire powers from a plant, which is not a mushroom. Those are different, fungus and plants, very different.

Bunny: Ah, well…

Oren: I mean, I looked this up ahead of time. Animals and fungi have more in common than either of them do with plants.

Bunny: This is a whole thing with their roots in the mycelium, the hyphae, and how plants, like, wouldn’t really have roots without it. I don’t know. It’s a whole complicated thing, but yes, they are technically different.

Chris: There is a whole like mutualistic symbiosis between roots and like mycelium that they go together.

Oren: They team up a lot, right? So do badgers and coyotes. That doesn’t mean that a coyote is more similar to a badger than it is to a wolf.

Bunny: We need to make more of these comparisons. Is badger more similar to a fungus or is it more similar to a vacuum cleaner?

Chris: We need more stories with slime molds. Will sometimes move around like an animal and sometimes stick around like a plant.

Bunny: Bring forth the slime mold. Slime mold solving puzzles, you guys, it’s so cool.

Oren: I definitely feel like fungi stories have gotten creepier in the last, I don’t know, decade or so. And unfortunately, unlike the zombie episode, I didn’t have time to do historical research on this, so I don’t know if that’s true. It’s just what it feels like.

Chris: I suppose if we read all the books with fay in it, we might come upon some cutesy mushrooms, because I think that’s where a lot of the cutesy mushrooms come from, is like fairy stuff, right? Like the fairy rings. They pop outta nowhere overnight and suddenly there’s a ring of mushrooms, so it must be magic. Or like little mushroom houses. I don’t think the romantasy inspired by Moss actually has little cutesy mushroom houses, I’m guessing.

Bunny: Better should. Love interest lives in a little mushroom house now.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: As far as internet memes go, the circle of mushrooms is also creepy now. People share one of those and it’s like, “Oh no, run away! It’s the fairies! Aaah!”

Chris: Yeah. I’m sure there’s some folklore about disappearing in those or something, but mostly I think they’re cute.

Oren: Definitely feels like the more that you learn about how fungus actually works, the easier it is to make them creepy. When you see a mushroom, most of the actual organism is underground and the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and there’s no way “fruiting body” doesn’t sound creepy as heck. It’s like, “That is just a creepy-sounding term. Who came up with this term?”

Bunny: Then you realize that it’s like the mushroom’s genitals, and it’s sending out little invisible things that go and, like, seed the environment.

Chris: By the same approach, we could say that, of course, that flowers are plant genitals.

Oren: Uh, the internet memes love that one, too. Don’t get me wrong 

Chris: Yeah they do I just want some context here when we say the mushrooms are genitals.

Bunny: I feel like people are less spooked by flowers than they are by fungus.

Oren: They are, but I think the reason of that is that we interact more with flowers. We have them built into our daily lives, whereas with fungus, we eat mushrooms, but that’s about it. We try not to interact with fungus more than we have to.

Bunny: And they are tasty.

Chris: And of course there’s always gonna be some drug stories.

Oren: That is another way that spec fic writers can use fungus, is to make the magic mushroom literally magic. I’ve done that a few times in various stories or roleplaying games that I’ve run, where consuming a certain variety of special mushroom will give you some kind of magical ability, but it will also make you very high. So have a fun time with that.

Chris: Best of both worlds. Maybe this is just because we tend to reduce mushrooms down, treat them like they’re the same thing. Imagine if we thought all plants were like the same plant, inherently. Then it would be like, “Oh, some of them are poisonous and some of them will get you high, and some of them you can eat,” because they’re like different plants. But, like, when we think about mushrooms, right? there’s something intriguing about the fact (and sometimes it’s actually very hard to tell apart), if you go mushroom foraging, is something you really have to watch out for. The delicious mushrooms and the poisonous mushrooms can look nearly identical. But for storytellers, I think there’s something fun about that. This mushroom could be TC or it could be poison, or it could be drugs.

Bunny: Right. And they’re like, they’re rare. They’ve got cool names like “destroying angel,” and they look unlike anything else. We have one book, that does the drug thing quite a lot, I know I’ve talked about on this podcast before, is The Velocity of Revolution, which is definitely inspired by the psychedelic mushrooms. Psilocybin is the mind-altering drug that is found in magic mushrooms. But in The Velocity of Revolution, basically people take this particular strain of mushroom and when people are on the same strain, they, like, share physical experiences and emotions and like low-level telepathy, and then it got out of hand in the end where they were like literally stopping time and then making all the foreigners sick because they didn’t live with the mushroom or something.

Oren: That’s a very flexible mushroom.

Bunny: It does interesting things with the internal consistency of the mushroom, like I can buy that there are different strains that do different things to, like, your mind and physical state. As long as they have this family resemblance about them, then there’s an internal consistency, but then it just got out of hand. And Chris likes to make fun of it because the mushrooms get stronger when you go faster.

Oren: That part’s a little out of theme. You’re using the same strain of mushrooms, so you share experiences. Okay, that tracks, but introducing velocity into it, obviously that’s in the title, but mushrooms have nothing inherently to do with going fast. That’s not a theming connection that is at all obvious.

Bunny: Gets dieselpunk and they have motorcycles. And motorcycles go fast, and so does the fungus.

Oren: It’s a fun-gus, not a boring-gus, so it’s gonna go fast, okay?

Bunny: Yeah. Chris, come on. It’s the rules of dad jokes.

Oren: My apparently hottest take about fungus is that I actually liked the spore drive from Discovery. I thought it was neat. I wish that they had built up to it a little more rather than just, like, having it already working when the story started, because I don’t think that the idea of a galactic mycelial network is wrong in Star Trek. I think it could actually fit fine. I just thought it needed a little buildup ’cause it’s a really big thing to just introduce and have, like, already known in the show.

Bunny: Entangled Life actually interviewed the mycologist. The character in the show who has the drive, I think, has the same name as him. An actual consultant that they brought on, this real mycologist, which is cool.

Oren: I thought that was a neat idea and I like the idea of them traveling along it. I think that’s cool. It does highlight the completely unforced error of making Discovery a prequel for no reason ’cause it just creates weird continuity issues that didn’t need to be there. But as an engine, I thought that was neat. Star Trek has a lot of quasi-magical technology. Let’s maybe introduce something a little different this time instead of just the same five tech that we’ve seen every time before.

Chris: Yeah, and I think the network effects are one of the neatest things about using fungus, and that also brought something to Last of Us. It also toned down the zombies ’cause now zombies don’t have much novelty anymore, but it also gave them fungus to make them unique. And one of the neatest part of that was, again, we have this unseen underground zombie network that all the zombies are attached to, which we can use then to explain like, “Oops, you stepped on the fungus. Now the zombies know you’re here,” which was great for the story.

Bunny: Right, it’s a much more interesting mechanic. Not a lot of stories, sadly, seem to use mushrooms, and you can play around with the properties of mushrooms in interesting ways, like the mycelium, like the wood-wide webs are this living computer that can stretch for miles and miles. I’m pretty sure that the largest organism in the world is a fungus that goes for miles and miles.

Oren: They get really big, maybe not the largest, but they can get very large.

Chris: The Last of Us is based on zombie ant fungus, right?

Bunny: Oh, yes. Let me tell you about Cordyceps. Ophiocordyceps. I hope I’m saying that. So there’s actually quite a few types of this particular type of fungus, but manipulative fungal parasitism, which is what happens when an ant gets infected by this fungus, has evolved multiple times in unrelated lineages across fungi, and then also in things like viruses.

Chris: So there’s more than one zombie amt fungus. There’s not just one zombie fungus.

Bunny: Yes.

Chris: Do they always affect ants or do they affect anything other than ants?

Bunny: It’s mostly insects, but no, there’s one that’s a virus that wasps inject into ladybugs, and then the ladybugs, like, become guardians for wasp eggs.

Chris: Whoa. That is weird.

Bunny: No, it’s really bonkers. They’re parasites, but, like, sometimes this virus, the wasps have essentially used this virus as, like, part of their reproductive strategy to keep their eggs safe. So there’s both the virus and the wasp that are being parasites to this ladybug. This behavior, again, it’s evolved across, like, unrelated species. So it’s like a very successful strategy, but the one that’s like most well known is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, I think is how you say it, which is the carpenter ant fungi. Ants get infected by the fungus and then they lose their fear of heights. They leave the nest, and then they climb up to the nearest plant. And at exactly like 25 centimeters off the ground, they bite down on a vein in the leaf. It’s like this death grip. That’s where they will stay. And then the fungus stitches their feet to the plant, and then a mushroom grows from its head and showers spores down on other ants below. And that’s the lifecycle, essentially, of this fungus.

Chris: Is it trying to get itself eaten by a deer?

Bunny: No, in this case it’s just trying to infect more ants, although there are, I think there are fungal parasites where it, like, has the bug climb up a leaf and then tries to get eaten by a bird and then it, like, reproduces in the bird’s digestive tract or something. I don’t know if that’s a fungus, but that is also another parasite behavior.

Oren: I’m just really looking forward to the Disney adaptation where the father fungus says to the child fungus, “This is the circle of life, son. We take over the ants and use the ants to create our own reproductive cycle, but eventually we die and become plants, and then, like, the ants eat those.” And the son will be like, “Yes, that is a just system.”

Chris: “We look down on our land from this grass. Look at all, you, all the sun touches. That is ours. Our kingdom.”

Oren: “We will bless the ants with our presence. Look how much they love us!”

Chris: “What’s that shadowy place? Oh, that’s fungicides.” I hope it’s a musical.

Oren: I have noticed that fungus is a popular choice among people who wanna do like an end-of-the-world-style event, because fungus are not unknown in medical science, but they’re… we have less encounters with them, so there are fewer treatments. That kind of story is gonna be changed forever because of Covid and I can’t even begin to estimate how big an impact that’s going to have. But I was definitely noticing before Covid that fungi were becoming more popular as a thing that would end the world with a super plague.

Bunny: Actually, fungus come up, not for the average person, like, thinking about what medicine is, but medicine does use fungus for quite a few things. Actually, the Cordyceps fungus, some of the, like, chemicals it uses to regulate, like, host behavior, one of those is cyclosporine, which is an immunosuppressant. Yeah. We actually use as an immunosuppressant in, like, organ transplantation. And obviously penicillin is like the big boy. We all know penicillin, but they are used in a medical context, not necessarily for superbugs.

Oren: All-natural, baby! I also noticed a funny little loop, and I don’t know for sure that this is what happened, but it just looks like it’s what happened, ’cause you have the Last of Us video game, which precedes the TV show by quite some time, and it’s got the fungus zombies and it’s got the whole person who died against a wall with fungus coming out everywhere. It’s got that image. And then along came the movie Annihilation. And if I remember correctly, the book doesn’t really have much in the way of fungus horror. If there was any, I didn’t pick up on it.

Chris: There’s a lot of creepy weird stuff in it, the book, that it’s unclear what kind of lifeform this is. We can just say that, but I don’t think it calls out fungus in particular.

Oren: But the movie has that very similar image of, like, the person embedded in a wall with an explosion of fungus all around them, and it’s very beautiful and has these really vibrant colors and feels like it was inspired by the game. And then the Last of Us TV show came out and it does the same thing and it feels like it was inspired by Annihilation! And I don’t know that’s actually what happened. It’s just, when I look at the pictures together, it seems like it’s a progression.

Bunny: Now that you mentioned that, I have seen those two images and they do resemble each other. That is strange.

Oren: It’s a very powerful image, right? I get why multiple filmmakers want to use it.

Chris: Do we see real fungal images that look like that? I guess that’s the question. Could they have been inspired by real fungal pictures?

Bunny: They could be. Honestly, it might look more like lichen. Lichen is very interesting. Lichen is a partnership between one or more algae with one or more fungi. So they’re like this composite organism.

Oren: Plants and fungi teaming up again. As an animal, I’m concerned.

Bunny: Yeah, they’re coming for us. No, lichen are really cool. Don’t want to get too sidetracked, but they’re like poly-extremophiles and go into suspended animation and like radiation that would kill tartigrades. Like, they’re just fine. They can get rehydrated and they just go on growing.

Oren: They’re cool with multiple romantic partners, ’cause you did say they were poly.

Bunny: They are polyamorous: they’ve got multiple fungus, multiple algae, making a big cool baby.

Chris: In what situations do they go in suspended animation? Is it just like when things dry out or… ?

Bunny: When scientists send them to space, for one. There’s a hypothesis that maybe life on Earth started through, like, contamination from space. And so people are like testing that theory, and lichens are like a candidate for what type of life could have survived, like out in space and then reentry.

Oren: The unfortunately named panspermia.

Bunny: Yes, panspermia. I do not like that name.

Oren: Nobody likes that name!

Chris: Did not think about it until you mentioned that. Now I can not not hear it, so thank you.

Bunny: I prefer “galactic lichen.” I think that’s a better name for the theory.

Oren: I’m definitely lichen that one more.

Bunny: Oh… yep.

Oren: I much prefer the idea that lichen did not come from space, but have this space hibernation anyway, just in case. Just to mess with scientists a bit.

Bunny: They do mess with scientists. They’re like really weird and can do some pretty cool things, including the suspended animation for 10 years, and then they rehydrate and they just keep on doing their own thing, but if you start thinking about lichens, you can’t think about them in terms of fungus and algae, or then you start missing the lichen. So they’re really interesting in how they complicate concepts of individuality and symbiosis.

Oren: What is a species, even? That kind of reminds me of the aliens from Three Body Problem, and that book’s been out for a while, but spoilers in case you’re watching the TV show: the aliens in that story have a thing where they will dehydrate themselves and go into suspended animation for long periods ’cause their planet is always like slingshotting around too close to their sun, which is a neat idea. It did create some plot problems because you’re sitting there wondering, “Okay, hang on. How do you guys have the infrastructure to create an interstellar invasion fleet if every 10 to 50 years, your civilization gets destroyed and you have to start over?” But plot holes aside, I like the concept.

Chris: Yeah, we need more stuff inspired by lichens. Like what if you had a culture that took a more lichenistic view of, like, individuality versus community? That’d be pretty cool. Or what about if astronauts have learned how to do suspended animation? I guess they also just dehydrate themselves.

Oren: They could have done that in Discovery, ’cause they had this problem in Discovery where there, like, I think, weren’t enough symbionts and they were trying to figure out a way to solve it. Fungus is the answer. They will help you to live in harmony.

Bunny: Fungus are the answer, you guys. I think maybe there’s a fungus growing in me that just makes me wanna talk about fungus.

Chris: Oh no! Don’t put it anywhere near grass, okay? When you get 25 inches up that grass, you’re done for.

Bunny: No! Centimeters, Chris. Centimeters.

Chris: Oh. Oh no. I need to embrace the metric system.

Oren: No, we’re gonna use freedom units here.

Chris: I know it’s less intuitive, but…

Oren: From a storytelling perspective, you can do more prosaic uses of fungi. You don’t necessarily have to be embracing, like, the full mycelial treatment. Your characters maybe just need some food in the forest. Fungus are very good for that.

Bunny: That’s true. Fungus be tasty.

Oren: And of course, just for regular cooking. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a survival situation. The fact that many fungi are poisonous is also a fun little plot point that you can add in there.

Bunny: I want more fungus forests.

Chris: I don’t recommend stewed mushroom and fruit medleys, though. I know that Link likes them in the little cook pot. I’m not digging it. I don’t think you should make that.

Bunny: Gosh, there’s been a lot of video games with fungus, which is what I’m learning from this episode. There’s Minecraft, there’s Mario, there’s Link. Books really need to catch up.

Chris: Luckily for Link, none of his mushrooms are poisonous, right? He can just scavenge all of the mushrooms and put ’em in his pot, and it’s fine.

Oren: Nothing is placeless in the world of the modern Zelda games, or at least if there is, it’s very uncommon.

Bunny: No, mushrooms are tasty. I love me some mushrooms, sautéed and buttered. Not necessarily related to fiction, just a tasty thing in general.

Chris: I think something that also tends to make fungus creepy is just, it’s a decomposer. It’s very related to death, decomposition in a way that flowers aren’t, although flowers grow on dead things, but they’re not like so intimately involved in the process of breaking down dead matter.

Oren: Mushrooms can, of course, also live without sunlight. Fungus doesn’t photosynthesize on its own. Lichen does though, right? That’s part of the process.

Bunny: That’s part of the partnership, is that the algae provides photosynthesis, essentially.

Oren: But since fungi don’t, by default, photosynthesize, they can also live in dark places, which tends to make them spooky to us ’cause, “Ooh, we can’t see what’s in there.” There could be anything in there. There could even be a zombie.

Chris: There is a heterotrophic flower that doesn’t actually use sunlight, that’s also pretty creepy. Like it’s white, it’s not green.

Bunny: They’re called like pipes or something. Those are also connected, literally connected to the mushrooms, and that they’ll like tap into the network of mycelium that grows underneath forests and they’ll just get energy from that, essentially.

Oren: Is that a parasitical relationship or symbiotic? Are they giving anything back?

Bunny: So what a lot of plants give back is phosphorus, but if they’re not photosynthesizing, I’m not sure. It might be a parasite relationship. I don’t remember.

Oren: Just freeloading on the mycelial network. I approve. I respect that level of laziness.

Bunny: They’re hackers hacking into the mycelium Man. This is something that I haven’t ever seen done, and because it’s really spooky and creepy, it definitely should be. People don’t talk about it because it happens on the micro level and it happens to worms. It could happen to people too. I think people should extrapolate from this.

Chris: Okay, but first, is this something I’m gonna have nightmares about?

Bunny: Hard to say.

Chris: Okay. Our listeners have been warned.

Bunny: We don’t think of fungi as predators, but they are. Some of them hunt nematodes in some really freaky ways. Some of them set nooses, essentially. Yeah. And they constrict around nematodes in a 10th of a second and trap ’em. They’re these circles and then they inflate and the worm gets stuck inside them. Another one is, they make adhesive nets like spiderwebs, my favorite. Some of them have little toxins on the tips of the hyphae that paralyze the nematode. Once the nematode touches it, and then the fungus grows in through its mouth and digests it from the inside.

Chris: Okay, there’s my nightmares right there.

Bunny: If there was anything that’s gonna give nightmares, it’s… it’s that one. And then my favorite: there’s like little gunboat spores that they’ll send out through the soil that can swim through the soil, and they get attracted to either like pheromones or other chemical signals that the nematodes put off, and then they attach to the worms and, like, harpoon them.

Chris: So it’s like a heat-seeking missile, but a pheromone-seeking missile? It’s like a little spore that follows pheromones to nematode and then shoots it?

Bunny: Gun cells. They’re literally called gun cells.

Chris: But these are spores, right? So they would form new fungus?

Bunny: Yeah, I think so. They would grow into a new fungus rather than feeding the existing fungus.

Chris: They don’t, like, bring the nematode back to the origin point? That would probably be difficult.

Bunny: It’s like a whaling boat that sends out the people to stab the whale, and then a new whaling boat grows where the whale was stabbed.

Oren: Pretty economical. So this could either be like a really creepy high-budget, like high-production-value show, like Last of Us, or it could be a really cheesy episode of nineties Star Trek.

Bunny: Yes.This is what we love about fungus. It’s so flexible.

Oren: Like the Voyager episode with the macroviruses that are just these, like, CGI blobs floating around.

Chris: That was pretty funny, seeing Janeway struggle with them, jump and hold them, and then we pretend after, like, she holds them, that they can actually have leverage to move around in the air and she’s like struggling with it.

Oren: She’s doing her best, okay?

Chris: Viruses are scary because you can’t see them and punch them.

Oren: “Look, Kate Mulgrew, we need you to pretend that you’re wrestling with a CGI virus. So, I don’t know, here’s like a teddy bear for you to hold.” And that’s called acting.

Bunny: A moment of silence for the actors who had to tussle with fake viruses. So, we mentioned fungi being decomposers, and they are. But one really interesting thing that you could do in your fiction with fungi is that it’s also… currently people are using it to build things as well. So fungi is really good at decomposing things. It can decompose very happily cigarette butts and, like, use diapers and agricultural waste. It’s quite good at that. But there are certain companies that are trying to, like, grow it into shapes and use it as building materials. NASA is thinking about growing buildings on the moon out of fungus, and the way this works is, I think, you mold it into a shape, and then you kill it, and now you’ve got your fungus house. If you can get the fungus to absorb, like, electrodes or something like that, then you, when you kill the fungus and put it to use as a house, then you have, like, a built-in electrical system already, which is cool and weird.

Oren: This is just an objectively cooler 3D printer. 3D printers are already cool, but they don’t have mushrooms.

Buny: I think you can even make batteries out of them. People are trying to make batteries out of fungus instead of a toxic metal.

Oren: Any replacement for batteries would be an improvement at this point.

Bunny: Get the fungus in there at all costs.

Oren: I am prepared to charge my phone with a shiitake mushroom.

Bunny: Please someone write this story. I want, like, an environmentally friendly solarpunk post-plastic story where it’s just… all runs on mushrooms. Everything’s built out of mushrooms. You plug your environmentally friendly phone into a shiitake.

Oren: With that, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: And if we have not given you nightmares, consider supporting us on Patreon, or even if we have. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

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

What’s this podcast episode about? Can you tell? Does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about curiosity in fiction: how stories create it, what purpose it serves, and why it can be detrimental if taken too far. Don’t worry, we love a good mystery as well, but like any flashy move, it’s easy to get so caught up with it that you neglect the fundamentals. We discuss the interplay between tension and curiosity, plus how to use one to create the other.

Show Notes

• ANTS
• Mystery Stories 
• The Hound of the Baskervilles 
• Knives Out
• Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals 
• BBC Sherlock 
• Lost 
• Severance 
• Silo 
• FROM 
• The Expanse 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Bunny: (Singsong) Bunny. 

Chris: And… 

Oren: Oren. 

Chris: So I wonder what the topic of this podcast will be about? Well, we can’t say it, ’cause then nobody will wonder about it anymore and we don’t wanna give it away. 

Bunny: I must know more. 

Oren: I think wondering about the topic is as good as having a topic, actually.  

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: We need to buy ourselves time so that we can continue to wonder and not actually give it away. So maybe we could just talk about tangents for a while and then drop hints, but only really perplexing hints that build it up and raise everybody’s expectations for what it will be. This topic is one weird trick, editors hate it. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: This topic killed our parents. 

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: And then of course, we end the show without ever saying what the topic was.

Chris: Of course, we want them to come back for the next episode!

Oren: [Laughs]

Bunny: You can look back on it fondly and be like, “Oh man, I was so invested. I wanted to know the topic.” 

Chris: No, we’ll have dramatic twists at the end of the episode that maybe has something to do with the topic. And maybe I’ll be like, “Oh, and I told Oren the topic,” and then he’ll be like, “Gasp.” And then we’ll end the episode or something like that. 

Bunny: Yeah, you can have a musical hit there. And then “The Castle by the Waterfall” plays.  

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Alright. Luckily for our listeners, we’re not actually gonna do that. 

Bunny: Fortunately for our listeners, the title is already up there on the website.  

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: So yeah, we’re talking about curiosity and storytelling. The good, and the bad, and the ugly. Curiosity is a double edged sword. It absolutely can boost engagement. I’m not saying curiosity is purely a bad thing, but it has a lot of costs and limitations, and generally I consider it to be a secondary source of engagement. 

For instance, when we talk about ANTS: Attachment, novelty, tension, satisfaction. Those I would think are the bread and butter of engaging your readers. Whereas there’s other things that do matter and sometimes are important to more niche genres, but are more secondary sources, like wish fulfillment, for instance. And I would place curiosity in that category. 

Bunny: And just to be clear, how would you define curiosity exactly? Is it just the pull that keeps the reader reading? 

Chris: No, lots of things can pull the reader, but I would say that tension is usually a better pull than curiosity is. Curiosity though, can be stronger and milder, just like tension can be. So let me talk about the differences between curiosity and tension then, so we know what we’re talking about. 

So, curiosity is a reaction to having unknown information that you know that you’re missing and you think it’s relevant, but most of all, it’s especially strong when you don’t feel like there’s anything that could fill that place, that it has to be wild and weird so that you’re really missing something. Like, a example I’ve used. If you randomly came home one day and all of your pets were wearing sweaters. 

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: And you swore nobody had been in your home. That’s a very wild thing to happen. It also seems very impossible. So that would be something that is very curiosity inducing. Because you don’t have any information that could seem to ever lead to that outcome, yet somehow it happened. 

Whereas tension also has uncertainty. It also comes with a question, but it’s specifically needing to know whether or not something bad will happen. Whereas curiosity is like an unusual question, not necessarily about something bad. 

Bunny: So it’s just the sweaters and not necessarily evil sweaters. 

Chris: Tension is very forward looking. Will something bad happen in the future? Curiosity could be backwards looking. What happened? And tension often requires more information than curiosity to work. You have to have a certain level of context to understand what bad thing could happen. And why it’s likely to happen, for instance. Whereas curiosity is often evoked when odd things happen that are out of place with no explanation at all. 

And so this is why people aiming for curiosity often destroy tension, because they want to give so little information to keep up the curiosity that people don’t have enough information to feel any tension. 

Oren: And also not enough information to know the characters, so they can’t build attachment either, or even enough information to see what’s going on in the setting, which also removes novelty. Just makes it harder to invest in anything. Because curiosity is a spice. It’s wondering what happened or what’s going to happen. Those are all things that you can be curious about and it can be great. But the problem that we keep running into is stories that neglect the fundamentals because they want to encourage curiosity.

Chris: I think that overall people are actually more familiar with curiosity. The fact that we have a common word for curiosity says something about how familiar it is to people in general. Whereas what tension is. And people don’t necessarily use the word tension universally for tension. Sometimes people use suspense instead, for instance. 

A different storytelling device source could use a completely different word for tension, or not have a concept of tension, or divide tension into two concepts, or do something else. So  curiosity is just a much more familiar universal concept, and I think that to some extent, that encourages people to try for curiosity when that’s actually not what they should be going for.

Oren: Mysteries are a good example of where the two can and should work together, but often don’t. One of my favorite examples of an old mystery story that has both is The Hound of the Baskervilles, my favorite Sherlock Holmes story. It’s got curiosity. There’s a weird, demon dog, maybe? That’s weird. What’s going on with this demon dog? Spooky. 

It’s also got tension ’cause maybe the demon dog is gonna kill somebody, or someone is gonna get killed by something that’s not a demon dog. So there’s tension there because we’re worried something bad is gonna happen. And we’re curious. What facts could exist that would explain these demon dog sightings we’ve been seeing?

Chris: I would say most mysteries have a curiosity element, but if it’s a main mystery plot, if it’s important, it isn’t usually just curiosity. It usually also has tension too. 

Oren: You could also have a mystery story about, why do cars keep disappearing off of the street and then being found on the tops of buildings? That’s weird. That’s certainly curious. 

Chris: That’s both very curious but also very tense. Because if cars are disappearing, that’s a dangerous thing. That creates tension. More cars are going to disappear. That’s very forward looking and anticipates, but it’s also very strange what’s happening, and it’s hard to imagine what could be happening that would be doing that. That’s very curiosity evoking. 

Oren: Admittedly, I was planning to use that as an example of a story that doesn’t have much tension. Oops. [Laughs]

Bunny: Well, Chris is really invested in those cars. 

Chris: Oh, I assumed people were in the cars. 

Oren: Oh, okay.  

Bunny: [Laughs]

Chris: This is the problem with hypothetical examples, is that it’s easy to read various details into them, and then people interpret them in very different ways. 

Oren: That shows how they would be different. If there were people in the cars that’s a big deal. But if they’re not, if there’s no one in the cars, then who cares?  

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Chris: I guess, ’cause I use things disappearing as an example of something that would create tension so often. So I imagine people driving away with their car, and they disappear, and then the car shows up on top of a building. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Do you think there’s any mystery story with tension, but no curiosity? 

Oren: So you would have a question of, is this really a mystery? But, sure. You could have a story where it’s really obvious who did it, and then it’s just trying to catch them before they kill again or something. 

Chris: So, Knives Out for a while. The assumption that’s revealed in the beginning of this movie is that our protagonist actually did it, and she’s trying not to get caught for a while, but it still unfolds like a standard mystery story. And of course, then there’s twists in that. It doesn’t really stay with that, but there are various situations in which you’re not necessarily expecting a very profound, surprising answer.

I think that’s kind of how you can tell the difference, is that the more it relies on curiosity, the more pressure there is to come up with a really surprising answer that still makes sense. And that is one of the reasons why it can be difficult to come up with a good answer to your mystery and why you’re not supposed to just, “Hey, these are two suspects,” and then reveal one of them did it.

Because in many cases, if you’ve built that up as a very curiosity-inducing thing, then that’s going to not pay off like it should for something that’s driven by curiosity. But if it’s more, “Hey, we know this person is the killer, but we need a way to prove it.” Or, “How did they do the crime,” or something like that, then we might have less pressure to come up with a really surprising answer, ’cause it’s more about the tension of whether we succeed at the task. 

Bunny: So curiosity is more about weird thing than dangerous thing. 

Chris: Yes. 

Bunny: And I’ve definitely run into, I guess for lack of a better term, unfulfilled curiosity. Where it turns out that the thing you’re curious about was actually less interesting than you thought it was. Oxenfree II unfortunately does this with the spooky ghost cult, which turns out to just be some hippies, which disappointed me. 

Oren: I did not like that. [Chuckles] 

Bunny: I wanted it to be a spooky ghost cult and hippies are just not as interesting. I’m sorry. 

Chris: One thing that’s interesting is when sometimes fantastical elements are actually not a good payoff. I did a critique of one of the Pendergast books, Brimstone, and it sets up this mystery where the person who died, there’s tons of locks. The gates are locked and the outside of the house is locked, and the room is locked and barricaded. Yet somebody still got inside and tore this person apart.

And that’s the murder scene. And if there was no fantastical elements in the story, it would be like, “How could somebody possibly get in and out to murder somebody in this manor while leaving all of those locks and barricades perfectly in place?” And that’s very curiosity inducing, and you would need some kind of answer that’s very not intuitive and seems like it could be impossible. But if you add like, “Oh, they had a space laser, or a wizard did it,” then that’s no longer a profound thing. And that’s actually a let down in that situation. 

Oren: You can also use speculative elements to increase curiosity. It’s all just a matter of what you’re promising. Like the locked room scenario, you’re promising a clever solution, whether you mean to or not. But if you have something like, “Oh man, our protagonist catches a glimpse of a mysterious figure in the woods,” at that point, if it turns out to be a supernatural creature, no one’s gonna be disappointed.

You’ve raised curiosity, what was that? And it turns out it was a spooky fae. That’s cool. Or maybe not now, ’cause people are tired of fae ’cause of Maas. But you know, some other magical creature that hasn’t been overused yet. 

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: That’s not going to disappoint people because you weren’t promising a specific thing that you then couldn’t deliver on. 

Bunny: The other kind of unfulfilled curiosity is something we were joking about at the beginning of this, which is just, it never pays off. The BBC Sherlock show is infamous for this. Always ending on cliffhangers that didn’t end up going anywhere. It’s like, “What’ll happen next?” And then the next time, “Whoa, we don’t know, what’ll happen next?” And it keeps teasing you like that rather than actually resolving anything. 

Chris: The ultimate example of this that everyone is familiar with is Lost. Because Lost had no plan. And it’s like, “Why is there a polar bear on this island? It seems impossible for a polar bear to be on this island.” They would do just tons of stuff like that. “Oh, where did this big silo come from?” Everything. Everywhere. They had no plan. They had no answer. 

So most TV shows I think are are trying to do a lot better, but there are TV shows that are modeled off of that. Severance definitely is. Severance, they’re in this weird corporate workplace and they run into a room full of goats. I think they’re baby goats. This is obviously inspired by the Lost polar bear. Are we ever gonna explain why there is a room full of baby goats in this weird corporate workplace? 

Bunny: It’s for goat yoga.  

Chris: [Chuckles]

Bunny: All the cool startups are doing it.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: And why does the main employee reward involve a weird BDSM show? That doesn’t match with the rest of this corporation at all. This is a problem with curiosity, is that curiosity more than most other storytelling aspects, has a kind of toxic incentive where you can end up borrowing more than you can pay back, essentially. Where you create a bunch of really curious elements that make people wonder what’s going on.

And the more you do that early in the story, it can make people engage more because they wanna know the answer. But you’re also making it increasingly difficult to actually give an answer. And that’s just a thing you have to be careful about. You exercise some self control. 

Bunny: You gotta have some kind of plan. 

Oren: Otherwise, you just end up digging yourself into a hole you can’t dig your way out of.

Chris: The big thing that I see with some of these TV shows, like Severance and Silo is another of ’em. That again, is another thing I was joking about in our intro, is the fact that they are trying to use curiosity, but it can be really hard to move the plot forward if your main plot line is supposed to be really curiosity inducing.

Because usually to move the plot forward, you need to learn new information. But if you learn new information, it dispels the curiosity and they don’t wanna do that. So these shows have very serious movement problems where they’re absolutely stringing you along and nothing is happening because they want to keep the curiosity up. And it’s not impossible to move the plot forward without this happening, but it’s much more logistically trickier than it is to keep up tension. Which is one of the reasons why tension is just usually more powerful and much more practical way to pull people in. 

You would have to be like, “Okay, why are there goats in this room?” And you would have to answer that question in a way that openly opens up more questions. So it’s like we’ve gotten our answer to the goats and that makes it feel like we moved forward towards solving this mystery. But the answer only opened up more questions so that we have more things to be curious about.

And I’m not gonna say that’s impossible, but it definitely is not easy for a storyteller to do. Whereas keeping up tension is more like, “Okay, I solved this first problem, so I got closer to avoiding the big bad outcome that’s creating tension. But oh no! Another complication happened to make things worse,” and that keeps up the tension.

Bunny: At some point, things have to start falling into place, and if you want nothing but curiosity, then you have to keep withholding that moment. Because then we get the kind of resolution to the question. 

Oren: Then once you dispel the curiosity, what if there’s nothing left? And then you just never can. So that’s a whole thing. 

Chris: I think this is one reason why I think some of the best, more curiosity focused mysteries are subplots. That you’ve got another main plot that has tension that moves forward, and this other mysterious thing is a thing that is not so urgent that we feel like the main character needs to drop everything and pursue it. So it can just be mysterious for a while, and then at some point it’s resolved. 

If you were traveling and you saw a mysterious figure in the woods, going back to our mysterious figure. Maybe that’s also tension inducing. ‘Cause a mysterious figure could also be threatening. That could create more tension too. But your main problem is that you need to get from point A to point B safely. And so to do that, you move forward. You keep traveling. You don’t go into the woods chasing after the mysterious figure. 

Oren: The Expanse books do a pretty good job of that because they have this big source of curiosity, “What’s going on with the protomolecule? What’s that deal?” But that’s not the main source of tension. The main source of tension is the political conflict in the solar system. So that gives the protomolecule plot plenty of time to cook and to be mysterious, and for them to introduce little tidbits and you don’t get bored or feel strung along because you have a really compelling political conflict going on around you.

Now, of course, that book series did still have a problem where they built up this incredibly powerful enemy that was the result of the protomolecule plot line, and there wasn’t really any way to defeat them, so we just ended the series. 

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: So that’s a problem that is a different thing. But for the first six or so books, it does a really good job. My favorite kind of curiosity is what I call “meta curiosity,” and as an editor, I encounter this all the time. I imagine people who don’t analyze stories for a living, it happens less. 

Where I’m just reading or watching and being like, “Oh, hey, is that a love interest?” They’re introduced with a bunch of candy and they have an odd amount of dialogue with the hero. Are they a love interest or is there some other reason the writer is doing this? Or when you mentioned that there was “legends of a beast in the woods,” is that foreshadowing or just imagery? I wanna know what that’s gonna be. 

Chris: Be careful, Oren. You don’t wanna encourage listeners to create meta mysteries. 

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Bunny: Danger, danger. 

Oren: This happens when the story is bad too. I’m just sitting here reading a story with a million different POVs and wondering, “Are they gonna eventually meet up at the end? Or are they just gonna be separate for the whole book?” And it’s not like either option is good. I’m just curious to find out which way the author is going. 

Bunny: I have found a sort of genre-based curiosity, like in The Mimicking of Known Successes, for example. There are events that appear to be unrelated. They’re investigating the disappearance of this one guy from the university. That’s the main plot. But then this doomsday preacher gets murdered and Mossa gets drawn off to deal with that. And you, the reader, are like, “This wouldn’t just be a random addition. These two events have to be connected.” But the characters don’t know that. So there’s a level of genre-savvy curiosity that you can have. 

Oren: You as a reader can wonder about it as long as the plot keeps going forward. We can come back to that later. 

Chris: I will say that you do have to be careful with lots of random things that ultimately end up being related because that can make it feel like there’s not enough movement, even if they end up being related later.

Oren: It can also just be that you get to the end and then the bad guy is like, “It was me. I was behind all of those things.” Okay. What things were those? Those happened a long time ago. 

Chris: Let me relate my convoluted plan that explains why I did each one of these things. And of course it doesn’t make sense. 

Oren: It’s not a good sign if your villain has to give a PowerPoint presentation at the end to explain all the things they were doing. 

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: Even if it does make sense, it’s probably not gonna feel like it makes sense and most readers are gonna be bored anyway. 

Chris: I think that when curiosity works really well, it’s often at the micro level. Where you don’t necessarily wanna just dump all information at once, especially the very beginning of the story. You don’t have time to explain everything at once, so usually in your opening paragraphs, opening scene, even, curiosity can be a really good supplement. Because when you can’t just exposition dump and have everybody understand everything that’s going on at one time, you can give them tidbits that are intriguing and a little curiosity inducing.

The key is to not purposely string it out just to maintain curiosity. That curiosity buys you time to build attachment and tension and other forms of engagement, other ways to hook the reader and pull them in. But it is a good supplement when you, again, haven’t done that yet.  

Bunny: Yeah, you can’t just eat vitamin D gummies, you gotta have vegetables. Those would be your primary source of nutrition.  

Oren: We’re coming up on the end here, but we’ve still got some time. Maybe we should talk about how to create curiosity in the first place. Maybe not “meta curiosity”, ’cause you’re probably not writing for an audience of editors.

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Or what your book cover looks like. You can get curiosity from a book cover, I will say. 

Oren: That’s true. Book covers can be very suggestive. If you have a good book cover, you can desperately hope people will judge the book by it. 

Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s true. This is something that happens. In fact, Chris and I went to a bookstore once and did it for a whole afternoon.

Chris: I guess the first thing I would say about creating curiosity is, again, we think about it as a deprivation of information, but everything requires some level of context to understand why it’s relevant or why it’s weird and different. Including curiosities. For instance, when I see people’s opening sentences and it has too little information, that can be a problem. ‘Cause I don’t have the context to know why something is strange. 

So for instance, my example of, you come home and you find that your pets are not wearing sweaters. That they weren’t before. We have to know the context of, there was nobody at home, you lock the doors, nobody was planning to come home. You have a house with pets or whatever. In order to make it seem odd that this happened. 

Oren: If you just describe that and there’s no context that these pets were not wearing sweaters before, then what does that mean? Nothing. 

Chris: Again, if you were creating tense hooks, it’s good to focus on one mystery at a time, not to just throw tons of curious things at once at your reader.

Bunny: And this isn’t a rule, but it seems like if the character has a reason to be curious about this thing, so does the reader. Of course you can make a mistake, the reader just doesn’t find it interesting. But if the character comes home and they’re like, “Why are my pets wearing sweaters?” Probably the reader will pick up on that and be like, “Yeah, I wonder why. I wanna know too.” 

Oren: That certainly helps. You could certainly build curiosity even if your character doesn’t necessarily pick up on it right away, that’s possible. It’s more challenging, it requires more subtlety. Whereas if it’s just something that your protagonist is curious about, that’s much easier.

Chris: And then I think from there you really do have to think about, again, not biting off more than you can chew. Because curiosity gets bigger the more something seems out of place or even impossible. The more difficult something is to explain, the more curiosity it will induce. 

Also, there’s relevance. If it’s something that’s trivial, like we don’t care about. That’s gonna be less curious, something that matters, a mystery that matters. Let’s get people’s attention more. We have to think about, “Okay, can we explain this polar bear on this tropical island in a satisfying way?”

Or in Severance. Okay, we want something weird in curiosity-Inducing in this workplace, are we gonna be able to, you know, if we put goats there? That is very strange. It’s very out of place. It’s also very hard to explain and that’s directly and correlated to how curious it is. And can we give somebody an answer that is surprising and satisfying? 

As opposed to if you have an answer that’s too easy. Just like our example of locked rooms, but it turned out a wizard did it. [Chuckles] It’s not gonna be a satisfying answer. It’s not gonna have a payoff that people want. It has to be something that clicks into place. I totally wouldn’t have thought of it, but now that you mention it, that makes great sense 

Bunny: And it does have to make sense. Let me drive that home.

Oren: As a word of caution, ‘cause I know a lot of novelists get their primary learning from TV, which is not inherently bad. You just need to understand the difference. A novel writer has a much stronger incentive to not string their readers along and then not have an answer at the end than a TV show writer does. Because a novel writer is a brand in themselves, and readers will remember you, and if they had a bad experience with one of your books, they’re not gonna wanna pick up another one.

Whereas TV writers tend to be much more anonymous. I’m not saying TV writers do this on purpose because they hate their audience or whatever. But, once the TV writers for Lost were done, they mostly just went and took other jobs. Even Damon Lindelof, who is most famously associated with Lost, isn’t a household name, even though he’s a super important person in Hollywood, people are more likely to know movie directors. So they don’t necessarily have the same problem that a writer does. 

Chris: And a TV show, there’s also kind of how short term or long term the thinking is. And oftentimes TV shows are just trying to get renewed for another season. Once the show actually ends, that’s when they don’t have anything to lose, ’cause the show is ending anyway. They’re not trying to get renewed. At which point, if they fumble the end, they’re much less likely to chase any consequences for it. Game of Thrones, the TV show was very unusual in that the ending was fumbled so badly that the showrunners actually faced consequences for doing so. 

Oren: They actually lost some projects, although they still landed on their feet. They’re doing Three Body Problem now.  

Bunny: I thought you were gonna say that the ending was unusual and I was gonna say, well, that is one way to put it.  

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: As far as our locked door example, an answer to that could be, maybe this is at the very top floor in the attic, so maybe somebody actually came down from the roof and there was a hatch or something. That might be an answer. That’d be like, “Okay, that makes sense. I was not expecting that. But that could explain this.” 

Oren: Or you do the classic of, the person is actually still there and has never left. Sherlock Holmes did that. So that one works. 

Bunny: That’s good for tension. 

Chris: Again, another answer that’s surprising but can be like, “Okay yeah, no, that totally fits.” So in this case, it’s just, okay. I don’t even know how I would explain those baby goats in the corporate office. 

Bunny: Goat yoga, goat yoga. 

Chris: Yeah, you can do goat yoga, but that doesn’t click together. That’s not like, “Oh, that makes sense.” So it’s bizarre. Anything that doesn’t click, is surprising, but doesn’t make sense in any way, just feels bizarre. And it doesn’t have that same payoff. 

Oren: And you could do something like, “Oh, we keep them as a sacrifice to the demon that we’ve made a bargain with.” But that creates this whole other thing. There’s nothing inherently supernatural in this show. So just having a demon or a Cthulu god show up at this point is probably gonna feel pretty weird. 

Chris: I think if you took Severance, you had showed goats in the beginning, and then throughout a couple seasons you slowly built up the fact that this is a corporate workplace that actually is a Cthulu cult. And then you finally got to the part where there were sacrifices and that actually fit and made sense. You could go back, “Oh yeah, that’s what the goats were for.” [Laughs] If you wanted, I think you could probably do that.  

Oren: Alright, with that very good explanation of curiosity out of the way, I think we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

Chris: If this episode satisfied your curiosity, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

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

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

We try our best to give actionable writing advice that makes stories better, but, unfortunately, not everyone else follows the same code. There’s a lot of terrible writing advice out there, much of it dressed up specifically to tell writers what they want to hear. This week, we’re talking about how you can spot it before throwing away perfectly good money. Whether or not you think our own advice is good, you’ll be forewarned about anything that sounds too good to be true.

Show Notes

• Scheme in British English 
• Writing Advice Cultures 
• Hyperion 
• Brandon Sanderson 
• Process Advice 
• Parable of the Sower 
• The Virgin’s Promise
• Kishotenketsu 
• Save the Cat! 
• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreant 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: Good news, everyone! If we just follow this five step writing advice book, $19.99 with shipping, we’re all gonna be best sellers in no time!

Chris and Bunny: Woo.  Wow. Wow. 

Oren: Yeah, it’s that easy. The first piece of advice is to stop plotting your story.

Bunny: Second piece of advice, write. 

Oren: It might be. You have to write, writers write. This is definitely deep wisdom, and we are- instead of plotting your story, we’re going to scheme our story. 

Bunny:Ooh.  

Chris: Oh, I see. Plotting is bad, but scheming, story scheming is good. 

Oren: Yeah. We’ve defined plotting as plots that are bad, and so plots that are good will now be referred to as schemes.

Bunny: I can drum my fingers together and stroke a long hair cat while I scheme. 

Oren: That’s my favorite part about British English is that the word scheme doesn’t seem to have the negative context that it does in American English. So you just hear people casually refer to the scheme for a new bike path.

[laughter]

Oren: Sounds so evil. 

Bunny: [as an evil villain] Ooh, transportation! Ahhahaha.

Oren: So today we are talking about signs of bad writing advice ’cause man, have I seen a lot of that recently. I’m not gonna mention most of them by name because if people haven’t already heard of them I don’t want to just be doing free advertising. So instead I’m hopefully gonna give you the tools to spot them on your own. And then if you find them in the wild, you will at least be forewarned. 

Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely an invasive species. 

Oren: Yeah. [chuckles] 

Chris: I do think it’s worth when thinking about advice first, thinking about what your ultimate goal is from getting advice. What are you actually trying to achieve so that you can make sure that your advice achieves that? And at Mythcreants we’re really focused on helping our readers make their story more engaging so it lands better with readers. We have some pieces on improving writer’s happiness as well, and various things like that.

But most of our content is you want to make your story more engaging for readers, and that’s the result that we’re aiming for. Other places might be narrowly focused on trying to increase your output. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a different goal than what we’re aiming for. There are many places that are more focused on creating content that appeals to writers in some way without getting results. 

Oren: You can tell a lot of bad advice is basically just telling writers what they want to hear.

Bunny:It’s a good hustle. You gotta admit. 

Oren: It is a good way to sell stuff. It’s just not what most writers actually want, at least not in my experience. What most writers are doing is they’re trying to do the same thing we are, which is they’re trying to make books that their readers will like. Otherwise, you don’t really need advice. You just write whatever you feel like.
If you don’t care about the reader experience, none of this matters, but, and most places pitch themselves as also wanting that but are just dishonest about it. The exception to this are the word count fanatic people who just say ‘it doesn’t matter if your book is good, just write, write, write more, and then maybe you’ll make money.’ At least they are sometimes honest that they don’t care if the book is good or not. 

Chris: They’re not always honest, though. Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘just write, write, write, and then like magically, your books will get better.’ Without you paying any attention to making your books better. 

Bunny: Any advice that says your first draft is best we should all know that’s wrong. Anyone who’s written anything…

Oren: That one’s not hard to spot. 

Chris: If you really- all you want to do is write first drafts, and you’re willing to be like, ‘okay, well this final stories I create aren’t gonna be that good. This is what I care about.’ I’m not gonna tell somebody that’s the wrong way to do it, and it’s not impossible to get- make better first drafts as you go. But like usually these places are very much, don’t pay any attention to quality. Don’t try to think about what’s good or bad or what will make your story better and the problem will just magically solve itself.

Bunny: Look, stories are made up of words. The more words, the better. 

[laughter]

Bunny: The more story it is.

Chris: At the very least, if you’re gonna practice, you have to know what the difference is between the result you want and the result you don’t want as a result of practicing. If you were practicing the piano and you couldn’t recognize the difference between when you got a note right and you got a note wrong, there would be problems. You wouldn’t necessarily get that much better by practicing. There’s a lot of advice that it may be fun or it may be motivational, or it may feel good in some other way.

But that’s just different than advice that meets the goal that you’re trying to meet by getting advice and that, I think that’s just an important thing to think about; what is it that you want? And if all you want is to feel better when you’re feeling down and the advice does that, okay, but that’s different from it actually getting some kind of result.

Oren: If I just want to get some self-esteem boost and I’m gonna go check this advice site that’ll tell me all these fun meditation techniques I can do before I write, great. That might help you. Maybe those will get your words flowing, who knows? But it won’t teach you story craft. And if it, if they promise that it will- they are lying to you. 

Bunny: There’s a few things that I think are worth noting that they might pitch themselves as writing device, but they are by definition disqualified from being writing advice. One of those, and I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail, this writing is inborn type of thing. Anything that prefaces its advice with that is disqualified from being advice ’cause advice needs to be doing something. And if writing is inborn, you don’t gotta do anything! You’re just magically [a] writer.

Chris: It’s not impossible. And I’ve seen writing books, books that are supposed to be about writing and storytelling, where the person’s, ‘you have to be like a born writer.’ And they’ll try to make the excuse that like, ‘oh, but if you are a natural born writer, then advice could help you.’ [laughter] At the very least, anybody who’s doing that is creating excuses for themself if their advice isn’t effective. Because anytime their teaching doesn’t work, they could just be like, ‘that’s because that- blame the person, blame their student for their own failure. It’s a very bad sign. 

Oren: Anyone who is creating a set of criteria in which it is impossible for them to fail because if they get a good result, then they succeeded, and if they got a bad result, it was someone else’s fault; go away from those people. They are not honest and there’s no reason to think they will be honest about anything else. Speaking of dishonest, I think the biggest flag that is really easy to spot and that you can immediately notice is when they promise you that this book will make you some level of success. This advice will make you a bestseller, or this course will make your book great and will make readers love it. I’m sorry. No one can promise that. 

Bunny: Unless this is like a publishing house, CEO, coming to be like, ‘write a book and I will publish it.’ Which is not advice, but that’s the closest thing you’re going to get to it. 

Chris: There are some services that will claim that- what they’ll do is like, ‘oh, follow it. If you follow this perfectly, we’ll publish you.’ But there’s always some caveat where they’ll take the cream of the crop. It’s just another submissions, or they’ll make it extremely complicated so they always have some way of coming back and being like, ‘you didn’t follow this.’ But there are places that will try to lure you in with the idea that you could get published from them and just in every single case, they’re just working like any other publishing house that takes tons of submissions and publishes a very small portion of them. There’s nobody that’s guaranteeing that they’ll publish you if you do X, Y, Z. They’re always finding some way around that. 

Oren: Even in the bizarre scenario where the, you know, person in charge of a publishing house came to you from off the street or whatever, I was like, ‘I’m publishing your book.’ Even they couldn’t guarantee it would be a best seller. If they could do that, then the publishing industry would be in a much better place financially than it is now.

[laughter]

Bunny: That’s true. They can market the hell out of it, but that doesn’t mean people will enjoy it.

Chris: If you are already a very famous writer who’s… all writings are of yours are popular because you’re a big name. Sure. [chuckles]

Oren: Unless you’re that one guy from Hyperion whose book sold like, a trillion copies and then everyone magically knew not to buy his next book because the poetry was too good.

[laughter]

Bunny: What? 

Oren: That’s my favorite plot point in Hyperion. One of the characters is a writer and he wrote this book that sold a million bazillion copies and then he wrote another book and no one bought it. And the explanation is supposed to be that the masses are not smart enough to appreciate his amazingly deep poetry. But how did the masses know that the book was full of poetry they couldn’t get? They had all already bought his last book. Did they all just like go and read the critical reviews? And make carefully considered decisions like, ‘I don’t think I would enjoy this poetry after reading these reviews and cross-referencing it with how reliable I found those reviewers,’ my God! 

Chris: Like his first book is as popular as the Bible or something. I feel like his next book would be a bestseller even if it was very bad, [chuckles] because at that point he’s a brand name, right? 

Bunny: Are there examples of this magical poetry in the book? 

Oren: Is- there is some of it. I, I think I, I honestly don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read Hyperion. That was clearly just the author expressing their angst about how people don’t read books anymore. Which was funny because during the time when that book was written, the reading level of the United States was going up. Again, it’s gone down more recently, but not like the sky is falling levels. People don’t read as much as they used to, but they still read a lot and there’s at least some data to show they are actually buying more books than they used to, even though they aren’t reading them which is weird but not bad for writers.

Bunny: Oh, I feel like that’s an attack on me actually.  

[laughter]

Oren: Look at what it promises to do. There is a reason Mythcreants does not promise that we can help you, that we can make your book sell good or that we can even make it good. All we promise is that we will do our best to help you. 

Bunny: Here’s the promise I will turn you- You’ll wake up one morning and look down at yourself and realize you are Brandon Sanderson.

[laughter]

Oren: That’s good. I like that. That’s a good promise. I’m into this now. 

[laughter] 

Chris: All you have to do is follow these seven steps and the seventh step is becoming Brandon Sanderson. Admittedly, the directions for that stuff are a little vague, but you sure you, if you do become Brandon Sanderson as directed, you will be a bestselling author.

Bunny: Then the next step is profit. Easy. 

Oren: You just put that Wired article about him under your pillow for like a week and then you’re good to go, I think. I think that’s how it happens.  

[laughter]

Chris: Another sign that I think is worth paying attention to because people kind of don’t think about it, this distinction until we bleed it out to them often is, basically when process advice is used in place of craft advice. 

Bunny: Gosh, I can’t stand that. 

Chris: And again, just to explain anybody who is not familiar with these terms ’cause process advice is a term that we coined. [chuckles] So process advice is anything about how you go about your work habits. As opposed to craft advice, which is about what should be on the page, like what your final result in the story is, not how you come up with that final result. For instance, dialogue craft advice would be like, ‘Hey, people don’t actually use each other’s names in dialogue that often. So that sounds unnatural.’ That’s something very specific. That’s about what you’re putting on the page.

Process advice would be like, ‘go listen to people. And take notes’ Because that’s about how you study. It’s not about the actual result that you get. And process advice definitely has its place. Like for instance, if you’re trying to raise your productivity, you’re gonna need process advice to do that. That’s a process result that you’re looking for. There’s other things that are just, again, hard to quantify without process advice in some way, shape, or form.

If people want advice on outlining, outlining is a process. Now, of course, a lot of people who want advice on outlining what they actually want is plotting advice. Parts of that can be difficult, but whatever process advice has its place. However, what tends to happen in lots of places is that people substitute process advice when craft advice is actually called for. So you try to get advice on characters and they tell you to write your characters backstory. As a way of getting to know the character without telling you, but what outcome do you want for this character on the page? We just talked about that when we were talking about what is character development actually for?

And when you see this, when you see lots of process advice in place of craft advice, it suggests the vice doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about. They don’t have the knowledge needed to give you that craft advice, or they are. So again, in that like romantic capital R mindset that they’re simply unwilling to express craft opinions that there’s like, oh, it’s all subjectivity and it comes from the muse and I couldn’t tell you what a good story is. Either way, they can’t really help you. 

Bunny: It’s at best, it’s good for like giving you ideas for how you could like go about approaching something. Being like, you know, if you already have some idea about the craft part, you could be like, yeah, okay, maybe I can write the backstory of this character and see if that helps me, like get to know them better or whatever. But that’s not related to the actual craft of the thing. It’s just an idea for how you can get your juicy juices flowing. 

Chris: Process advice isn’t banned, but like again, if it’s substituting when you actually need craft advice, is when it becomes a problem. 

Oren: Because the same process can have very different results for different people. Like if you take that classic ‘listen to people talking and use that to prove your dialogue’ okay, but what am I listening for? I have definitely encountered some authors who that was a thought I had. It’s like ‘these people don’t talk like regular people. Maybe you should listen to the way regular people talk,’ but of course if that’s all you tell them, then they’re gonna end up copying all of the parts of how people talk that you don’t want in your dialogue. The stuff that we edit out as much as we can from the podcast. Otherwise, it would just be. Uh, right, you know- 

Bunny: Awkward pauses.

Chris: And if you’re getting process advice from an editor or somebody who’s giving feedback on your work, the problem is that this is often a substitute for actually telling you what is wrong. If you write dialogue and it sounds unnatural, and they just tell you, ‘go listen to people’ they’re not telling you why your dialogue sounds natural or what about it is unnatural. And that can leave you completely unequipped to fix it, resolve the problem.

Bunny: Just create more problems at worst.

Oren: The next one that is a really big red flag that you need to be very careful of is vagueness. And this one’s harder to spot than some of the others. And this can be in both what a product you’re buying says it will do and the actual advice that it gives. Because a lot of courses and writing books and online classes kind of obscure what is actually in them. It can often mean you’re buying nothing of particular value. If you look at a writing course and it looks pretty cheap, it’s only $60, but then you see what does it include and it includes a bunch of blog posts. 

Chris: Or resources! [dry chuckle] We have good advice. We have lessons. In this class, this class has class material. Lots of class material. 

Oren: And if it’s not specific, it could just be that the class giver is going to send you 10 blog posts. That is not worth $60. If they tried to sell that as a book, they would get laughed out of town for $60. If they don’t tell you what’s actually in there, you can’t make that judgment for yourself. You just have to trust them. And I wouldn’t.

Chris: When it comes to the specifics, for instance, of a story. If we’re talking about craft advice that’s vague, this is also very commonly used for what I call pseudo structures where people are giving you what is supposed to be a story structure, but it doesn’t really work. And they’re trying to cover for that by making it vague. Like ‘your character should have a victory here, but by a victory we could also mean a defeat.’ [laughs] Or it’s so like, ‘oh, they will metaphorically come out of the bag.’ But, and that could be absolutely anything because it’s a metaphor. What they’re doing is making it so that you can’t actually pin their advice down or ever prove them wrong. It means that they don’t need to know what they’re talking about.

Bunny: The other thing with vague advice; it lacks nuance. Those story structures you’re talking about, just they have to be vague because they don’t account for everything. I’ve noticed this with the term like inciting incident in particular where a lot of the stories I’ve read, the thing that you might call that happened before the story started.

It starts in the middle of the story after it’s been kicked off. But then if you’re trying to warp around like inciting incident to fit that and you’re looking for like the next exciting thing, it’s either at like word zero is the inciting incident, or it’s like much further down the line after the first scene of the story has happened, which also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Oren: The inverse of this is hyper-specific advice, which is less common, but you still see it. And hyper-specific advice can be appealing to writers because it can make them feel like they just need to do whatever this book says. Because it’s, and it’s easy to follow. But the problem with hyper-specific advice is that it’s useless. If this actually worked, everyone would do that. And this is stuff like, I can actually say this one, because it’s famous, the Save the Cat, the original, the screenplay book has stuff like ‘at page 15, your hero must meet their arch enemy.’ Like why? 

Bunny: Not all heroes in movies have arch enemies.

Oren: And those that do often the plot’s not gonna work for them to meet on page 15. Why would they? That’s a weird non-starter, and it just, for most novelists know better than that. Which is why in Save the Cat Writes A Novel, Brody takes those points and then vague-ifies them.

Chris: So they mean nothing instead of being hyper-specific.

Bunny: You swing back and forth. It’s a pendulum. 

Oren: Because in Snyder’s version, ‘the midpoint is at exactly this page in the script your hero must have a false victory,’ which is silly. A lot of stories aren’t gonna have that, and so then Brody’s version is, ‘somewhere around the middle of your story, your hero must have a false victory or a false defeat, by which I mean a real victory or a real defeat, or a false victory or a false defeat.’ Anything in which your hero does or does not win something could qualify as long as it happens somewhere around the middle of the story. 

Bunny: Your protagonist also has to do something. Or maybe they don’t. 

Oren: Who knows? Authors of novels tend to not like super specific advice, so that I’m not as worried about that one, but it still is out there. People need to know about it. 

Bunny: Usually it’s a tell when they can’t justify it. I’m sure the Save the Cat guy tried to justify the page 15 thing, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just like, ‘this is what successful screenplays do’ and then left it at that. 

Oren: He waffles back and forth on that. Sometimes he gives weird justifications and sometimes he’s just like ‘a movie I like that made money did this so you should do it.’

Bunny: I mean, that is a justification, but it’s not a good one. 

Oren: And like people get mad at us for this because they say that’s what we are doing with our stuff about things like turning points and character karma. But we’re not telling you that your story has to be a very specific thing. We are telling you things that it should have in it if you want to have certain effects. We’re not giving you like, ‘this is the instructions. This is what must happen in your story.’ That’s the difference to the extent that you can tell it. 

Bunny: A story is not an IKEA shelf, guys.

Chris: I think well related, we’ve talked about this before, is trying to put all stories into a fixed number of categories. Which, and this is usually a very absolutist thing, where it’s like every single story is one of six types or one of… Save The Cat has like 15 genres or something? That he made up [laughs] from movies and they never work. Every time we look at them, they do not work. And I think theoretically, one of the reasons they can’t work (it’s impossible for them to work), for one thing they never take into account the fact that some stories are bad and poorly formed.

There’s some mix up between what’s descriptive or if we’re talking about prescriptive in a constructive way as opposed to prescriptive, meaning overly pedantic. Where when we give advice, and this is the thing is that lots of other people, other than Mythcreants, try to avoid criticizing stories. The idea is that every bestseller is a success story and that’s what we’re trying to get and so we never wanna criticize them, but it doesn’t fit the reality of the fact that stories have flaws and lots of them aren’t doing a lot of things right.

And every time you try to say, ‘Hey, this is the ideal formula,’ if you try to fit all stories into it, including the really janky ones that have no plot and only worked because they were just like really novel when they first came out but everybody would find them boring now, that doesn’t work. There has to be some division between best practices and not as good practices. 

Bunny: I think people make the mistake of assuming that what’s in a popular work, it’s like in its best and most ideal form which is not necessarily the case. And then that any changes you suggest or criticisms you make would therefore be tacked on or like distract from the essence of it. I ran into this in a class where I brought up that it’s kind of weird that Parable of the Sower doesn’t even mention queer people, especially since Butler’s other stuff has dealt with themes like that. And I had gotten into a huge argument with classmates about… They were like, ‘oh no, it would be shoehorned in if she included it.’ I was like, ‘why do we assume that it would be shoehorned in? Don’t we trust Butler to like, include things gracefully?’

Oren: When something’s a classic people cannot imagine it any other way. So if you talk about, say for example, how Lord of the Rings could have been different, all they imagine is that you’re taking away Lord of the Rings. They cannot imagine that there could have been a better version of that story that we never got to see. And that’s just a problem with classics. That’s why it’s hard to talk about best practices in terms of classics, just because they have calcified in people’s minds and they just must always be that way. 

Bunny: Which is really annoying. 

Oren: It’s a problem. It’s one reason why we don’t only talk about classics. People are more willing to accept that newer stuff maybe could have been different.

Bunny: It’s also worth noting, back to your point, Chris, it’s a big thing in philosophy of art that if you have a theory of what is art that doesn’t include bad art, then you have a bad theory of art. [laughter] Because there is bad art out there. If your, if your criteria is like, ‘all art is beautiful,’ there’s some ugly ass art out there, I gotta say!

Chris: But again, when we’re talking about what is our goal with writing advice, if our goal is to improve our writing in some way, then by definition when we’re trying to create useful categories we are not trying to include the bad stuff. And so the lack of recognition that we have to make a distinction between good and bad quality on some level, even if it’s a fine line and lots of shades on the spectrum, is always gonna leave people astray.

Besides the fact that, of course, stories are highly variable, and the idea of trying to put them into categories that are useful is almost impossible just because of… the natural variety that they have is so great. And we have categories sometimes, but it’s very much, ‘Hey, here are some easy starter categories that you can use, but we’re not trying to claim that everything fits into them. These are just some easier, simple ways to get started.’ Like our blog posts on six turning points for climaxes, there’s six types of turning points that are very common that we see a lot. We don’t try to pretend that everything fits into one of them.

And then I have another blog post that explains more of the mechanics of how turning points work without sorting them into categories. So it’s a little more broad and flexible. We see lots of places that are desperately trying to give writers that ‘here, just follow these easy steps. Here’s how you do storytelling without having to think too hard.’ I don’t think that works. You’re gonna have to think about it storytelling’s- 

Bunny: It’s not easy! 

Chris: It’s not that simple.

Oren: And we’re almost outta time. So one thing that I wanna mention before we go is the last thing to really look out for is; anything that is presenting itself as a quick fix. A simple solution to a complex problem, and you have things like ‘if you just follow the hero’s journey, you won’t have to plot a story.’ ‘If you just use the Virgin’s promise, you won’t have to do character arcs because these will just tell you how to do them.’ ‘If you just use Kishotenketsu, you won’t have to have conflict or tension.’

The thing that- keep in mind for these quick fixes is that you have to remember that most other people are about as smart as you are, and if these things actually worked, everyone would use them. The fact that other people aren’t doing that, or at least are not doing it in a way that is noticeably successful, can show you that this is obviously not a thing that actually works. Because if you could figure it out, other people could too. 

Bunny: I’m guessing actually this isn’t much of a guess that, because I’m sure that Save the Cat and Save the Cat Writes A Novel, have sold like a quadrillion copies each, and that doesn’t mean we now have a quadrillion bestsellers.

Oren: That was the thing I pointed out in my critique of Save the Cat Writes A Novel is like, ‘well, this book promised miracles and I haven’t seen any yet.’ All of the really glowing reviews of it from authors who were successful before it came out. Feels like if it could do the things it said it could do, we would already have a bunch of authors who were super successful saying that it was all thanks to Save the Cat. So with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

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

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank two of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel.

And second is Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme. The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.

Swords? How droll. Guns? Completely unfashionable. Aren’t there any weird weapons out there to satisfy our thirst for novelty? You know what we’re talking about: the kind of completely bizarre contraption that’s as much a danger to the wielder as to the enemy. Fortunately, there are actually quite a few of those in both fiction and real life!

Show Notes

• Mass Effect Weapon Heat
• Transporter Gun 
• HL Hunley 
• The Claw of Archimedes 
• Greek Fire 
• Point of View Gun
• Air Rifle 
• Mancatcher 
• USB Arrow 
• Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber 
• Laser Bow 
• Lirpa
• Bamboo Cannon 
• Panjandrum

Transcript

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

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

[Music]

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

Chris: Chris

Bunny: …and…

Oren: Oren!

Bunny: And I’m just so tired of this sword. I’m tired of this gun. They’re so basic and chunky. I want something unique. I want something that makes you scratch your head and ask who designed it, and I think the best way to do that is to stick two other weapons together. So I’ll go first. I’m going to have a gun, but it shoots nunchucks, and when the nunchucks are shot, they unfold into scissors.

Oren: That’s pretty scary. I’ll admit I would not want someone shooting that at me.

Bunny: What about you Oren? What weapons are you gonna jam together?

Oren: Okay, so obviously it’s gonna have to be a whip and a shield. ‘Cause we’ve already seen whip swords, right? For some reason, only sexy characters use whip swords. So I tried to think of what the opposite of that was. So a whip shield is like the least sexy weapon you could possibly use.

Bunny: Captain America and Catwoman.

Chris: Okay. I think I want a gun that when you pull the trigger, it actually dissolves into a bunch of nanites that fly over to the person you pointed the trigger at, which really begs the question of why you did the whole trigger thing and just attacks them.

Oren: Also, you better hope you don’t need your gun while the nanites are over there.

Bunny: Usually you confuse them. It’s psychological. They thought they were gonna be shot with a gun, but they were shot with nanites.

Chris: I mean, it might be cool if you had like a big gun that got smaller every time you shot it, as some of its nanites flew, and then those nanites would return and recombine with the gun.

Oren: That was the idea of the guns in Mass Effect. Not quite, but the idea of Mass Effect was that there wasn’t any ammo because the guns fired by shaving off little bits of metal from basically a bar of metal inside the gun and then accelerating them up super high. And so the idea was that in theory you could run out of material, but it would take so long that there was no reason to track bullets. So instead, it tracked how much heat your gun generated, which was a cool mechanic, but it turned out to be too hard to balance. And so in the second one, they invented heat clips, which are basically bullets.  It’s just very funny to be Shepard and wake up in Mass Effect 2 after you’ve nearly died and had your near death experience and everything… and it’s like, “Hey, Shepard, while you were asleep, we invented bullets!”

Bunny: It’s the future, in which they have bullets! I think I didn’t get far enough in that game to encounter that particular lore, but what I do remember is that you can turn your gun into healing goo. Which is not a feature of most guns.

Oren: Oh, yeah, obviously, just shoot people with healing bullets. There’s some weird lore in Mass Effect if you read the in-game text, if you’re a nerd.

Bunny: Unfortunately, I’m just a nerd and not a very good gamer, so I could not get to the actual nerd stuff.

Chris: One weapon that I was surprised was not introduced earlier is the transporter gun in Star Trek because transporters are literally death-clone machines. So I’m surprised that nobody weaponized them earlier.

Oren: So there are a couple of different ways you can weaponize a transporter. Every time Star Trek does this, it raises the question of why they don’t do it all the time. But some writer is just really eager and they always are like, yeah, I’ll be clever by weaponizing the transporter.

Chris: We always knew the transporter was very dangerous. We actually need to forget that because characters use it all the time, and each time we’re cringing.

Bunny: Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about it.

Oren: No, you chaotic drama llamas, don’t do that. It’s hurting the entire setting when you do that!

Bunny: Don’t people always get stuck in the transporter too?

Oren: Yeah. The transporter can be used to cause and solve most problems, but this particular one was from the DS9 episode where it transports the bullet into the room and shoots you with it so that you can shoot through walls and stuff.

Bunny: Wow. That is OP.

Oren: Which is, yeah, it’s pretty OP and the answer to why they don’t use it all the time was some handwavium. It was like, it didn’t turn out to be viable… but it looks pretty viable to me in this episode!

Chris: It just really does ask the question, why doesn’t the gun instead just transport someone into nothing?

Oren: There’s transporting a bomb over, there’s just transporting away pieces of the target.

Chris: Oh, yeah. They also thought in the movie, thought they were so clever. Oh look, we transport a bomb!

Bunny: That’s the first thing it would’ve been used for.

Chris: The first thing. It would’ve been used for.

Oren: Some of the shows have done that too, and it’s annoying then too. Like guys, come on. We have to pretend we can’t do this, or the show doesn’t work.

Chris: Just like all the episodes where it’s like, okay, how about we solve this deadly disease by just running a person through the transporter and modifying them during transport? No, we need to pretend we can’t do that or else no medical drama works.

Oren: My favorite weird historical weapons are the ones that you hear about and they sound like a terrible idea, and then you see how they were used and it turns out that they were exactly as terrible as they sounded.

Bunny: “Why would someone do that? It must have a point.” Oh, oh child. Nope.

Oren: My favorite, my absolute favorite is the spar torpedo. ‘Cause back in the day, torpedo actually was just a synonym for what we would now call mines, just a floating explosive that a ship would run into. Nowadays they’re self-propelled weapons. But that wasn’t the terminology way back in the day. When they were making the first – or actually the second, the first one was during the Revolutionary War, but that’s a different story – the second combat submarine known to exist during the Civil War, and they were thinking of how to arm it. They thought, okay, what if we put a torpedo on the end of a long stick?

Bunny: I see where this is going…

Oren: And then we pedaled up to the other ship, ’cause this was a pedal driven submarine, and hit the other ship with our torpedo on the end of a stick and blow ’em up.

Bunny: Gotta be a pretty long stick.

Oren: Yeah. And so you can see the immediate problem with this is that this requires you to be very close to the ship when your torpedo goes off. For a long time, we didn’t know what happened to that submarine, the CSS Hunley, because it never returned from its mission when it was able to sink a single Union ship. But we eventually found it and did a bunch of studies, and right now the main theory of why it sank was that everyone on board was killed instantly by the torpedo explosion.

Bunny: Wow. Who would’ve thunk, you know?

Chris: But did they test the radius of the torpedo explosion?

Oren: They absolutely did not.

Bunny: This was before math, Chris.

Chris: Before math!

Oren: You have to understand how cursed this submarine was, okay? This submarine literally killed two entire crews in training.

Bunny: Oh God.

Oren: It got to the point where the Confederate naval personnel would not go inside it because it was a death trap, and so they had to get Army people to take it out on its mission. This is the most cursed ship you have ever heard of. It’s very grim, but I also love it.

Bunny: Save the submarines for a different war, guys.

Oren: Yeah, they’re not ready yet.

Bunny: They’re not quite there. Speaking of ships, when I was doing research for this episode, I learned of the claw of Archimedes.

Oren: Yeah!

Bunny: Which is just a very funny title, and it’s basically, I guess like a grappling hook that grabs an enemy ship, lifts it up, and then either drops it, turns it, or chucks it, and it sinks the ship. It’s just a big hand that grabs ships and sinks them.

Oren: Yeah. It doesn’t really work though ’cause the game is rigged so that the claw can’t actually grab onto the ship for long enough to get it over to the prize. So you have to put in more coins.

Bunny: A claw. A claw! You know, I have gotten a plushie with a claw of Archimedes. 

Oren: What? No, you, that’s impossible!

Bunny: I know. I did it once!

Oren: Some kind of chosen one.

Bunny: I got a branded bee.

Oren: Mm. Very nice. So it should be noted that the claw of Archimedes is probably made up, but Archimedes is a real person – or was a real person, he’s probably not still alive – but a lot of the things he’s credited with inventing probably never happened. Like the claw of Archimedes, that’s probably fake. There’s that idea that he had the soldiers shine light from their shields and burn other ships as they were coming in. That probably didn’t happen, but it’s a neat idea. In a fantasy setting, you could probably make it work.

Bunny: Is that the same thing or a different thing than Greek fire?

Oren: Greek fire? Okay. All right. All right. Hang on. I gotta talk about Greek fire.

Bunny: Go off, Oren.

Oren: Okay, so first of all, it should be called Roman fire because it was invented in the Byzantine AKA Eastern Roman Empire. Mm-Hmm. Take that, historians destroyed by facts and logic! So Greek fire is just a general catch-all term we have for a kind of incendiary liquid that was used by the Eastern Romans from around, I think the nine hundreds, probably a little earlier than that. And they used it to protect Constantinople from various invading fleets. And it should be noted that they were not the only ones to have incendiary fluids. Incendiary fluids have been used for basically forever in warfare, but Greek fire, at least from the history records that we have, seems to have been more effective than whatever anyone else was using at the time. But it gets confusing because the term Greek fire got so popular that people would start using it for any kind of incendiary liquid. Often it’s hard to tell if this thing that they’re talking about is the same as the really famous Greek fire. But Greek fire basically made the Byzantine navy unbeatable for a certain stretch of time because there was just, there’s no answer to it. If you don’t have a gunpowder weapon and your enemy ship has a flamethrower… sorry, that’s over.

Chris: This is maybe an odd question, but were the flames from Greek fire a normal color?

Oren: Last time I checked, there’s different reports on that.

Chris: Oh, really?

Bunny: Interesting.

Oren: Yeah. ‘Cause we don’t really know exactly what it was made of. There are different ideas, but like the actual formulas for what the Byzantines were using were so tightly guarded that we don’t have them anymore. And that may have actually been why the Byzantine stopped using it after a while because it’s such a small circle that eventually they lost it.

Bunny: Well, that’s embarrassing.

Oren: There are illustrations that show them as orange and red flames, but I believe there are accounts that describe them in different colors, so it’s likely that they may have had different colors because who knows what was in there.

Chris: I think in Game of Thrones there’s what’s clearly Greek fire-

Oren: Yeah, alchemist fire.

Chris: -clearly inspired by Greek fire, that’s green flames or something like that.

Oren: As far as I know, there isn’t a lot of evidence that Greek fire burned green. I think that’s a George R. R. Martin invention, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

Chris: I mean, it’s certainly a cool image. Works great on film. One of my favorites when it comes to weird weapons is the point of view gun-

Oren: Yeah, that one’s great.

Chris: -that’s added to the Hitchhiker movie. It’s not from the book. They added it during the app adaptation, but it’s cool, so, when you shoot somebody, they understand your point of view on the situation.

Bunny: Okay, that’s great.

Chris: So it helps you win the argument. The description of it is weirdly gender essentialist though, because the movie explains its history by like a coalition of angry housewives that wanted their husbands to understand them and that it supposedly doesn’t have much effect on women because their empathy is high already.

Bunny: What?

Chris: It’s like, okay, we don’t, that’s weird. We don’t need to go there.

Oren: Look. I will accept that a group of housewives had to create this weapon because patriarchal standards make it so that men are not supposed to understand each other. But don’t tell me that one gender is inherently more empathetic. Come on guys, we can do better.

Bunny: And does that imply that women always empathize with the other side of an argument? Because that is emphatically not the case. I’ve had enough arguments with friends in philosophy class to know that.

Chris: But I like that because there is still almost something weapon-ish about it, in that if you’re having an argument, you could use it as part of your argument, but it’s also just entirely peaceful.

Bunny: But it is a gun!

Oren: I also really like historical weapons that sound like they should be superweapon game changers. And it turned out they weren’t. And so then you get a lot of people being like, why didn’t they use this thing more? And then that leads to weird conspiracy theories, which are very fun. I mean, fun to learn about. One of my favorites is the air rifle, which is an invention from around the late 17 to early 1800s, which was literally a gun that was fired using compressed air instead of gunpowder. And it had a really high rate of fire ’cause you didn’t have to do the whole ramming a ball down the barrel thing and it could fire in the rain more easily. It didn’t produce any smoke, so it seems like a wonder weapon. Why isn’t everyone using these? And so you get these weird conspiracy theories about how Napoleon hated them and would kill anyone who was using one, and none of that’s true. The reason is that they were really expensive and hard to make and had a tendency to catastrophically fail when you were using them. So that’s why. But they’re just a very fun weapon to imagine.

Bunny: “Eight Weird Weapons – Napoleon Hates Number Four!” One weird one that I learned about was apparently still in use – by, of course, the police, of all things – is the man catcher, or rather the person catcher, it will catch you either way. And it was used for pulling people off of horses. It’s basically those sticks with a little grabby thing on the end that you use to pick up trash. It’s basically that, but human sized.

Chris: What?

Bunny: And then it has spikes all over it.

Chris: Oh!

Bunny: Yeah. So you grab someone off their horse and they’re presumably wearing armor, so the spikes don’t kill them, but it could kill them and the police use it. They don’t have the spikes currently. But very funnily, in my opinion, people in India were using this to capture fugitives during covid so that they could social distance while they were arresting people.

Chris: Wow.

Oren: You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.

Chris: But it’s for grabbing people off their horses.

Bunny: Yeah, but it can be just used for grabbing people too. It’s like a big trash picker upper, but for people.

Chris: Woof. That’s very strange.

Oren: I feel like that’s gonna become an overpowered weapon in the Avatar setting,  because in Avatar, any weapon that is at least theoretically non-lethal is super good because they can’t kill or cut anyone, hence the prevalence of bolas in Avatar. Everyone loves bolas.

Chris: Right? So many bolas. So Hawkeye has an arrow that shoots bolas. I don’t know how that works, but apparently he has one.

Oren: My favorite thing about his bola arrow is that he also has at least one arrow that just like traps you in foam, which is obviously a more effective way to-

Chris: I like the big purple foam arrow. That’s cool.

Bunny: That sounds goofy.

Oren: I can only imagine that the purple foam arrow is more expensive. So he is like, “I’m on a budget, man. I retired from the Avengers. Tony Stark’s not paying for all my arrows anymore.”

Chris: So your bola arrow is like the poor man’s big purple foam arrow.

Oren: Yeah, exactly. Some video games make you track ammo, so you have to keep your very best ammo for the boss. And for the minions, it’s like, all right, I guess I’ll use bola arrows for these guys.

Bunny: Oh, what he should be doing is using heat clip arrows.

Chris: They even in the show, this one was kind of a joke, but he apparently has a USB arrow.

Bunny: Look, when your computer is on the other side of the room…

Oren: The problem with the USB arrow is that it wouldn’t work because to plug in a USB, you have to try to plug it in once, not work, take it out, turn it over. It still doesn’t work. You take it out and you turn it over a third time and now it works.

Chris: Maybe the arrow does that. You don’t know.

Oren: I’ve seen it. It doesn’t do that!

Chris: Maybe you just shoot three arrows, so you shoot one one way and then the other way, and then back the first way.

Bunny: You gotta rotate them.

Oren: It always goes in perfectly the first time, and my suspension of disbelief is ruined!

Bunny: That’s the most unrealistic thing in that show.

Oren: I do find it funny on Star Trek when they’re trying to come up with a unique weapon for aliens because there’s only so many ways you can put variety on like a point and shoot laser weapon, at least with the budget Star Trek is usually working with, so you’ve got like the Ferengi laser whips, which is just… sure, what if you had a phaser, but you also had to make this really awkward arm swing motion to use it? How do you aim that?

Bunny: There is that- we referenced the urumi, which is the whip-sword-whip. You can stick a bunch of these into a hilt and swing around and whip people with it. I guess it’s sort of like that.

Oren: The phase whip is supposed to be a ranged weapon.

Bunny: Oh.

Oren: It’s a whip, but when you crack the whip, it shoots a bolt of energy.

Bunny: What?

Chris: Why would you do that? A gun is so much easier!

Oren: Because the Ferengi, back in early TNG when we thought the Ferengi were gonna be the big bads of Star Trek-

Chris: Oh, isn’t it that first weird one where they’re super goofy and they’re introduced?

Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The laser whip stuck around for a few episodes after that, but then they retired them and just decided that Ferengi used phasers like everyone else, but they had a different shape of phaser.

Chris: That honestly reminds me, because it seems like it would be dangerous to the Ferengi, of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber handguards. The things on the sword that stick out on either side, they’re to protect your hands. Okay? They’re not to kill your opponent with, so making them a burning laser is not a good idea.

Bunny: Just get a little stabby stabby when you get really close to your opponent and you can’t impale them on the big one. You gotta like, stabby stabby on the side.

Chris: You’re just more likely to burn yourself with that at that point.

Oren: Man, okay. So there are like pages and pages of discourse on this because if you look closely at Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, you can see that the energy bits don’t come directly out of the handle. There are sections of just metal, and then the energy comes out of those. So at least in theory, if he slides his hand too far forward, he’s not just gonna burn it up on lightsaber stuff. But then this raises the question of what happens if someone else slides their lightsaber down the sword, which is the whole point of a handguard. Aren’t they just gonna cut through those little emitters? Which then led to the fan theory, I think propounded by Stephen Colbert, that those are not emitters, that those are actually just conduits and the lightsaber bits are coming off of the main one. It is so confusing.

Bunny: What? They wanted it to look cool.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, clearly they’re designed to look like handguards. That’s clearly what they’re inspired by. So regardless of the technical design, if you look closely, that’s what they’re supposed to be reminiscent of.

Bunny: Yeah. But what if he swung them around and it made a crack and then he shoots you? 

Oren: Lightsabers are just a weapon that if you think about them for five seconds, you realize just how incredibly silly they are and how nothing about them makes any sense. So I just generally advise against making me think about the mechanics of lightsabers because like for example, I don’t want lightsaber fights where what people do is when they go to clash swords, one of them just turns off their lightsaber for a second and then turns it back on and kills you. That’s boring. I don’t want that kind of fight. A martial artist on YouTube pointed out that if lightsabers actually weighed nothing, the way you would use them is by kind of waving them around like a flashlight, and that also looks very silly. I don’t want that. So we just have to assume that lightsabers have weight somehow. Things like that.

Bunny: Like how far can you extend the blade?

Oren: Yeah. There are some of the books where the guy’s like, I have a nine foot lightsaber blade. Okay. At this point, why are you not just using a gun?

Bunny: I have a lightsaber where if you point it at someone and turn it on and off very quickly a beam shoots out and impales them.

Chris: Speaking of “why not gun,” I think we should talk about Omega’s laser bow on Bad Batch. 

Oren: Oh my gosh.

Chris: Okay, so for anyone who’s not seen Bad Batch, Bad Batch is about a bunch of clones in the Star Wars universe who end up defecting when the Republic turns into the Empire and leaving, and the clones start getting replaced with other recruits. So it’s a bunch of burly guys, and then they have a little girl with them. Her name is Omega, and so she needs to learn to fight. But instead of giving her a blaster, they give her this laser bow and it’s big and bulky and apparently takes strength to pull back, ’cause you know, bows, a conventional longbow, or even a shortbow takes a lot of strength to pull back. And we even establish that she’s having trouble with the amount of strength that it takes to pull this bow back, and that’s affecting her aim. But then instead of being like, okay, Omega, you need to go weightlift until you can have enough strength for this bow, they just have her keep shooting at a target. It’s like, clearly strength training is what she needs. But anyway, it’s big, it’s bulky and all it does is shoot the same kind of blaster fire that just a normal gun would shoot, that you wouldn’t need strength for.

Oren: And it doesn’t have a stun setting. It’s just an objectively worse weapon and she’s the worst person on the crew to have it.

Bunny: Oh, it is massive!

Oren: Yeah. It’s such a weird choice for her and every time she’s in a face-off with someone and she has pulled the string back, the laser string, and is holding it on someone and they’re holding a weapon on her, I just think of how hard it is to hold a bow string like that.

Chris: That takes a lot of strength. You can’t just-

Oren: I just keep expecting her to lose her grip on it after a while. ‘Cause even a trained archer can only hold that for a short amount of time. Yeah, that bow is so silly.

Chris: I understand the impulse to want to give her a signature weapon. It’s also like… pink.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Which opens questions about like, I mean, pink is fine, but did you give the girl a pink bow because she’s a girl?

Oren: Yeah. It becomes noticeable in that context. I noticed none of the burly guys have pink laser weapons.

Bunny: One has to wonder, we can only guess.

Oren: I also feel bad for sci-fi TV show prop designers who are trying to make alien melee weapons.

Chris: Oh, like the bat’leth?

Oren: Yeah, the bat’leth is the main example.

Chris: I mean, it looks cool with all its curvy blades, but yeah, probably wouldn’t actually make any sense to wield a bat’leth.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a very awkward weapon to try to use. It’s a big two-handed weapon with no reach and its swing is very awkward. And the way that you swing it, you’re trying to hit people with the spikes on the end, but the spikes are always at an angle to whoever you’re swinging it at. So you’re never getting full power from it. It’s just the weirdest weapon. But there are only so many ways to design a practical melee weapon, okay? And we’ve explored most of them as humans.

Chris: Okay, so, pointy object that is designed to hurt another person. There’s only so many optimal designs. It’s not that complicated. It’s actually very simple. You try to get creative, you’re just making it suboptimal.

Oren: Or at least the ways it is complicated are very hard to read on screen. You can look at two swords that to most people would look almost identical, but to a trained swordsmith, there’s a lot of differences.

Chris: Sure. Absolutely. But to a viewer, so, trying to make it seem cool to somebody who doesn’t know anything about weapons…

Bunny: And then there’s apparently, I was remembering there’s that episode of, I think we see these in the original series, but I could be wrong about that. Where Spock gets really horny.

Oren: Yeah!

Bunny: And has to go back and then he and Kirk fight each other with these big pizza spoon looking things.

Chris: What?

Oren: Those are spears that have a big half moon blade on them.

Bunny: Lirpas?

Oren: Yeah. Those are pretty silly looking. I’m trying to remember if that’s based on a real weapon or not.

Bunny: If it is, I’m lost. I could not tell you.

Oren: Because I mean, there are some odd looking weapons historically speaking, especially because sometimes it’s not clear if a weapon was ever really used or if it was ceremonial. There are a lot of swords that are in museums and stuff that look too big for a person to have ever used, and the two explanations for them are that they were either ceremonial, or that there are secretly giants that the Jews are hiding from us. So I’ll leave it to you, which one of those you think is correct. Speaking of Star Trek, I unironically love Kirk’s bamboo canon in the Gorn fight. I don’t care if it works or not. There’s internet discourse about whether or not you could actually make that work. And I’m on the record as “I do not give a crap.”

Chris: I’m not familiar with this cannon. Tell me about the cannon.

Oren: So this is the first Gorn episode and the Gorn are rude guys and an alien beams Kirk and a Gorn down to fight. ’cause why not? The Gorn is much bigger and physically more powerful than Kirk. And so Kirk figures out that he has all the things he needs to make gunpowder, and he uses a reinforced bamboo tube as the barrel, and then he uses diamonds as the ammunition. 

Bunny: Uhh…

Oren: And he builds this thing and he uses it and he shoots the Gorn and then doesn’t kill the Gorn, therefore showing that we have evolved as a species, and it’s great. I love that part.  Fantastic episode. Except for the part where we just let the Gorn get away with murdering a bunch of people for no reason.

Bunny: Well, I’ll keep that survival tip in my back pocket in case I ever have bamboo, diamonds and gunpowder.

Oren: Mythbusters did an episode where they tried to recreate it and they couldn’t get it to work. I think their conclusion was that the bamboo is just not strong enough and that it would explode.

Bunny: Fancy that.

Oren: But there are competing claims. There are other people online who claim to have made something similar. So I think it is conceivably possible. As an engineering obstacle, it might be too much for Kirk to realistically overcome, but wooden cannons are not unheard of in history. They have happened. They’re just- obviously metal is better. I have never tried it. I just know that there’s discourse about whether or not this would actually work.

Bunny: So, I know we’re running out of time here, but I wanna mention one more, and I’m curious if either of you have heard of it. I think it’s the Panjandrum.

Chris: A drum.

Bunny: So it’s basically a steel drum full of explosives – This was in World War II – put between two big wheels, giant wagon wheels that were propelled by rockets. Rockets around the rim of these wheels.

Oren: Yeah, why not? It seems like a fun day at the beach.

Bunny: Yeah. And then you light the rockets and set the thing going and it just rolls through whatever barrier you put in front of it. For some reason it was never used, which is sad.

Oren: There are a lot of very odd weapons that you can find in World War I and II.

Chris: So it was supposed to basically carry explosives into something.

Bunny: Yeah. The ultimate goal is to bust down big defenses like concrete walls and fortresses, and it could get up to 60 miles per hour with these rockets on it.

Chris: So if you have a flat, no man’s land, whatever, that you don’t want a person to go on. You set this thing rolling into the wall with a bunch of explosives. And the idea is that it hits the wall and then explodes.

Bunny: Yeah. And like crashes through it. And it’s to get a tank sized hole in it, so then you can get your tank through it. And the best way to do that is a rolling ball of explosive death.

Oren: Well, maybe not the best way.

Bunny: [laughing] No. Shut up Oren!

Oren: As it turns out…

Bunny: Shush!

Oren: Alright. With that we will, I think, call this weird episode to a close.

Bunny: Closing it with a bang.

Oren: Ah!

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

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons who help make sure we can afford to research all of these bizarre weapons, which, you know, is a very important process. I think you’ll all agree.  First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Finally, there’s Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. We will talk to you next week.

[Music]

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

Tension comes from problems that the characters have to solve, and if a character is important, they should contribute to solving the problem in question. But how will they contribute, exactly? This question can be difficult to answer, especially if you have a bunch of characters with different power levels on team good. Fortunately, we’ve got a few suggestions for you!

Show Notes

• Animal Companions 
• Avatar Beach Episode 
• Echo 
• Tech
• The Winchester Brothers 
• Toph 
• The Buffy Gang 
• The Fellowship 
• Cersei 
• Margaery 
• Holly Munro
• Counselor Troi 
• Temeraire 
• The Northman 
• Ops 
• First Officers 

Transcript

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.

[Intro Music]

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

Oren: …Oren…

Chris: …and…

Bunny: …Bunny.

Chris: Okay, quick. We all need to make sure we are contributing to this podcast, or the post author might decide we’re superfluous and erase our existence. 

Bunny: Oh, no!

Chris: Oren, what’s your contribution? 

Oren: I have one joke that I make all the time, and it’s the same joke, and it was really funny the first time, so it’ll probably be funny the next 500 times.

Chris: I see nothing wrong with this. Bunny?

Bunny: I’m the pretty lady who walks around and shows you the car you can win on the game show.

Chris: Ohh, very good.

Oren: That is very useful.

Chris: So, for me, is providing the intro enough? Am I done now?

 Oren: You served a purpose early in the story, so that should work for the rest of it, right? You can just hang around for the rest of the story and not worry about anything.

Chris: Yeah. Or just, like, engage in active listening, just to remind people that I am still here. I haven’t disappeared, I swear. But I won’t actually provide any information, or offer any tips.

Bunny: We could just imagine you leaning forward and nodding intently. [Oren laughs]

Chris: Yeah, with the same body language every time, because we’ve got to change it up.

Bunny: It’s like when you’re playing a video game and the animation begins to loop, but it’s active, don’t worry.

Oren: Oh, it’s a podcast idle animation? [general laughter]

Bunny: Yeah. It comes with a track that goes, “Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah.” 

Chris: [laughing] This time, we’re talking about how to give protagonists a way to contribute. Basically, the reason why is because you need every character to make a difference. So, from a plot perspective, you should not be able to cut a character out and have nothing change, right? That’s bad. They’re just not gonna feel like they belong there. They’re going to feel extra and useless.

And then, also, contributing helps make your secondary protagonist in particular more likable. When they help the main character, they really do come across better. Whereas if you have a side character that is constantly creating trouble for the main character, maybe they’re just always getting into trouble and the main character always has to bail them out, and they’re never actually helping anything, they get really annoying.

Oren: Why would you personally attack animal companions everywhere, Chris? [laughter]

Bunny: Like the lady showing the cars, they can just be cute, right?

Chris: If they’re cute, and they’re not contributing, but they’re also not hindering…. but animal companions, you also don’t really have to develop them or invest in them that much, like they’re not there. [laughing] Which is a low…I think we can usually do better than that, but I’ve seen worse. The other nice thing about getting your protagonist to contribute is that it just helps distribute the candy among Team Good, or Team Evil–in some cases, stories, generally not narrated stories, film stories, will have a Team Evil. I’m thinking about like the beach episode, which I know Oren hates the beach episode of Avatar, the Last Airbender.

Oren: I don’t love it. It’s not my favorite. [Oren and Chris laugh]

Bunny: Refresh my memory?

Chris: So this is when we have an episode where Zuko and Azula…they all hang out on the beach.

Bunny: They brood.

Chris: Yeah. In some situations, if you have a Team Evil with charismatic characters, it may be helpful to also make sure they’re all contributing, just because anybody who does not contribute, they feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick. They feel like they’re not being treated as well by the story, they’re getting more spinach, that kind of thing. And yeah, it can create resentment against the characters who are doing all the contributions, and make people sympathize with a character that never gets to contribute, or, again, make somebody annoyed with the person who doesn’t contribute, because they’re weighing everybody down and never helping.

Oren: If you introduce a team of characters, different people in the audience are gonna like different members of the team. And if those team members just become useless, then it sucks to watch, or read. This is a special topic to me, because it was one of the first times when I was a kid when I, like, distinctly noticed and identified a problem that was making me enjoy a story less.

Because I used to watch a lot of Cartoon Network anime when I was a kid, and I always noticed that Dragon Ball Z introduced this big group of characters, and then over the course of the show, a bunch of them just stopped mattering. But they were still there, like they never left. They just hung around and didn’t do anything, and I hated it, so much. Because naturally every character I picked as my favorite would end up being one that became useless.

Bunny: And the rest is history…

Oren: I could not catch a break. I was so upset. Okay, fine. This new guy, he’s got a sword and he’s also a Saiyin, so he’s gotta stay important for the whole show, right? No, he doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not Goku. Oh God, please stop. I hate you all.

Bunny: And thus, a critic was born. [Oren laughs]

Chris: It also helps to distinguish between the characters and remember the characters. I’m thinking of The Bad Batch, which is a Star Wars cartoon, where in the beginning, the character Echo just doesn’t do anything.  And the problem is that there’s a repetitive skillset between him and Tech. They’re both like tech people. And so it’s clear that the writers just don’t know how to help give him contributions. And so he just fades into the background like he’s not there. And he’s much less memorable, as a result. And we don’t really get to know him. We don’t remember what his personality is like, because we don’t ever hear him talking as much, and that kind of thing. How a character contributes can definitely help distinguish them in the group.

Oren: And–spoilers for the second season of Bad Batch–but that’s the reason why he leaves for a while, and then they kill Tech at the end of the season.  Because now, when Echo’s not around, we don’t have to deal with this problem of he and Tech competing for the same content, because he’s off doing something else. And then Tech is the obvious choice to die, because it’s tragic, we like him, but we also have a replacement ready. We still have a tech character, someone who does tech problems. So when Tech dies, the team doesn’t lose anything that we need to make the story work, which is what would happen if we lost any of the other characters.

Bunny: Yeah, except for he was the only one who had just a hint of romance. I’m like, why…

Oren: I’m not saying I liked his death…

Bunny: …and why did you bait me with a romance? And then… [laughing]

Oren: I’m just saying that’s the reason they picked him to die, because they had a replacement ready. [laughing]

Bunny: Is there any story that you think didn’t have enough team members?

Oren: Didn’t have enough team members? Hmm.

Bunny: Yeah. There’s probably a lot of stories where you’re like, “that team member was unnecessary,” but was there one where you felt they were lacking?

Oren: Supernatural.

Bunny: [laughing]

Oren: Supernatural, it definitely became noticeable after a while that they would recruit allies, and then those allies would just leave, and sometimes they would kill them off, and then sometimes they wouldn’t. And it just got to feel strange, after a while? It just, it seems like they should know more people by now.

Chris: Yeah. I do think that–Supernatural had like 15 seasons, right? And so we’ve got these two brothers, and I think the problem is that after a while, they just end up rehashing their issues, or they become such different people in order to keep their interactions fresh. It’s like, how much interpersonal drama can you do with just two people over 15 seasons, you know? [laughing]

Oren: I watched a mere seven seasons, and…

Bunny: [dramatic outraged voice] Fake fan!

Oren: You could already see they were at a point where they were just switching off between Sam and Dean of which one would have the arc of going too far this season. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Who is it? Is Sam going too far this season, or is it Dean who’s going too far this season? Because they’re always doing that arc.

Chris: So potentially if you had, like, a novel series, and you liked a lot of interpersonal stuff, two characters might not be enough, and you would probably have room to bring in other skills, another person, that kind of thing.

If you have one person, a story could definitely work with one person, like The Martian, for instance. But sometimes the second person is really helpful in creating some contrast, making some foils of each other, and bringing somebody to life. Yeah, there are instances, but it’s much more likely to go towards the other end. 

Oren: There are a few stories that I can think of where the team doesn’t really feel complete until they add a certain character. But I’m not sure that’s an issue of there not being enough of them. Like with Avatar, honestly, watching the first season of Avatar now is a little bit of a chore, because Toph’s not there, and I love Toph so much that she really completes the group. So having her not there feels like something is missing.

Chris: But that might be because–you might not have noticed the first time you watched.

Oren: If Toph had never been there, or if I had never gotten to the second season, I doubt I would’ve felt like there weren’t enough characters in Avatar.

Bunny: I feel like bringing up Toph also raises an important thing with characters, which is that they need to not just contribute different things, but also feel like different people. Which should go without saying, but Toph is memorable, not only because she’s the earthbending master, but she’s got, like, an attitude, and she’s got a different appearance, which, some teams don’t manage that.

Oren: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a character who overlaps with another character, you have to really have a lot of that to go around. If you’re gonna have multiple fighters on your team, you need to have a lot of fighting.

Chris: I think a really good example of that is actually how many information gathering characters you have in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because, you wouldn’t think that would be important, but anytime you have a monster of the week episode, usually part of that is figuring out, “Okay, what is this new monster we just encountered? How do we defeat that monster?” And so there is research, or information gathering, that has to basically be done for most episodes. And so a bunch, a whole bunch of the characters, they just do it in different ways, and that makes them more distinctive. Like, Giles looks at books. Whereas Buffy, she also gathers information, but she does it by scouting, and therefore going directly into danger, because she’s also a fighting character. Spike networks, right? He knows all the demons…

Bunny: …he has on LinkedIn. [Oren laughs]

Chris: So he talks to them, and then, some people have psychic powers, science, there’s a whole bunch of different ways, but it’s all about finding clues and information. And because the show has so much of that, they have room for a whole bunch of characters that do that, in different ways.  Whereas, if you have a story that’s lots of fights and doesn’t have much conversation, you might only have room for one social character.

Oren: Yeah. And then when it comes to, like, aesthetic, or personality, or attitude, I don’t think you really want characters that double up on that unless you’re specifically trying to contrast them. If you have two goths on the team, you would probably wanna show what makes them different kinds of goths, as opposed to just having them both be goths, because then it would feel like they’re cramping each other’s style. 

Bunny: Yeah, and it also–style, attitude, appearance, those sorts of things can’t be the only thing making them different. Otherwise you’ve just got, like, “fighter, but this one’s wearing a different hat”.

Chris: Going back to Bad Batch, let’s say we have Tech and Echo. If they had lots of conflicts involving technology, and then they, for instance, made Tech so that he, like, makes things or repairs things, and Echo does all of the hacking, does all the software, and Tech does all the hardware, or something, that could have worked. And I think the issue was that the show didn’t have enough need of a technology character to fill two roles.

Bunny: Yeah, subspecialties help.

Oren: And it becomes easier with similar roles, again, if you are putting them into some kind of contrasting or competitive situation. Like in Lord of the Rings, Aragorn and Boromir work decently because even though they have very similar roles and contributions to give, they are somewhat antagonistic towards each other. Boromir, at least, is not super into Aragorn until the end, spoilers. And Gimli and Legolas don’t really become super prominent until the second book when they start, like, getting into competitions to see who can kill the most Orcs, right? Like in the first book, they’re both just kind of there. They’re hanging around, they’ll be there eventually. 

Chris: If you need more things for characters to do, oftentimes the kind of support roles are easy to overlook, but you can make them relevant. So that includes healing, repairing people’s equipment, getting people fed, or logistics things, like mapping the area, being a guide. All those kinds of things that support all of the other characters in a team. 

Bunny: Think about making an RPG party. You’ve got the sneaky one, you’ve got the fighty one, you’ve got the magic one.

Chris: Yeah. Don’t forget the social one. In some stories, social is like the equivalent of fighting. Where there are lots of social conflicts, and actually, Game of Thrones, for all its fights, it’s surprisingly like this, right? There are tons of social conflicts in Game of Thrones, and lots of different social characters who engage in social conflicts in different ways. So Cersei is always, like, leveraging her power against other people, where Margaery is always using charm to get people on her side.

Oren: Yeah, so that’s what I call a shared task type situation, where there is a thing that your characters engage in so often that you can have multiple characters who do that thing and not have them step on each other. So in Game of Thrones, you can easily have multiple political characters. Now, of course, in Game of Thrones, they’re often on different sides. But even if some of them are on the same side, there is so much political drama in Game of Thrones that you can have multiple characters on the same team doing that, and it’s not so much of a problem.

With support characters, the two things to look out for are, one, make sure to show that their support actually matters, and show how and why it does. Because in theory, the character Holly in Lockwood & Co. is a support character, but her support doesn’t matter. Like the story just doesn’t know how to show why it matters. And so she’s just around for most of the story.

Chris: I do think that one of the things to think about that, is, do you need the character to stay in one place, or move, go into danger, right? Because Lockwood & Co. is very much a story that really focuses on the characters going into danger. And it does have scenes where they’re at their, like, home base, but a lot of the important stuff actually happens at danger. And so, the problem with Holly just doing her support stuff is it leaves her at home base, and she doesn’t travel with them for all of those dangerous scenes. So sometimes it’s something that you need to think about. Okay, if Holly’s providing support, how does she provide it? Is there a kind of essential support she needs to provide while they are out at a haunted house getting rid of some ghosts that might fit the urgency of the situation? Maybe some of the support keeps people safe in those emergency situations, and she has a reason to be there. And then you can see how she helps in an emergency, and that makes a difference.

Oren: And you also wanna make sure you don’t add a support character when you’re planning to do a bunch of stories that depend on the support not working. And I’m not only talking about Troi from The Next Generation, but I am definitely talking about Troi from The Next Generation. [Bunny and Chris laughing] Because so many Next Generation plots depend on protagonists having, like, serious mental health problems that they don’t get any support for. Which is weird, that’s not how we think of The Next Generation, but there are a surprising number of plots where that’s the case. And so as a result, Troi cannot help them, because if she helped them, then their problem would be resolved, and then we wouldn’t have a plot anymore.

Chris: I can think of at least two episodes where Troi literally goes to Captain Picard and tells Picard that he has to do it, instead of her. This person needs, you know, this boy from this super patriarchal planet needs, like, a man to tell him, give him directions. He won’t listen to me. Or, I think there was another one with Data. Data won’t admit that he’s having emotional problems because he doesn’t have emotions, but he is, and he needs you to do it, Picard, or something. [laughing] And it’s just, it’s sad, because it’s like, why don’t we let Troi do her job? But you wouldn’t have an interesting variety of internal conflicts, if Troi always fixed it by just sitting down and doing her job.

Oren: Yeah. And when they really want someone to talk to a more nurturing support character in TNG, they almost always use Guinan. And, like, I get it. I like Whoopi Goldberg, too. So I’m not even mad that they wanna use Guinan for that role, but, like, you have a main character whose job this is…why. [laughter] You wanna be careful with that one. [Oren laughs]

Chris: If you do have a big team, and okay, sometimes this happens, where, you’ve done the thing, you’ve added too many characters, right? And now you’re like in book two [laughter] and it’s hard to get rid of them, and you’re trying to figure out how to make the best of it. In general, we try to keep characters together, but for really big, important conflicts, like big fights or battles, or something like that, splitting characters up does really help.

I’ll give them a task, something like, one group distracts people–the enemy–while the other one attacks something or steals something. One group sneaks in somewhere, unlocks it to let the others in. One group, maybe, if they’re doing a con, dresses up as security, while the other ones act like they’re thieves, that kind of thing. So, if you have lots of people, and you have to find a way for them all to contribute during big conflicts, it can be helpful to think of a strategy that requires more than one role that’s happening simultaneously, and then split them into smaller groups. And then once they’re in the smaller groups, you may need to think about, okay, they’re sneaking in somewhere. Let’s give it a lock that has to be picked, for our lock picking character, and then let’s give us a guard that we have to talk our way past for the social character, to split it into multiple stages, or something like that.

Oren: What you have to do then, is you have to plan a plot that is robust enough to require a bunch of people.

Bunny: A plot? I don’t know…

Oren: Yeah, you have to bring plot into your characters, and you’ve got characters in my plot. Oh no!

Bunny: What is it driven by though? [everyone laughing]

Chris: Well, that’s how you make a character-driven story, you just add more characters! [laughter]

Oren: Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left! But like the Temeraire books, for example, have a lot of characters, and there’s a funny thing where they graduate the extras on the dragon crew to named main character status over time, so you end up with more and more of them. And it does a pretty good job, because that’s like an epic war story, so there’s a lot that needs to be done.

A story that doesn’t do as well is Shadowshaper, which, I like Shadowshaper, it’s good, but it does have a problem where the main conflict is that the protagonist needs to beat an evil wizard in a magic fight. And there just isn’t really much for the other characters to do, but there are a lot of other characters.

Chris: Yeah, I’ve sometimes seen these stories where it feels like what the writer really wants to do–I think in that case of Shadowshaper, it felt like the author really wanted to highlight the value of the community, which involves bringing in lots of characters, but then he didn’t have enough for all of those characters to do. And so they just…

Oren: You need a community action! What does it take a community to solve? Right? That’s the question you need to be asking yourself at that point.

Bunny: Raising a child. [Oren laughs]

Chris: Another tricky situation is if you have a super humble character in a group of heroes. Which sometimes we like those dynamics, and this is like the Frodo character, who is, “Oh, I’ve fallen in with all of these great heroes, but I’m just a normal farm boy.” [laughing] Whatever you have. How do you let that character, especially if this character is your main character, how do you give that person something to do?

I have a post for this, but obviously, Lord the Rings does it by giving Frodo a special, basically magical role, where Frodo is the best person to carry this ring. Other people can’t seem to handle it, so Frodo does it.  So you can do something like that. Any magical ability that is special really helps. Of course, that makes your character less humble, so you may not want that.

Those support tasks, again, we were talking about the fact that you do have to find ways that they matter. But I think of it this way, one, let’s say your support character is cooking for people. When might cooking really be crucial? Maybe in situations where everybody gets poisoned. Or maybe in situations where it’s actually that food is starting to get scarce, and you have to get creative. Or if they’re cleaning, maybe they find something that was lost, or repair something that everybody assumed couldn’t be repaired, or what have you. So those support tasks, they’re a little bit trickier to work with, but you can make them work, and it still leaves your character feeling humble, even if they make a big difference.

And then you can also–again, this is ad hoc–what you really want the most is a skill that can reliably give them a way to contribute, for every character, ongoing. So if you have to depend on how you arrange the specific events in the plot to make them matter, that’s gonna be really hard because yeah, you can do it one or two times. It’s gonna get exhausting and logistically impossible if you rely on it all the time, but for a couple times, you could have, you know, nobody else is there, right? Your humble character has gone off by themself to go fetch some water. They run into an antagonist, for instance. That kind of thing. It’s just, you can’t rely on that all the time, and which is why it’s really important to give characters the right skillset so that you have a reliable way of letting them contribute.

Oren: Yeah, and that’s why so many humble characters have an arc where they, like, get more skilled, or learn how to use their powers, or something.

Chris: Right. That’s also just good wish fulfillment.

Oren: It is. [laughter] You can also use a social connection as a way to make a character prominent when they otherwise wouldn’t be. This is like a common one, is that the character inherits something.

Bunny: Ah, a nepotism character.

Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Because now they’re responsible for it, whether they wanted it or not. “Congratulations, you are the king.” “Well, I don’t know how to be king.” “Well, deal with it,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve inherited this spooky ghost property,” or something. Now, the trick with that one is to not then surround them with friends who know how to handle the situation. Which is the thing I see authors do sometimes where they’re like, I know, I’ll make my main character a fish outta water who inherited like an evil spy business. And then I’ll give them like a bunch of spy friends who will just tell them what to do.

Bunny: Yeah. The main character has to be in that position. Even if they’re a fish out of water for story purposes, they need to seem like they should be there.

Oren: And if you have them, if the more experienced characters are people they can’t trust, then you can solve that problem, right? It’s just, if you give them like a random connection that makes them important, but then have a much more capable character who they can rely on, then they never have to do anything for themselves.

Chris: Strategizing is probably one of the skills that is most associated with your main character. Not always. There are some exceptions, like in Avatar, the Last Airbender, Aang isn’t really the strategist, but he’s important because he’s the Avatar, and so everybody trusts him, and puts a responsibility on him anyway, and that frees up Sokka to do the strategizing. But in most stories, your main character is like the idea person. And what really makes a difference is them coming up with plans and making decisions, and that can easily go away if you surround them with characters who are just a lot more experienced. It becomes harder to be, like, okay, how come my main character can come up with a good idea or a solution for this?

Oren: Yeah, that was the problem with The Northman, where he was supposed to team up with this lady, and she was supposed to use brains, and he was supposed to use brawn, but he was also the brains, ’cause he’s the main character, and the main character is usually the one coming up with the ideas. So she just was also in the movie.

Chris: That was super irritating. I think probably what they should have done in that situation is had her come up with plans, him start to follow the plan, and then something goes wrong. And then he has to do the improvising, when something goes wrong.

Oren: Yeah, that…I think that would’ve been better than what they did. [Oren and then Chris laugh] You can also make this easier for yourself if you create a setting that has prescribed niches that give characters specific skills that you know are gonna be important because that’s how you’re setting up the story. This is your basic Star Trek scenario, where everyone’s got a job, and because those jobs are all on the ship, they matter, presumably. You just need to know, make sure you know what those jobs are.  Like, no one actually knows what Ops does in Star Trek. It’s just the other guy, who isn’t steering the ship.

Bunny: They op, come on.

Oren: Yeah, they op. [Chris laughs] The only ops character who ever does anything is Data, because he’s also an android, and so he’s super overpowered. But if you look at the other Star Trek shows, the ops character is just hanging out. And sometimes he has a Russian accent, so that’s fun, I guess. [Bunny laughs softly]

Chris: At the same time, we still need, if they’re part of the main cast, when there’s an actual something that goes wrong in the Enterprise–they also still need to be involved in that. It doesn’t help if they, for instance, have a routine thing they do on the ship, like they’re the janitor, and there was no role for the janitor to play when something goes wrong. You can be vague what the ops person does. I think the ops person is just like whatever miscellaneous thing that we could use somebody for.

But we have a way, you know, there’s a pilot, for instance, and there’s a way in many of the conflicts where there’s some tricky piloting somebody has to do, because they’re sneaking a shuttle onto a planet, or what have you. And you have the chief engineer, and there’s again, in a lot of conflicts, there’s damage to the ship, in which case the chief engineer becomes really important. And having…the first officer one is probably the trickiest one to make work. It only works if they, again, have an away mission. So they have one person commanding the ship, and one commanding the away mission. The problem was with TNG, they always wanted Picard, after a while, to be in the middle of the action, and so Riker didn’t end up going onto as many away missions as he should have.

Oren: Yeah, that’s why most of the Star Trek shows give the first officer another job. Because otherwise, they’re just the emergency backup captain, and that’s just not much to hang your hat on. And Riker absolutely has that problem. There are a lot of episodes where Riker just has nothing to do because Picard is there. And, I mean, Chakotay has it so much worse in Voyager. Because he’s got nothing, and Janeway does all the captain-y stuff, and there’s nothing for Chakotay to do. But if you look at the original series, Spock is also the science officer, in Deep Space Nine, Kira is also the Bajoran officer, so she does all the Bajoran politics stuff. And in Enterprise, as much as I hate to praise Enterprise, T’Pol is the science officer again, so you don’t have to worry about that. Although Enterprise then has it so they give us a specific cool pilot guy who has been in space before, and has all this experience, and then they have Archer do all the piloting stuff.

Chris: They basically take all the piloting away from their actual pilot so that they can make their asshole captain do more cool things. Instead of their, like, one Black character.

Oren: Yeah, that was bad. I did not like that.

Chris: It was really bad.

Oren: All right, so with that sufficiently big “oof”, I think it is time to call this episode to a close. 

Chris: If you feel we contributed to the character roles in your story, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants

Oren: Perhaps we at least contributed an “oof”.  [general laughter] Before we go, I want to thank our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. And it should go without saying, that all of these people contribute to Mythcreants being here to annoy you in podcast form. [laughter] So we will talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

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

It’s well known that Mythcreants hates it when novels employ multiple viewpoints, but what if we didn’t? In a handful of specific situations, that is. Don’t want to get too wild here. This week, we’re discussing when additional POVs are actually good for your story, and why that’s the case. We discuss political drama, fraught relationships, groundbreaking cinema, and also whether readers need to know which floor everyone is on.

Show Notes

• Sauron 
• Saruman 
• Tyrion Lannister 
• Jack Torrance
• Santiago Singh
• Interlude 
• Maplecroft 
• Why Cliffhangers are Annoying 
• L (Death Note)
• Brown Girl in the Ring 
• Rashomon 
• Midnight Sun 
• Bean

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro Music]

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

Bunny: Bunny

Oren: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: I have a very serious question: when do multiple points of view actually work? Trick question! The answer is never. Moving on. Podcast over.

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: Down with multiple POVs. 

Bunny: Hey, in fairness, we are on a podcast sharing multiple POVs.

Oren: You could say we each have a unique and beautiful viewpoint we bring to the podcast.

Bunny: Contributing a personal flavor.

Chris: Yeah. The important thing is that when I talk, you know what it’s like to be where I am right now, which is in a completely different place across the country from where Bunny is. So, if you didn’t include me, how would you know what it’s like to be over on the West Coast? You just wouldn’t. You need to see the West Coast. Otherwise, you won’t know what’s happening there.

Bunny: Yeah, you could be keeping secrets.

Oren: I would argue that being on a different vertical plane in the same air column known as being upstairs is equally different and worthy of its own viewpoint.

Bunny: [Dramatic] If not for Oren, what would we do with those rooms? They might as well not even exist.

Oren: That’s the secret. It’s okay if they don’t.

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Oren: I do wanna talk a little bit about when multiple viewpoints are actually good for a story. Cause this is one of those things where we’re known for being very anti-multiple POV. Partly because we’re the only people who have that particular axe to grind and everyone thinks we’re weird.

It’s easy to stand out if your opinions are strange enough.

Bunny: To be fair, you have the article decrying multiple points of view, but you do also have several articles talking about how you can do them. And now a podcast.

Oren: Yeah. Now we can do it in audio form. Because that’s a thing. There’s a lot of people who listen to the podcast and don’t read our articles, so we have to have crossover selection.

Chris: Looking at when they don’t work is still helpful, in this case, to seeing when they do.

Oren: And if you know why they don’t work, you can be sure if you’re actually picking them correctly.

Bunny: We’ve gotta resist the temptation to just fall into complaining about them.

Oren & Christ: [laugh]

Oren: Okay, so the first one that comes to mind, I don’t know if it’s the most common, but it’s certainly the one that I use as my most common explanation, is a political drama.

And you can do political dramas with a single point of view. You don’t need multiple points of view, but they can provide some benefits and you can structure them so they don’t take things away from your story as well.

And these are usually conflicts that have, if not morally gray or equivalent, at least not completely black and white, good and evil. So not Lord of the Rings cause we don’t really need Sauron’s perspective. Or a perspective of whichever inherently evil orc we might follow around.

Chris: We might need to explain that because there are many people who do try to add the villain’s perspective. We have a whole article on why that’s usually a bad idea, not 100% of the time a bad idea.

Bunny: We also see glimpses of the villain’s points of view in Lord of the Rings.

Chris: Not in the book, just in the movie. They have Sauruman, they show scenes with him.

Bunny: Well, there’s him digging the Uruk-hai out of the gunk. I think we have a scene with that.

Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s actually in the books.

Oren: Yeah. The Lord of the Rings is not a book I would hold up as a beneficial example.

Chris: No, it’s not.

Oren: It is worth noting that movies often have to cut away to what the villain is doing because that is simply the most efficient way for you to know what the villain is doing. Movies are under much tighter constraints when it comes to information portrayal.

The reason why I say not Lord of the Rings when it comes to political drama is that Sauron’s perspective is not interesting. Sauron is a perfectly good villain. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with Dark Lord evil villains, but the thing that makes them good villains is not their nuanced take on the world.

Honestly, Sauruman is more interesting cause Sauruman was a good guy and switched sides cause he thought it was impossible for the good guys to triumph. I still don’t know if that justifies him having a POV. I would say no, but he is a little more interesting as a perspective than Sauron is.

Chris: You have to know what the effect is of giving a character a POV.

One thing is it sets expectations about how important that character is. If a character has a POV, they’re considered a significant character, but also it helps you understand them. And in doing that, it helps humanize them and helps you sympathize with them.

And these are not things that you want for a Sauron. They’re what you want for a more sympathetic character, which is why it works so well for gray conflicts. Because when you have multiple people fighting against each other and none of them is strictly the good guy or the bad guy. That’s a situation in which it makes sense to humanize both of them and make both of them sympathetic, and then really dig into what their perspective is and then help understand why they disagree with each other so much, even though they’re not terrible people.

Oren: And it’s often a question of who you want to pick as your POV character. There’s a reason why in Game of Thrones, we have Tyrion as our Lannister viewpoint character, and not Tywin. Tywin’s not Sauron, but his point of view isn’t that interesting. Tywin is basically, I want power and money, and I will kill anyone I have to kill to get it. Tywin is a fun, intimidating, big bad, but he’s not an interesting POV character, whereas Tyrion very much is.

Bunny: I think it’s worth noting though that viewpoint characters don’t necessarily have to be in conflict with each other. It’s just that in political dramas at least, they often are.

Oren: This is one place where it can really help to have POV characters on both sides of a complicated political conflict.

Bunny: Yeah, and I mentioned keeping secrets, and that’s also something that you can’t do in one point of view, right?

Chris: Yeah. If you have a character who has a secret and would not talk to anybody about it, adding their POV can be a way of delving into that. Especially if they’re doing things that the audience does not understand and doesn’t seem to make any sense, or you want people to sympathize with them more.

They are coming off like a jerk, but there is a important emotional reason they’re being a jerk and you want to make it so they are more likable despite being a jerk. A POV is also really good for that.

Not usually what you want for a big, bad life of Sauron, but some other villains sometimes that is what you want.

I think a good example is in The Shining where you have this family hanging out in this haunted hotel. Jack, the father basically becomes a murderer cause he’s seduced by this hotel.

It’s clear that Stephen King wants readers to root for this family to work things out and stay together. He doesn’t want the reader to just write jack off and be like, nevermind, that guy can just go die somewhere. He wants them to understand his mindset and see his decline because that’s interesting to see the way that he slowly moves towards being more and more enraptured by this hotel, falling to his worst habits and patterns.

The story is, because it has a haunted hotel, scary enough even if we sympathize with Jack. So that works really well to give him a POV.

Oren: It occurs to me we should probably cover maybe the fundamentals of what it is that helps multiple POVs work. I maybe jumped right into a specific example before I should have. That’s the wonder of podcasts, everybody.

The thing that’s most important, and we’ve talked about this a couple of times in our articles, is that these POVs have to be part of the same story. What happens in one POV has to be obviously relevant to what happens in the other points of view. If they’re off doing their own thing, even if it’s a political conflict, that doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re gonna bring them together at the end, which is the thing I see a lot. We need to be able to tell from the beginning why these characters matter to each other, whether they are on the same side or on opposite sides.

Chris: And just to go into some of the reasons why that is: if the viewpoint characters are affecting each other. What one character does in their viewpoint has an impact on what happens in the other viewpoints.

It raises engagement when that happens because then if the reader cares about only one of those viewpoint characters, they still have a reason to be engaged when they leave and go to a different viewpoint character. Because what that viewpoint character does will actually affect the character that they like. So, it gives them more reasons to care what’s happening.

Oren: Yeah. You never end up with a situation where suddenly you get pulled away from this character you like, and now you have to spend a bunch of time with someone you don’t care about who’s doing nothing you care about. Cause they’re all connected, baby!

Chris: If they’re all silos, they’re all doing their own thing, the book’s time is divided between different independent stories. Each story gets much less time and each story only moves forward at a slow crawl. So, you get to see just a tiny bit of one story and then it cuts off and then you have to get through several other viewpoints before you go back to that story and see the plot move forward just a little bit again.

Whereas if they’re interconnected when you switch viewpoint, that story that you just experiencing before is still moving forward. The story actually comes to a conclusion, feels like it’s coming to a conclusion more, and that’s a lot more satisfying and rewarding.

Bunny: I think it’s worth noting that there can be degrees of separation from the main story, and if the degree gets greater, you have a greater risk of losing people.

Characters can be in the same scene and working on the same problem between their viewpoints, and that’s the close end of the spectrum. And then characters can be both working on the throughline, but in completely different ways. That’s the series’ throughline. And for me at least, those are the ones that start losing me because there will be two high tension situations, but they’re completely, or almost completely disconnected.

We know that the characters know each other and they’re working towards the same goal or whatever, but they’re far apart in space and facing down different antagonists or sub antagonists. And every time it cuts, I’m like, I just wish it were continuous.

Oren: They have to be obviously affecting each other, right?

It probably shouldn’t be We’re two characters fighting a war and we’re fighting the same guy, so we’re part of the same story, but we’re both on different planets fighting different battles, and it’s not really obvious how one of our battles affects the other one. That’s probably too distant.

Chris: Location is a fairly good way to start looking at how connected they are, but it’s also not the end word, right?

It is possible to have two characters who are on the other sides of the world who are directly interacting in some way, depending on what kind of elements you have in your story that allow for communication or other interaction. But that is definitely logistically much harder than two characters who are in the same room.

Oren: If you do want one of them to be on the bad guys’ team, even if it is a not a hundred percent black and white—if you have one team that is the clear bad guys—you have to think really carefully about whether or not you should actually give one of them a POV. And usually that’s gonna be someone you’re gonna want to be making more sympathetic.

Children of Blood and Bone has its Zuko-type character. He’s chasing the protagonists across the world, and that’s a reasonable place to give a villain a POV. Cause he’s a secondary villain and he’s meant to be sympathetic, unlike his more conventionally evil boss.

As opposed to something like in the later books of the Expanse. They introduce another brand of new evil bad guys, and they’re very bad and we get a perspective from one of them, and he starts off the story bad and arguably gets worse as it goes along. But he was already evil, so who cares?

The best I can say about that.

Chris: A lot of writers are tempted to add viewpoints for logistical reasons. How will a character know what’s happening somewhere else if I don’t give a POV to that other person?

But that’s also a warning sign. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t work out. But usually, if you have to add a viewpoint, there’s a good chance that’s a bad choice that will lower engagement. Whereas if you don’t need it for logistical reasons, then what you’re considering is not that you have to, but will this actually improve the experience?

Bunny: Especially if you have this one piece of information that you need the audience to know. That’s happening elsewhere that the main character wouldn’t know about. Don’t throw in an extra viewpoint just to narrate one event.

Oren: Yeah, those are called interludes and nothing good ever happens in an interlude.

Bunny & Oren: [laugh]

Chris: So if you have a story that’s really tightly plotted and you have several essential characters that are hanging out together, and you could tell the whole thing from one person’s POV, but you’re like, maybe I should put some scenes from the point of view of this other central character. Maybe you wanna flesh out their internal struggles or what have you.

That’s a sign that it’s actually going to do less damage to switch POVs because they’re already covering the same events. So you’re not gonna cover a event that is completely disconnected from anything else.

Oren: This is a great place for conflicted relationships to shine using multiple points of view. Romance is the most common way that this happens. It doesn’t necessarily have to be romance.

The one that I always use as an example is Maplecroft, which has different perspectives of, I think, three characters who are, broadly speaking, the good guys and their very difficult relationships. It helps bring out the conflict between Lizzie and her sister Emma, and the way that they try to keep their doctor at arm’s length and all that sort of thing.

That kind of relationship is often a good indication of that. You might get some benefit from a second viewpoint.

Chris: And in romance, oftentimes if you do have a lot of internal obstacles to the characters hooking up, one person has to learn to stop distancing because they’re afraid. For instance, the other person sees their partner as the enemy or something, and they have to learn to trust them.

Whatever you have, those things are definitely easier to dive into in more depth if they each have a POV. It doesn’t mean that romances need POVs. I think it depends on what kind of romance you’re telling with what kind of obstacles and conflicts. So if you like a story where they’re just made for each other, but the world wants to keep them apart, if you like that kind of star crossed lovers type romance, that doesn’t so much need two POVs in most cases.

Again, any of those like really complex emotions that explain character behaviors that are otherwise difficult to explain, A POV really helps with that a lot.

Bunny: There’s a series, admittedly I haven’t read this in a while, so I hope I don’t get some of the details wrong. But it’s interesting in terms of talking about POV because it has in the first book a romance, and then it becomes like more of these action intrigue stories later, which is a zone problem because I came to the first book for like Hot Dragon Romance or whatever, and now it’s a spy thriller.

Oren: Why are there so many knife fights now? I wanted kissing.

Bunny: Come on. There’s more kissing and like surfboard dragon, but the first one is a romance between a dragon who’s shapeshift into a human and a dragon hunter. So we get their different POVs. We get to see the dragon hunter coming to realize that this is a dragon and like dragon trying to hide and stuff like that.

And I thought that was a good use of multiple POVs. And then in the later books, they get separated. I guess they’re both fighting their own evil organizations. The Evil Dragon Organization and the Evil Dragon Hunter organization.

Oren: There’s a little couple split, one for each of them. That’s nice.

Yeah. Everyone’s got their own special antagonistic organization to fight, but then that became the thing where it feels like broadly they’re fighting for the same cause. But both of the stories were so high stakes that I would end one chapter and be like, shoot, I really don’t wanna read about the other character right now. Like, I wanna get satisfaction for what just happened in this last scene. So I’d be skipping chapters, which is not what you want.

Chris: Especially if it ends on a cliffhanger.

Bunny: Every chapter was a cliffhanger. I was like, where did my California Dragon Romance go?

Chris: It’s like black hat storytelling.

Oren: Do not use additional viewpoints to drag out the time between when you put the character in a dangerous situation and when you resolve it. That’s not good.

Bunny: That’s exactly what it was doing.

Oren: It’s hostile architecture, but a book.

Chris: Similar to political conflicts, another type of story that can really benefit is Cat and Mouse. The one that always comes to mind, even though this was not actually in a narrated format as far as I know, is Death Note. Because Death Note has such equal weight in highlighting both the criminal and the police officer who’s chasing him.

Oren: I could see that working in a written narrative for sure.

Chris: So, if you were to put that in written narrative, you would definitely want both of those characters to have their own POV. And it has to do with the fact that they’re both equally important and giving them a POV is a way of saying who is important. Their relationship to each other is important, even though they’re enemies. That gets surprisingly close later.

Oren: [knowingly] Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.

Chris: Debating, how many in Death Note, the relationship to each other. I think that’s a good sign of when multiple POVs is helpful.

And even though they’re not in the same place many times, their antagonism means that they are interacting with each other. They spend their time figuring out how to outwit the other one, right? And so, anything that they do in their viewpoint affects the other person.

Oren: Another potentially useful, although very specific kind of story where multiple POVs can be helpful, is what I’ve been calling the vignette anthology. What is sometimes known as daisy chain plotting.

Instead of a single story, you are telling a bunch of small stories with a common theme, usually around a common event or sometimes a common item that links them together. But they’re still separate stories.

World War Z is probably the most famous book version. It’s a bunch of vignettes about the zombie apocalypse, and they all have the zombie apocalypse in common, but there’s not a single plot thread that runs through any of them other than the general rise and fall of civilization during the zombies.

Chris: I have seen some series that, again, feel more ensemble focused that make rotating POV work better. For most series, when you focus on a single main character and you move to the next book and you switch the main character, that feels icky. Because you got really invested in the main character of the first book.

But for some stories where they have an ensemble cast to start with, and then they devote one book to give each character a POV, it feels more like a TV show with an ensemble cast where some episodes focus on one person.

The series throughline is often less important than the actual plot of each book, and I think that’s one reason it tends to work better in those situations.

Oren: I am speculating a bit here because I’ve never actually seen this work with full novels. I’ve only ever seen it work with the Animorphs, which are very short.

Those are novella length books, and there’s a ton of them. But I think it could have worked fine in, for example, the Dragonet Prophecy, where each book gives one of the five dragons the center of POV. I think the problem there was honestly not even the POV change. It was that whoever wasn’t the POV character didn’t matter in the next book.

If each story had been about the team and we had seen the team from a different perspective each time, I think that would’ve been fine. But this one was more like, this is the story where the sand dragon matters, and this is a story where the shadow dragon matters, and the other ones mostly might as well not be here.

Chris: That is, I think, a big problem that can happen with those stories, and I’ve also seen them where the author really just wants to promote their next book. So, they include the characters from the next book, but a lot of times what you have is excess characters that just don’t matter to this story. They’re just there and I start to resent them.

I want to read the next book less. I learned to hate the characters early. But yeah, with the Dragonet Prophecy, I think the issue with handling an ensemble cast is how you get everybody involved so that they’re not superfluous. And I think that was the problem with that one. And if it had been a smaller number of dragons, then it would’ve been easier for the author to handle.

Bunny: Oh, I just wanted to talk about an interesting example. I just read from a Nalo Hopkinson’s book, the Brown Girl in the Ring, or just Brown Girl in the Ring, actually. It keeps the multiple viewpoints focused on the same actions and stuff taking place, but it hops a lot between their heads in the same scene. It’s all clearly delineated, every time it moves to a different perspective.

There’s three dots, so you know you’re moving to someone else’s head now. And I thought it worked surprisingly well, maybe because it was all in the same scene. So even though it wasn’t close limited, it felt omniscient because we were moving around so much.

Chris: Again, if everything is in the same scene and you could tell the whole story from one person’s perspective, then you know that all of the plots are better linked together.

Don’t get me wrong, a single POV story can still go on tangents and things instead of events that shouldn’t be included. Then you know that adding the viewpoint isn’t really like breaking the plot because you’re covering the same event.

Bunny: And there’s a lot of viewpoints in that, including the villain.

The villain starts off the story, but then the story follows a sort of intergenerational conflict against the villain. So, it makes sense that each of the three generations of women who fight this guy have a little bit of viewpoint. Ti-Jeanne is the main character, but then we have Mi-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne. They’re French-Canadian names, I’m sorry.

But then sometimes we’ll get a viewpoint that only shows up once and then we move away from it. And I didn’t find it drawing. I thought I might, but because it did it so much and there weren’t just like long sections.

Chris: Sounds like it was consistent and very clear about when it was moving.

Bunny: Yeah, it felt deliberate.

Chris: And that really makes a big difference about setting the right expectations for how this experience is gonna go.

Bunny: Yeah, it was. I know you two hate the term cinematic. It was cinematic in how it was able to move around between these scenes.

Oren: Yeah, as long as it’s clearly delineated. Otherwise, you’re gonna have the head hopping problem of being, I don’t know whose perspective we’re in right now, and that can be really confusing.

Chris: It is possible to hop heads in a scene and have it work. It’s just difficult. That’s not tried by most people.

Bunny: No, this definitely is the exception.

Oren: And there was of course, one other scenario that comes to my mind that I just wanted to mention, which is if you have a Rashman type plot, which is a movie, but has also become its own genre where there are multiple accounts of the same event, and part of the plot is trying to figure out who’s telling the truth or more likely how each version is wrong.

In that case, you’re gonna need multiple perspectives. And as long as you’re doing something interesting with them and actually showing differences, that could be very fun. Just replaying the same scene again but the cloak is a different color, that’s probably not enough.

Chris: If you’re doing that type of story, you do have to carefully fast forward through the parts people have already seen and always go the way you would expect, and then spend more time on the things as they deviate from the last person’s tale.

But yeah, that’s a premise that depends on multiple points of view to work.

Bunny: I feel like we should note that this is different than, say, retelling the same story over again from a different character’s perspective without changing anything like Midnight Sun.

Oren: Oh, right. Yeah. That was the one where Edward got a POV.

Yeah, the same thing happened with the Ender books, which kind of confused me. I haven’t read Ender Shadow in a long time, but I just remember feeling it. I wasn’t really sure what the purpose was.

Chris: If you wanna sell more stuff to your super fans.

Bunny: That’s the answer to probably Midnight Sun and that weird Christian Gray spinoff that I think came first. That’s the answer: Money.

Oren: All right, so we figured it out. The reason is if you want mooooney, that’s the right way to use multiple viewpoints. Alright, I think we will call this episode to a close on that note.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode and you have now unlocked the secret to using multiple POVs whenever you want, consider supporting us on Patreon.

Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Before we go, I want to thank some of our existing patrons, each of whom brings a unique and valuable point of view to our podcast story.

First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally, we have Vanessa Perry, who is our premier expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.

We will see you all next week.

[Outro Music]

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

A wise wizard once told us that our eyes can deceive us and we shouldn’t trust them, so maybe that’s why we’re always giving our characters additional senses. This week, we’re using narrative-o-ception to sense what this topic is about and how writers can incorporate it into their work. We discuss super powers, aliens, and just about every animal sense we could think of. Also, cats. Lots of cats.

Show Notes

• Sting 
• Umwelt 
• Daniel Kish 
• Parable of the Sower 
• Echolocation 
• The Hidden Memory of Objects 
• Whiskers 
• Electroreception
• Lockwood and Co. 
• Ian Waterman 
• Vox Machina Dragon Sense
• Spidey Senses 
• Proprioception 
• Predators With Side-Facing Eyes
• The Purpose of Zebra Stripes 
• Dazzle Camouflage 
• Wolf Pack 
• Hench

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Leen. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[intro music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me here today is…

Chris: Chris

Bunny: And,

Oren: Oren

Bunny: and I’m sensing something. It’s like kind of a tingling in my brain. Just listening to both of you, I’m realizing you’re like me; you’re both podcast hosts. I thought I was the only one..

Oren: special podcast senses activated. 

Bunny: Yeah. The environment around me has gone blue and red for some reason, and there are squiggly lines coming out of my head.

Chris: Do you glow blue when other podcast hosts are near? 

All: [laughter]

Bunny: Rival podcast hosts. 

Oren: I wonder if Sting still works if you put it inside a lead box. What is the mechanism it uses to detect orcs?

Bunny: [giggles]

Oren: Are orcs mildly radioactive? I have questions.

Bunny: I like that explanation. Maybe podcast hosts are radioactive too.

Oren: Yeah, that’s why we have so many hot takes.

Chris: [giggles]

Bunny: Ohhhh [laughter]. 

Today we are talking about the wild world of senses, and I first wanna give a shout out to the book “An Immense World” which inspired this episode. And I’m going to use one of the concepts it introduced, which is – Germans, forgive me – “Umwelt” which refers to the sensory world of animals; the different bubbles that we live in based on our senses.

So the umwelt of a bat is a whole lot different than that of us, or a spider or a snake. A lot of researchers have made the error of thinking about animal senses and other creature senses with regard to our own, usually in a very visual context because we are very visual animals. 

So today we’re gonna be talking about how you can use the inspiration of the animal world and, in general, to give your characters unusual senses. I’ve found that usually this manifests in one of two ways:

It’s either superpowers, or it’s like aliens or a different species that have different physiology. We have Daredevil, for example, It’s the superpower, but he doesn’t have massive ears and he also doesn’t click, which is really weird because it’s supposed to be like radar. 

Chris: Yeah. For echolocation or radar, you have to emit a wave and then it bounces back. And there are people who do echolocation and they click; they make clicking noises.

Bunny: Yeah. Look up Daniel Kish if you’re curious about that. But you don’t send out waves automatically. You have to do it.

Chris: I suppose an alien species could send out waves that are non-perceptible by human characters, automatically.

Bunny: Yeah, bats do that, but I don’t think Daredevil is a bat. 

Oren: The human ear has to be able to hear it. Right? So by definition, other humans will be able to hear it too, unless you have very special ears. 

I’m a big fan of active senses. I think those have a lot of potential because, by default, our senses are mostly passive, they mostly receive information; we have very little in the way of active senses most normally.

Although it has been pointed out, humans can and do navigate by sonar, which is one of the reasons why I would recommend not generally having that as a superpower. It’s kind of like giving your character the superpower to memorize long stories; most people don’t do that, but a human can absolutely learn to do that. They don’t need a superpower [giggles].

Bunny: You can tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue and that’s your superpower.

Oren: Yeah. You can learn to do it. It’s like ‘my superpower is that I can bench 200 pounds’. That’s a lot. That’s a decent bench press, at least by my standards, but it’s obviously not something that most people would need a superpower to be able to do. It would just need training. 

Chris: I also get the feeling that Daredevil gets echolocation from all directions. 

Bunny: Yeah, that also doesn’t work. 

Chris: You usually click and then there is a specific area that your waves are in that direction, and that’s the direction that you can see in. 

Oren: He’s just emitting clicks in all directions at all times. 

Chris & Bunny: [laughter].

Oren: Everyone around him has just learned to tune it out. 

All: [laughter]

Bunny: It would be really funny if his suit came with a crown that had little clickers at certain intervals, and those are just constantly going.

Oren: But that is the dynamic of active senses is that you are sending out some kind of signal, which means that you will get information when it bounces back to you.

But anyone who can receive that signal, presumably members of your species, whatever it is, will also receive it, and then they will see that you sent that out, and this is a really fun game. 

You can do, if you’re in sci-fi, you can have two ships that are trying to locate each other and they have to decide whether they wanna risk sending out an active ping because it gives away where they are, but also will give them information.

So that is fun and you can do that with characters if they have that kind of active sense going.

Chris: I think the other nice thing about that is, again, there’s always situations where we want things to take a character by surprise. Whenever we have a character that can, for instance, automatically hear, even just read the motions around them…

Think about that. If you could automatically sense everybody’s emotions, you would know whenever a person was nearby, because you could sense their emotions, even if they’re being perfectly quiet and they’re behind you. 

Oren: There was a D&D (dungeons and dragons) argument that went on for years in one of my gaming groups about whether or not being able to sense magic automatically let you detect stealth characters if they had magic items on them.

Logically, it sounded like the answer was yes, but obviously that was really overpowered. So we said no and came up with a nonsense explanation to try to justify it. 

Chris: So anytime you have any kind of passive sensory perception, if that’s associated with people, you’ll all know where people are all the time [giggles]

So if it’s active, the character has to suspect somebody’s nearby in order to do the sensing, and then it just, oh man. So much easier for the plot. Every time you need that person to be taken by surprise, they still can be.

Bunny: I’m reading “The Parable of the Sower” right now, and the main character has, well it is a magic power, but it’s explained through drugs, which makes me feel bad because I didn’t put this in the drug episode

Oren: [laughter]

Bunny: It’s called “hyper-empathy” but I think the way it works is she has to look at someone and then she feels strongly what she interprets them as feeling.

And I think that makes a lot more sense than the Troy dilemma, where it kind of works sometimes, and when it does work, either it’s overpowered or it’s just things that you could tell by looking at the character.

Chris: And we never have Troy… Like there’s two people in the hall outside [laughter] She should be able to do that.

Oren: But she can sense cosmic being sometimes. But also, other times not so who knows?

All: [laughter]

Bunny: It’s the power of plot convenience.. plot sense.

Oren: When I try to write a character with a sense other than the various human ones, I generally end up defaulting to ‘it’s like one of our senses, but a little different’ because I don’t know how to describe a sense that I don’t have!

Chris: That’s not the worst thing as long as it has novelty on its own. It is cool if we’ve managed to break away a little bit from anything that replaces sight and is now just like sight and works exactly the same way, or anything that involves talking just becomes sound.

It is nice when we can do things differently. Like with echolocation, it doesn’t give you the same information that vision does. It can replace vision in that it tells you where things are, but it gives you different information, like how soft or hard things are, instead of what color they are.

Bunny: And the other thing that’s interesting about echolocation and bats admittedly get most of the publicity on this. Whales and dolphins also use it, and they use it to create a 3D world because the ways that it bounces off of things can construct, for lack of a better word, a different picture. And the thing about humans being so visually oriented is that our Umwelt tends to revolve around sight or our other dominant sense Probably being, hearing or touch.

 Honestly, super touch is not something I’ve seen before. One could make it happen, I guess.

Chris:  Usually when there’s super touch it’s like you touch something and you get visions.

Oren: Yeah. I actually really like that as a power; a character who can read the history of an object or whatever by touching it, because it’s really easy to get information to your character that they need to have that would otherwise be difficult for them to get. But it’s also easy to deny them that because they just don’t get the item.

Whereas if they can just look back in time, my gosh, that is so hard to plan around. Don’t give your character that power. 

Bunny: Yeah, There was a book, I think it’s called “The Hidden Memory of Objects”, which is all about the character having the ability to touch things and then get their history, and then becoming increasingly overwhelmed by that, where the power gets stronger and then she can’t touch anything without getting overwhelmed by this. I don’t know. It was an interesting plot.

Chris: The other thing I like about touch related powers is that it gives an excuse for your character to have to go somewhere or put themselves in danger, even, because they have to be in close enough proximity to touch something. It’s like ‘Hey, maybe I could see what’s going on in the villain’s head, but I have to go and touch the villain’ [laughter]

Bunny: Yeah [laughter] that’s awkward. Trying to get close enough to hold the villain’s hand. 

Oren: Yeah. But makes for a great reason to do fake dating which is one of my favorite tropes. So, yup, more please.

All: [laughter]

Bunny: That’s a good trope. Touch also involves one sensory organ that’s often involved in touch and with seismic sense, which we can talk about later, is whiskers; which can be extremely sensitive.

For example, we usually think of whiskers on cats and that makes sense, cats do use their whiskers.

But whiskers on seals and sea lions? Aren’t they really powerful hunting tools? They can be just completely blinded and still function just fine because their whiskers are so good at that, because fish leave ripples and then the seals can follow the ripples maybe even as far as like a hundred meters away,

Chris: That seems like it might be more powerful in the water. 

Bunny: Vibrational senses tend to be stronger in water, just because water conducts that more. But cats do a similar thing where they can sense airflow with their whiskers. They also can’t see very close to them, so they use the whiskers to get sensory information that way.

Oren: I’m a big fan of good old electro-reception.

Bunny: Oh yeah! Electro-reception. 

Oren: Electro-reception is very fun because it’s specifically used for finding the electrical signals generated by living creatures so you can snack on them, which I find fun.

 I don’t know how to describe it though. I wanna give my aliens electro-reception or a superpower or maybe through some kind of gear. At least if it’s through gear, I can assume that whoever made it is already gonna try to translate it into a picture because, presumably, the person using it will be able to understand that.

But if it’s a superpower or a magical ability or something. I don’t know how to describe that. What do you just, you get a vibe? like how does it work? 

Bunny: You just get the feel of it, you know?

Oren: Tell me what your Umwelt is like, good friend, hammerhead shark.

All: [giggle] 

Bunny: Electric sense is cool, also because we were talking about active and passive senses, it can be either depending on the animal; like there are some fish that just have it on all the time, and other fish that can turn it on, which is pretty rad.

Oren: Although active electro-reception is like you’re shooting electricity out. That’d be interesting. ‘Hang on. I gotta get a look at you… Boom’ [laughter].

Bunny: [laughter] It’s like they generate an electric field and then when it gets distorted, like if something enters it, they know there’s a thing there and they can take a bite. 

Oren: Did not know that. Learning all kinds of fun things today [giggles]

Bunny: It’s interesting. There’s a particular type of fish, and I’m forgetting what kind it is, but they did tests on it and observed that it could swim backwards just as easily as it can swim forwards.

And the reason for that is that it has electro-sense all along its body. And so when something impacts the electrical field, it knows not to hit it.

Oren: Yeah. Although it does make that annoying ‘Beep beep beep’. 

All: [laughter]

Bunny: Oh, that’s right. It was the dump truck fish.

Oren: [laughter]

Chris: Probably one of my favorites is when a character senses something that is technically in a different realm, but they see echoes of it that are creepy.

So, for instance, in “Lockwood and Co”, they have characters who have ghost sensing powers and they split it up between the regular senses; So some people can see glowy ghost trails if they have really sensitive sight, others hear voices, but then at one point they actually go to the realm where all of the ghosts are hanging out.  

And so you see that in that realm they can see them regular, and what they were seeing before was just an echo.

That happens a bit, at least in the Lord of the Rings movies too, because when Frodo puts on the ring, you can tell that his perception is changed; he saw dark, creepy shadows before, he puts on the ring, and now they’re like glowing and white because he has moved through space and his perception has changed, and I find that having two different versions of the same senses for the same item to be interesting. 

Bunny: I think to some extent you do always have to translate it into a human Umwelt just because it’s mostly humans reading this, I assume. For things like the electro-sense and senses that are pretty hard to translate into those of us that don’t have intellectual sense. It’s probably easier to put that on other characters and see how they use it. Or for example, like alien creatures or non-sapien beings that also use electro-sense.

Like maybe you have a sidekick who is beeping their way along the story.

Oren: I also am a fan of, if you’re going to do the whole ‘it’s a normal sense, but it gives extra information’, which I always do, so I’m not judging. I do think you can still spice it up by having it be something other than sight.

If you’re gonna give a character the ability to sense electro-fields or magic or whatever, they don’t necessarily have to sense it as a vision overlay, which is a standard. They can sense it as pressure in their skin,now you’re using an enhanced sense of touch, it’s really more where it’s coming into play where as you get closer to a magical item, you can feel more pressure on you as you move closer to it. 

Bunny: That’s a good idea. Oh, just quickly, I wanna mention that common knowledge is that people have five senses. It’s sort of true, but it really depends how you define senses.

The classics are sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. But then, some people argue we have over 30 senses depending on how you define that, but sticking with shorter numbers, smaller numbers here, there’s two other ones that often get put in with the five.

One of them is proprioception, which is where your body parts are in relation to each other, even when you can’t see them. If you put your hands below the desk, you still know where they are relative to each other, and there’s actually been a case where someone lost the sense and had to completely relearn how to walk and navigate by sight alone, like having to have visual contact with his limbs at all times. This is the case of Ian Waterman, or IW as he is sometimes called.

And then there’s vestibular sense, which is where your body parts are in space. Just generally, if you have your arm out to the side, you can know where it is.

Oren: What about my sense of fashion?  Does that make 31? 

All: [laughter]

Bunny: Yeah, that’s 34 I think. Some people say up to 33, so I guess yeah, it would be 34.

Chris: Can I just say what the worst sense has ever been? In the original Buffy, the Vampire Slayer movie; before the show, Buffy gets menstrual cramps when vampires are near. 

Bunny: That’s terrible. Does she get her period too?

Chris: [laughter] Not as far as we know, but it’s like ‘does she have to fight with cramps?’ [laughter] It’s just the worst! 

Bunny: That’s like getting a migraine every time you see the color blue. Don’t be a creep, Whedon. 

Chris: [laughter] That’s what answers that. It’s like nobody, that’s not wish fulfillment. Nobody wants to have menstrual cramps when they’re…

Bunny: Right. There are so many other routes you could have taken with that. 

Chris: Yeah, and it’s not just that they’re painful, they’re painful and distinctly unpleasant in a number of ways. It does not work. 

Bunny: No. It’s like getting a migraine when you see the color blue and then you have to fight the color blue.

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: I get a sore throat whenever dragons are around.  

Bunny: [laughter] Yeah, I get the flu If there’s a fairy nearby. 

Oren: That was one of the things that was weird about the first season of “Vox Machina”, they were struggling sooo hard to explain how the ‘Rangers sense favorite enemy’ thing works because Rangers has supposed to be able to sense whatever their favorite enemy is, and hers was supposed to be Dragon, and every once in a while she would get this weird look and we could never figure out what was going on.

And for some reason she couldn’t tell that there was a dragon shapeshifted into a human with them in the room. 

Chris: Didn’t she get headaches or something? 

Oren: Yeah, she would get headaches.

Bunny: Oh wow. It’s just literally the color blue.

Chris: And she would just randomly get them and we’re like ‘okay. So that character is secretly a dragon, isn’t he?’

Oren: For some reason they never put that together. It was very weird 

Bunny: and she never knew. Despite having a headache. 

Chris: Just having a headache. You think about that for a while if you had to punish a headache every time. But yeah, it still brings up the question; when she fights dragons, does she always have a headache then? because that doesn’t sound like a favorite enemy anymore.

Bunny: You always gotta keep some Tylenol on you.  

Chris: As opposed to like spidey senses, which I think are supposed to be like tingles or something where Spider-Man knows when to dodge just in time, except for when he’s not supposed to dodge because that would be plotting convenient.

Oren: The spidey senses are weird because they’re pretty vague. I actually assumed that the new Marvel movies didn’t have them because we see a couple of scenes where Peter, like the hairs on the back of his arms stand up or whatever, but often he wasn’t in immediate danger when that happens, what is he sensing when that happens?

And then there are other scenes where he can get surprised just like anybody else. So I just assumed he didn’t really have spider senses in this version. But then suddenly one of them made his spider senses a huge plot point, which was because he was fighting mysterio who can trick your visual senses very easily and ‘wow, wouldn’t you know it? This hero just happens to have a non-visual sense he can use’. Solved, I guess.

Bunny: Which is funny. It seems like there should be, given how much super senses are a thing in media and superhero media, there’s not a single character like Daredevil with super-hearing, who can hear Mysterio putzing around. 

Oren: Nope. Can’t do it. Look, the Avengers were all on vacation that day. Okay. Don’t ask where the Avengers were.

All: [laughter]

Bunny: I think it would be fun to talk about if you do want to either ‘superify’ the big five senses, I’m not really sure how to superify proprioception or vestibular sense; feeling like your limbs are in the extra right place doesn’t work. 

Chris: I suppose if you attune an item, it could feel like a limb and that you always know where it is. That sounds very creepy to me though, but maybe it would be okay if your story was creepy. It might fit.

Oren: Actually, I think this could be a really interesting idea. You could have someone whose ability is if another person is close to them or they’re concentrating on that person or whatever, they can sense where those person’s limbs are. That would be really helpful in a fight, like in a fist fight. You could do some really interesting stuff with that. 

Bunny: Okay. I like that. That’s a good direction to go with it. Someone take that, that’s a good idea. 

Okay. Here’s one thing you can do when you’re thinking about how to design your alien species or your superpowers as well. Draw “the Beasties” in our world and think about the reasons that they developed the senses that they do. 

So humans, as we’ve talked about, are very visual animals, and we’re good at pinpointing where things are in space, we can get up really close to something and see it clearly, or you can be really far away from something and if your eyes aren’t crap like mine are, you can see that thing pretty clearly as well.

 We can also see the color red, which is unusual in the animal kingdom, and, due to that, we’ve put social weight on things like blushing, which is interesting. If you didn’t have that sense of red, you wouldn’t be able to see blood filling someone’s cheeks. 

I wanted to think about, when you’re talking about unusual senses in the visual realm are things like where the eyes are on your creature. Like cows, their eyes are on the sides of their head which makes them look kinda dopey and tired. But what that gives them is a huge panoramic view of the horizon.

Dragonflies have those big compound eyes, which gives them 360 degree vision, including above and below. A really interesting thing with some, I think mostly bugs is that they experience time differently and I’m pretty sure this has to do with how close their eyes are to their brains.

Like they have a really fast track from their eyes to their brains, and so, things that look really fast to us are pretty slow to them.

Chris: Bunny, when you were reading that book, did you find confirmation about how predators have their eyes in front?

Bunny: I don’t know if they discuss that a lot.

Oren: Well, actually I can answer that. The answer is usually yes, but with enough exceptions that you can’t always tell. 

This is a thing that gets brought up in a lot of popular archeology communities is because, generally, predators have forward facing eyes and prey animals are much more likely to have wider set vision, but it’s not universal.

First of all, many animals are predators and prey at the same time.

Bunny: Your typical house cat is both, but they have forward facing vision because they hunt. 

Oren: But even animals that don’t hunt sometimes have forward facing vision for a number of reasons. And occasionally animals that do hunt have more spread out vision.

So it’s not a guarantee, it’s an indicator. But you can’t just find a fossil and be like ‘look, it’s got forward facing vision. obviously a predator’. It’s not that direct. 

Bunny: Interesting. I don’t think I knew that, but I guess that makes sense.  Even predators can benefit from a 180 degree view, and while dragonflies are predators, in fact, they’re some of the most efficient predators there are, and their eyes are just bulbs, they’re not forward facing or sideways. 

Chris: I think another thing about us being very vision oriented that is easy to take for granted is the fact that it’s not just that we have a good ability to perceive light, it’s that we have brain mechanisms for understanding what we’re seeing and that makes a huge difference.

When we look at things, we can see what is a distinct object and process that information. For me, it was always weird this idea that, for instance, zebras with stripes would hang out together because it’s hard for a predator to pick out an individual, because when we look at it, it’s extremely obvious what an individual zebra is, even though they have stripes. 

But for a creature that can’t process visuals as well and tell what visuals create mean, a distinct object, then yeah, it might be hard to pick out an individual zebra in a herd.

Bunny: So there’s something interesting I learned from this book and that is that zebra stripes might not actually have something to do with camouflage. There’s some research suggesting that they have something to do with avoiding biting-insects of all things; the insects are too confused to land on them so I guess in a way that is camouflage.

Oren: I actually have the answer to this, I’ve done some research and the answer is that zebras used to be plain gray and then they were painted in that black and white during the first World War to hide them from German submarines. 

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: Wait, hang on, I’m thinking of freighters again. I’m think that’s not zebras, ships is what I was thinking of.

All: [laughter] 

Bunny: Ships need to be painted like that so they can avoid the lions. 

Oren: Yeah. Please look up dazzle camo, I love it, It’s my favorite thing. 

We don’t know if it works or not. There was not enough data gathered to say

All: [laughter]

Oren: One thing I wanted to mention real quick, since we’re coming up on the end of our time, is a surprisingly powerful thing to give your characters is super-smell.

Bunny: Yes.

Oren: Because again, we as humans are pretty much used to the idea that if a person or whatever it is we’re looking for is not in our immediate vicinity, then we can’t perceive it.

But smell is a weird one because smell leaves a trail and our sense of smell is not really developed enough that we can track most things by scent unless the smell is really strong.

But a lot of animals can, and they have a much better ability to follow things. If you give a human the ability to do that, it becomes very hard for them to, for example, lose a suspect if you need a scene that depends on them seeing someone and then losing sight of that person in the crowd, it’s like ‘hang on, I’ll just smell them It’s fine, I got this’.

Bunny: Smell is very interesting because most senses keep track of where things are in space, but smell has the additional dimension of time -how recently was the smell emitted-, It can also travel in weird ways, like it can get dispersed in a plume or in a stream. 

Chris: This reminds me of Wolf Pack, where we have this group of teenagers and we’re pretending that there’s nothing they can do because they’re supposed to spin their wheels for most of season one.

But one of the teenage werewolves has super-scent. We established that she has super-scent, and so there’s a big werewolf killing people out there. She has superset, I don’t believe that she couldn’t find it. 

Oren: I had one player in one of my burning wheel games take the special ability “nose of the bloodhound”. I don’t know why that ability is in there, but it’s in there and wow, it was suddenly really difficult to structure a mystery.

Bunny: That’s the thing, super-smell would be so helpful in anything involving crime or mystery. There’s a reason we have a lot of dogs that sniff corpses or identify missing people, I think they also sniff mines. So if you had a character who had the super-scent, they could find drugs, corpses, mines, missing people, anything like that.

Chris: Admittedly, I was in one of Oren’s games with a character that did have enhanced smell, and by then I think he’d gotten some practice because he came up with a variety of reasons why my character… there’s like ‘there’s too many people in here. The smell gets lost. It’s been too long. You can follow it up to this point, but at that point you think maybe they changed cards’ 

Oren: I got some practice by then. I knew I was wise to your ways.  

Bunny: Yes, I recall this. It’s definitely the most maligned scent. People call it ‘primitive’ and ‘it came from like our fish brains’ and stuff like that.

But no, it’s extremely helpful. I think the only place I’ve seen super-scent really is Hench, where a side character has super smell and has to wear nose plugs most of the time. 

And I think that might be the main reason that super-scent isn’t more common is because it’s just not very cool for a character to be able to smell a fart really well.

Chris: I think that we’re a little self-conscious about the idea of smelling each other.  It’s like, oh man, you can smell everybody’s BO (body odor) and it’s not necessarily what we wanna think about.

Bunny: but just think of all the information you can pull from someone’s BO

Chris: Honestly, you got a character who always smelled everybody’s BO and also all of their scented products because if you could smell that, you could smell their scented skin cream or their scented shampoo or all that stuff. I feel like after a while it would not be a big deal. 

Bunny: We see a lot of colors and we don’t get overwhelmed when there are a lot of colors around. You can, but your head’s not going to explode. You can get used to it even when purple and brown are side by side and it looks really ugly. 

Well. Now that you’ve listened to this podcast with your super-hearing, you should head on over with your super-touch and click on our super Patreon.  Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons;

First, there’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.

 Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro]

This has been The Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton.

Everyone knows that stories should have well developed characters, but what does that mean? Should you be racing to give your characters as many traits as possible? Does it matter at all what those traits are? The truth is a little more specific than some advice may have led you to believe, and that’s what we’re talking about this week. We discuss how character development works, which characters need it, and why it’s important to remember that fictional heroes aren’t real.

Show Notes

• Game of Thrones Ending 
• Murderbot 
• Friendship Arcs 
• Legends and Lattes 
• Aang vs Ozai Fight 
• Character Arcs 
• Eldest 
• Meta Mysteries 
• Backstory
• Anthony Lockwood
• Kaz Brekker  
• Wade Watts

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[opening song]

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

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: And:

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Bad news folks. We don’t feel real enough. We have to fix that. Okay, so first we each need a memorable trait, so pick one.

Bunny: I have brown hair.

Chris: Very memorable. Oren, what’s your memorable trait?

Oren: My memorable trait is I’ve decided is that I’m now gonna be really into crypto. 

Bunny: Oh no. I think we’re getting too three dimensional here.

Oren: Look, you guys are never gonna be able to forget the blockchain, okay, because I’m gonna bring it up in every conversation.

Chris: Yeah. My memorable trait will be that I complain a lot. I’m gonna first start by complaining about your crypto obsession. 

Oren: You can’t silence me, Chris. This is who I am. I’m just a real true person.

Chris: That’s too true. It’s too real. And now we’re a little bit flat caricature, so we need more traits, because Bunny, you’re entirely defined by having brown hair.

Bunny: Damn. Oh well. Somehow I need another trait.

Chris: Or how about a deep motivation? What do we really want during this episode? What overriding desire is driving our actions?

Bunny: I could use a drink.

Chris: And this episode is your way of getting a drink.

Bunny: Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.

Chris: Okay. Very good.

Oren: Okay. My motivation is that I want to convince everyone that I would totally vote for a progressive candidate, just none of the ones who are actually running. 

Bunny: Oh, that’s elaborate.

Oren: That’s, look, I just feel like that fits with my crypto obsession. I’m not racist, but…

Chris: Oh no.

Bunny: Oh, you’re becoming more rounded by the minute.

Chris: Yeah, maybe I have layers because my complaining is a way to get attention. And that’s why I’m a podcast host.

Bunny: Oh, that’s right. You’ve got a tragic backstory now.

Chris: Yeah. I just want people to notice me, okay. And if I complain about your terrible crypto obsession and your brown hair – which is too brown, okay.

Bunny: Oh no! Don’t come after my hair like that.

Chris: Kids these days, the Gen Z, their hair is too brown. Have you noticed all the Gen Z kids have brown hair?

Oren: It’s so brown.

Bunny: Well, you damn millennials and your crypto.

Oren: There’s an NFT for that. I actually already own your brown hair because I bought an NFT of it, but that’s how crypto works.

Bunny: Oh no. I guess I have to dye my hair now.

Oren: Yeah, you better. Otherwise you’re gonna have to pay me 1 million Doge fan coins; that’s probably a real currency by now.

Bunny: I don’t even have a single Doge fan coin. What am I gonna do?

Chris: Alright, I think we’re off to a good start. Now I’m just gonna hand you 10 pages of random questions like what your middle name and favorite food is, and then we will be good. We’ll be totally developed.

Bunny: Sushi, easy. That’s my middle name and my favorite food.

Oren: Man, that’s efficient.

Bunny: Brown hair wants to drink sushi. In every scene.

Oren: I think we’ve got real winners on our hands here, Chris. I think we’ve solved it. I don’t know what it was, but we definitely solved it.

Bunny: Was there a problem? I don’t know, but it’s fixed now.

Chris: We’re very real now. Very real. So, this time we’re talking about character development, and I guess the first question is, what is it? It’s for the most part just designing a character or making stuff up about a character, but it’s really vague, and the implication comes with that your end goal is to create a quote-unquote “strong character,” which is also an extremely vague term, and it all just boils down to, like, design your character real hard, so they are a good character. That’s what the rhetoric – basically doesn’t have more to it than that.

Oren: Yeah, my official stance is that character should be good. Make your character a good character, not a bad character. I want quality of character to be high, please.

Bunny: Look, this is the hot takes people want out of Mythcreants. 

Chris: So, not really helpful. I blame Romanticism because of course I blame Romanticism, but for everything.

Oren: That’s your real defining trait.

Bunny: So cliché, Chris blaming Romanticism.

Chris: So I guess the question is, is a real seeming character what we should be aiming for? To some extent. Obviously I don’t want a character to walk in and be completely unbelievable.

Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like realism is a bit misleading. Like, we want to believe in them as a character. You don’t want them to necessarily be like a real person, because they’re your character and they’re going on an adventure for a reason. Like, why is it them on this adventure?

Oren: Yeah. It depends on what you mean by real. If I wanted to be hip and cool, I would say you want a believable character. I would say you want a character who seems real, like, don’t get me wrong, if your character feels fake, people will notice that. If your character does things that just don’t seem to fit with who they have been established to be, then people will react and they’ll say, this character doesn’t feel real, or this character feels like a cartoon or something. So I think that is a real thing, like your character should feel real, but what it means is very context sensitive.

Chris: Yeah. I think for the most part, the realness of characters is an illusion, just like the realness of dialogue is an illusion. We want our dialogue to seem natural sounding. We don’t actually want it to be real. I think characters are the same way. You want them to not be so fake that they interrupt the experience, but real people are mostly kind of dull.

Bunny: That’s true. This is why I struggle with creative nonfiction.

Chris: I think about it, we can’t remember real people’s names very often, but we want our readers to remember character names and remember our characters.

Bunny: I’ve started reading Parable of the Sower, and there are so many characters. I can’t keep them straight. I can’t keep the people in my class’s name straight.

Chris: Yeah, and we want our characters to be entertaining at some level: to be interesting, or fascinating, and have something that stands apart. And all of those things are not typically present with the average person we happen to meet. But that – again, how real a character seems is one of those things that’s also often mentioned in the same conversations that character development and quote-unquote “strong characters” are mentioned.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s not even so much that real people are dull. It’s that, at least in my mind, they are unlikely to demonstrate things that are interesting in a fictional context most of the time. You could hang out with a person and they could very well have a lot of interesting things about them, but very often you won’t ever find out those things. And for a fictional story, it’s not just that they have to have interesting things about them, they have to have interesting things about them that feel like part of the story. Because you can have a really interesting backstory about how your character grew up in a protest camp and was part of an environmental movement. That could be interesting. But if the story is about, I don’t know, building Lego bricks in a tournament, how is that relevant? That just feels like some random side thing you brought up.

Chris: I do think that the conventional character advice treats characters like they exist outside of the story. Like they’re completely independent of the story and like they’re developing on their own with no consideration of what their role is. And I’ve even seen plotting advice that makes no distinction between protagonists and antagonists, which is very bad. And seeing people use that plotting advice, I’m like, no, you don’t do that with antagonists, that’s for protagonists. But if you don’t make any distinction, then they’re all just characters, because we’re thinking of characters as people who exist outside the story, which again plays into the whole like real, you gotta make somebody seem real, like a real person that you could just grab if they from the street when they feel like they step outside the story and start talking to you.

Bunny: I do think it can help to consider who they are outside of the adventure. Usually that comes in when they’re just about to start the adventure, and then they of course change over the course of the adventure. I think that can be helpful, but they are also in a story and their role needs to reflect that.

Chris: Yeah. And I think that’s why at Mythcreants, we spend so much time discussing what makes a character work in their role. Because that is largely what feels like it’s missing elsewhere, and that is a huge factor in whether they are successful. Again, conventional characater development is, there are some things right that are important for any character, and so we can talk about that too. But that kind of optimization for the role is a piece that is often missing. 

Oren: Here’s the thing. If you come at this purely from the angle of I’m just gonna make a set of people and then I’m gonna put them in a room and see what happens, which is a way I have seen advocated of writing a story, and you’re not willing to like make any changes to these characters to facilitate a story, one of two things is almost certainly going to happen.

You’re either going to not have a story because you didn’t just magically, by extreme chance, stumble onto a connection of characters that would make a dramatically satisfying story. Or, you are going to have to suddenly make some of the characters act differently to how you’ve established them to get a satisfying ending, and neither of those are gonna go over well. People don’t like it when you do either of those things. The most obvious example of the latter recently was Game of Thrones, season eight, where suddenly Daenerys had to act like a completely different person to get the ending that the writers wanted. And we don’t see the first one that often because that almost never makes it to publication. I just threw some characters into a room and they just hung out. At least not in spec fic. Not in the kind of books we tend to talk about on myth grants.

Chris: So should we talk about what should we do when we’re developing a character? What things are we trying to do with our characters? What properties or traits should they have?

Oren: I think you should just draw random traits out of a bucket, and then that character just has the trait now, and just keep doing that. Because more traits is better.

Chris: They’ll be multidimensional. Each new trait you pull out is a dimension, and you want a hundred dimensions.

Bunny: So they have brown hair and they complain.

Oren: Yeah. That’s good. And just keep adding.

Chris: And they talk about cryptocurrency. I think that one thing that good characters tend to have is looking ahead to character arcs. Good characters tend to have character arcs. Yes. But then that means that when the character’s going into the story, when you’re first sitting up the character, they need to have something to overcome, like a misconception or a flaw. Learning to trust, for example, is one that a lot of action heroes have, where you’ve got the gritty veteran who needs to learn to trust the newbie, or something like that.

Murderbot, also; learning to trust the humans. Pacifism is another one that I’ve seen, like trying to learn nonviolent solutions. Legends and Lattes: the whole center theme is about this putting away the sword and all, and she gets tempted now and then to use it to solve problems. And then Avatar: the Last Airbender tried to do that, but it couldn’t really commit to it because the heroes had already beat a bunch of people up over the course of three seasons.

Oren: Yeah. But now suddenly fighting a guy means we have to kill him. Suddenly. 

Chris: So I would think of this as an internal problem the character has, then make it part of a character arc. Usually either they are unhappy in some way, or discontented, or they’re making some kind of misjudgments where even if they don’t know there’s a problem, the audience is looking at them and being like, this doesn’t look good. That’s definitely something that I’ve seen for important protagonists. For minor characters, that’s a lot of investment because anytime you build an arc, you have to follow through.

And so you can’t give a character arc to all of your characters, but if you try to do a viewpoint character, especially your main character who has a viewpoint, and you try to give that person emotional struggles or just a bunch of negative feelings, and you do not think through a character arc for them, oftentimes just… call it spaghetti, like spaghetti emotions, where we just have strands of possible arcs everywhere and it feels like a mess. It feels very inconsistent. Suddenly the character’s angsting about one thing and then another thing, and they don’t seem to have consistent issues from one scene to the next.

Bunny: Their problem can’t just be angst.

Chris: Generally angsting about whatever happens to be in the scene at that time. Probably my favorite is from Eldest, the sequel to Eragon, where Eragon seems like a nihilist in one paragraph, and then he changes from paragraph to paragraph what his emotional issues are.

Oren: He just has a lot of facets, Chris. He has so many.

Chris: For anybody, if you wanna give a character deep driving emotions, a character arc provides structure. It’s just, we don’t necessarily have that much time for every character in the story.

Oren: Yeah. What I have seen is that audiences really like getting to know a character. They like to feel at the end of the story as if they know the character better than when they started. And often that means an arc. Not necessarily a hundred percent of the time, but arcs are very helpful just because they also have some attachment and drama while you’re learning things, and it’s more likely that they will feel relevant to the story and not just random pieces of information.

They’re especially useful for viewpoint characters because with viewpoint characters, unless you’re doing meta mysteries, which you shouldn’t, we’ve covered this. Stop doing it. Then you can’t do the thing where you just find out more random things about them, because in most cases, those are things you should probably already have known. Whereas with a non-viewpoint character, you might be surprised to find out that the jerk rival takes care of their siblings at home because their parents aren’t around. That might be part of an arc, but it might not necessarily be; but that’s hard to do with the protagonist.

Chris: With a protagonist, you can still get to know them better, but they have to be like embellishing details, right? A meta mystery happens when there’s something that would naturally come up. And the only reason it hasn’t come up is because the storyteller has decided to arbitrarily keep it a secret, giving the audience the feeling that there is something they don’t know or something missing, or just they don’t understand where the character’s coming from. Emotions are coming off as flat, and just missing. That kind of thing. Certainly if it’s something that’s more of an embellishing detail that wouldn’t have naturally come up and it’s not important to the story, sometimes those details are fun, right? A character really hates mushrooms.

Bunny: Oh no. They’ve gotta learn to overcome that. Nobody should hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are so good. That’s a character flaw. 

Chris: …What have you. So you can add some of those things. But yeah, for non-viewpoint character, giving ’em a little bit more complexity, I think gives you more to learn. Giving them layers. Sorry, whenever we talk about a character being deep, or layers, it just, there’s just so much… I can’t take those words seriously anymore.

Oren: They get used for, I would argue, less than admirable purposes. You get the people who are like, the character arc is the true soul of the novel, and they tend to talk about that sort of thing. I will say that absent those perhaps ulterior motives, having a character with more than one side to them, if you see that character a lot, I would say is valuable, because if they are the same every time you see them and you see them all the time, then that starts to feel weird. 

Bunny: Especially if they’re in a bunch of different contexts. Like maybe your character will be putting on a different face when they’re talking to a police officer than they do when they’re at home. And that can be useful and feel real. And you can still see the interiority of the character. They can still be having thoughts and feelings to themselves. In fact, they can think about how they wouldn’t normally act like this or that. They’re consciously trying to be a bit more rigid and official than usual. That can absolutely work. But if they act the exact same in every context, that doesn’t make sense.

Oren: If you have a wise mentor who is in two or three scenes, wise mentor can be their character. They could be memorable as that, as long as there aren’t a lot of other wise mentors. But if that wise mentor is in a lot of scenes, you’re gonna wanna show some other sides to them. Common ones are, this character’s normally show wise and calm. Let’s show what would make them show anger. And that feels cool. That creates contrast. People like that sort of thing.

Chris: I think another important thing to think about in this category that lets you learn more about a character, that is useful for non-viewpoint characters, is the fact that people are not going around purposely showing everyone their emotions all the time. A lot of times there’s what they’re feeling and their motivation, and then what they choose to show other people. What they’re trying to show other people is different from that. So that gives you opportunities for them to put on one face, and then when you hit the right situation, for them to reveal what they’ve been thinking underneath the brave face. They put on a brave face, but really they’re scared. That kind of thing. And you can also have that with motivation.

You can leave a character who has a very simple, obvious motivation. But you can also add a deeper motivation. Like, I want good grades just because I am kind of a teacher’s pet or something being superficial; or I want good grades because I really need approval, because I have low self-esteem and I really need the approval of others, being a deeper motivation. That’s more emotional about their personal identity, that kind of thing.

Oren: So here’s a question. How does backstory fit into character development? Because I have a tendency to write characters with too much backstory. That’s just my toxic trait. So how does that work exactly?

Chris: I think backstory, again, is one of those things like character arcs that is a very high investment choice. If you’re gonna do it, it has to be usually for an important character, and also it has to matter. I’ve seen a trend with candied characters where we reveal a backstory and it just doesn’t change anything. Again, it just feels very glorifying. The author’s like, don’t you care that this character used to work for the bad guys? No. I don’t. It doesn’t change anything about the story. It’s like, but isn’t that cool? No, I don’t care.

But for a more important character that you wanna spend more time on, explaining their character arc is probably one of the number one things. It depends on the character arc. Sometimes characters have flaws that don’t really need explaining very much, like they’re impulsive. Maybe they’re just started that way and they have to learn restraint, but there’s no deep backstory reason why they’re impulsive. But there could be deep backstory reasons why if they have trust issues. That suggests somebody hurt them. And then that backstory could end up being very relevant because it might change which situations are really sensitive for them, or what kind of people they trust, or the person that hurt them might show up in the story. 

Bunny: And I feel it’s very difficult or impossible to create a character without any backstory, I guess unless they’ve just been born or something. But at the same time, you have to know how to doll that out in ways that are actually supporting the story. And in that case, I think you’re right that it’s usually explanation. I’m thinking of backstory that can explain their relationships with other characters. I think that’s another big one, especially if that ties into the character arc. And I think that’s especially important if they have a character arc about either reconciling with or finding a different way to relate to another character.

Chris: For a relationship arc backstory, their relationship can also be important, but I would say that when you talk about backstory, it has to be something that is not self-explanatory, that’s important enough to actually take time out of the story to relate something complex. And there are many cases in which, especially if you have a young character, where things are fairly self-explanatory, and then the issues start when the story begins.

They’re a young character who’s naive, they have a friend that they grew up with… That doesn’t really take much explanation. And then when the story starts, then stuff goes down. Then they lose things, then they develop their flaw. Then they have a fracture with their friend. And it’s all in the story proper. None of it is backstory. So if you’re going to take time to relate something that happened in the past, that doesn’t move the story forward, there has to be a bigger reason for it. 

Oren: My favorite weird backstory thing is when the author gives their character more backstory than it feels like they’ve had time to do. It’s like, you’re not that old. How did you have time to do all these things?

Chris: How did you have time to watch every single episode of All In The Family, or whatever it is that Wade does in Ready Player One?

Oren: Yeah. The ones that come to mind immediately are Lockwood and Co. and Six of Crows. For one thing, it’s really obvious that in Six of Crows, those characters were not supposed to be teenagers. They don’t act like teenagers. They don’t have any teenager related arcs. They clearly were supposed to be at least mid-twenties, and were aged down because YA is hot. That seems very clear to me reading the story, but Kaz still has the backstory of someone in his mid- to late twenties and I just don’t believe he had time to do all the things he is talking about having done.

Chris: Yeah, Buffy made fun of that in the episode, I think it’s called Superstar, where Jonathan uses a magic spell to give himself all the candy. Like how did he have time to go through medical school and do all of these other things?

Oren: Yeah, and Lockwood has the same problem, specifically the character Lockwood. He just has too much backstory; he has so many people that he knows and so many things he’s supposedly done, and it’s like, was he 10 when he was doing these things? My favorite is that he supposedly has had a rotating cast of casual girlfriends and the story – he’s 15 when the story starts. How many girlfriends could he possibly have had by that point? He hasn’t been dating age for that long.

Bunny: You went through puberty two years ago, Kaz.

Chris: One of my favorites is a newspaper article about the death of his sister that’s like, you know, oh, and the sister died and her brother was unable to stop it, or something like that. And it’s like, okay. He was a young child. What was he, eight or… he was seven. His sister was older than him. How many newspapers reporting the death of somebody are like, oh yes, and their seven-year-old younger brother was unable to stop it.

Bunny: This tragic child death occurred, and the family hamster was not able to stop it.

Oren: What a scrub.

Chris: So another one that is sometimes worth thinking about is the character’s motivation, which people make a lot of. I think a simple motivation goes a long way. And the reason is just to make the character more consistent, usually, so that you can catch if they’re doing things that are inconsistent with whatever they might want. Because there’s a good chance readers will notice if the character switches sides inexplicably, or seems to go do something in one scene that’s contradictory to what they do in a different scene. And if you know what they want and their primary motivation is, that just helps you make them more consistent.

Oren: This one is hard for me to intellectualize. It’s like, I know when I see it that a character is going against their established motivation, but it’s hard to give advice on it beyond don’t do that. Very helpful advice.

Chris: I will say that one thing that does happen, and I think we talked about this a little bit when we went over believability, is that it’s one thing to know, but you also actually have to communicate to the readers. So if you have any issues with consistency and believability, the first step is actually knowing what’s going on yourself. And the second step is making sure that readers do. Because if you do have a character that’s complex, for instance, and you’re thinking, oh, they’re on the fence about this, or they have nuanced feelings, they’re really divided, it is tricky to make that come across as being complex instead of just inconsistent. 

Oren: Yeah. My advice to clients I work with is when in doubt, simplify their motivation, because a lot of the issues that I’ve encountered of ‘this character is doing something that just seems to contradict what they wanted,’ is that the author has this very complicated idea of their motivation in their head that is hard to portray on the page. When in doubt, simplify, is my constant refrain.

Bunny: I’ve had this problem myself, especially in short stories, which I’m terrible at writing, where I’m like, I want this complicated background and I want the characters to have history with each other and interact in complex ways. So I come up with a backstory that’s completely tangled and requires tons of explaining. And then my professors, “This feels like a chapter of a novel,” and I’m like, goddammit.

Oren: No, I get it. I have the exact same thing. Okay. So these two characters, they used to date until they had to split up because of a war, and then they met again, but that one of them cheated on the other one, and then the other one stole all their money and then they worked for rival crime syndicates for a while. How long is this story again? 5,000 words. Don’t worry about it. 

Bunny: Yeah. The one I’m thinking of was that there was like two vampires and initially one of them had turned the other one, and then that one wasn’t ready for it and went on a rampage, and now they blame the first vampire for that. And it’s all very hard to explain in a ten minute play with only dialogue. 

Oren: Sounds like it could be a good novel premise though.

Bunny: That’s my problem!

Oren: Just saying.

Chris: Backstory, there’s the issue of communicating, but I think the other issue that happens with lots of backstory is that you want your audience to be on the same page as a character and feel what they’re feeling. And so you have to be able to relate the backstory in enough detail that you can feel that with them. So if you have them meet up with their ex, you want that to be an emotionally meaningful moment. The audience has to understand all that history enough to feel something about it, right? Feel whether that this is a good ex or a bad ex, or what have you, so that when you see the ex, they’re like, oh yeah, the ex, or like, oh no, not that ex.

And when all of those emotions are poured into the backstory, not only is it hard to explain, but it can also be really hard to then bring forth emotions in the story because it all depends on all this stuff. So, yeah, that’s again a matter of how much time do you have to develop your character. That’s a big one. And you have less time in a short story than you do in a novel. It depends on basically, what is the total number of words you have to devote to this character? And if you don’t have that many words, you gotta pare it down. And if it’s a character that only makes a small appearance, they can be a flat character. You’ll get away with it because people won’t have time to know the difference, and they’ll probably just be memorable, which is good if they appear more than once.

Oren: Okay. Now that you know all of our backstory and we are all very well developed around here, I think you can agree we are very real people who exist. We’re gonna call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you think we are real enough, consider supporting these very real podcast hosts on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.

[closing song]

Even the best villains must eventually come to the end of their run, but what if you could bring them back? It would be so easy, what would be the harm—NO. You stop that. Do not give in to temptation! This week, we’re talking about why it’s almost always better to leave a villain dead and then complaining about stories that didn’t leave their villains dead. You could say there’s a bit of an Echo in there, and that, somehow, Star Wars discourse returned. 

Show Notes

• When to Kill a Hero – Or Not 
• Kingpin
• Peter Hale
• Kate Argent
• D6 Star Wars RPG 
• “Ursula’s Crazy Sister!” 
• Sheev Palpatine 
• Darth Maul 
• How to Bring Back a Defeated Villain 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Paloma Palacios. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: Chris.

Oren: – and –

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: Now, you might remember that I was vanquished at the end of the last episode, but I have risen again, better and stronger than before.

Bunny: Nooooo!

Chris: Oh man, I put so much work into killing you.

Bunny: It was such a struggle. Could you just go back to being dead? That’d make it a lot easier.

Oren: No, since people liked me as a villain the first time, they are guaranteed to like me even more the second time. That’s just how stories work.

Bunny: You know when someone comes up to you and they’re like, did you miss me? Did you miss me? Yea, I always miss them more.

Oren: This is the process. You just brute force everything. It’ll work out.

Chris: But marketers really need easy, profitable successes, can’t we just take the last story and just do that again?

Oren: Yeah. Minimize the investor risk. 

Bunny: Look, even if you have an evil laugh, it’s even better ’cause then you can put it in trailers

Chris: Or the end of the credits, like we think the villain is dead, and then we have the entire credits, and then we resurrect the villain at the end of the credits. Like when most people left and then everybody’s like, why is the villain – I thought this person was dead and we made a really big deal about how this villain was dead. At the end of the last movie.

Oren: I hope you watched the mid credits scene!

Bunny: Psyche!

Oren: So today we’re talking about why your villain should stay dead.  They almost certainly should. The good news is that, from what I can tell, this is mostly a TV and movies thing. I actually could not find many novels that did this.

Bunny: That’s not too surprising.

Chris: I wonder if it has to do partly with, again, bringing in big name actors that play the villains again.

Oren: I think it really is. I think it’s the franchise obligations from what I can tell.

Bunny: Also Oren, go away if villain should stay dead. Hoo. Get outta here. 

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Well, that’s a nice evil laugh, that will do.

Bunny: I would put that at the end of the credits.

Oren: So there’s the big franchises like the MCU or what have you, where they have a bunch of characters and no one ever wants to get rid of them because each new writer wants to be able to use them. You see this in comics too, right? They’re never gonna permanently kill off a named character. That’s just how comics work, or at least how mainline, Marvel and DC work. And it’s the same thing when it comes into TV and movies, but you occasionally see it in other places where it makes even less sense and is even more confusing.

Bunny: Here’s a question – Do you think it’s better or worse to bring back a dead villain or a dead hero?

Oren: I would in most cases say a dead villain is worse. Neither is good. You shouldn’t start killing people and then bringing them back. It’s very tempting, but don’t.

Chris: Either one can seem really contrived, so they can both have that issue, but at least with a dead hero, I think people are more likely to be excited that the hero comes back and they can still function in their role as a hero.

Oren: The hero doesn’t have the same problem that the villain has of, if we killed them, they’re probably not threatening anymore.

Bunny: That’s true. What you need in a villain is, primarily, threatening. If you’ve gotten the crap kicked out of you, I think you’re just a little bit less threatening. 

Oren: There are some edge cases where that’s not the case. Sometimes the villain doesn’t get taken out by the heroes, and in those cases it’s not that specific problem. There are other problems, but it doesn’t have that specific one. But with a hero, that’s never gonna be an issue, or probably not ever gonna be an issue, but you’re still resurrecting a dead character is always gonna have a serious cost that is always going to erode audience trust in what you’re showing them. This is true of anything when you take back something that should be untake-backable, but it comes up the most with character death.

Chris: I think that the way it really destroys the experience is if when you do want a character to die. What you want is for your audience to be focused on that tragedy. You do not want them to spend all of their attention being like, okay, is this character really dead? How graphic was this death? Have they been bisected? Have they been set on fire? Their pieces been sewed back together?  If you actually have a dramatic death scene, you want them to be in the moment feeling the tragedy of that death when you know so many characters are brought back, that is less and less possible, and it becomes harder and harder to actually make deaths look permanent even if they are, and this is happening with injuries too. Marvel’s very bad. Marvel has become extremely bad about injuries.

Bunny: It also makes the audience just trust you less. It also, no matter whether or not it was planned, it just feels sloppy, I think. It seems very difficult to me, even if it was planned to make it not feel uncreative and sloppy, like you didn’t have any other ideas.

Oren: There are ways you can do it if you really set it up in advance. Maybe. I’m not gonna rule out a hundred percent of those possibilities, but it’s pretty rare, and most of the time, there’s no question. Most of the time when we see this happen, if people are complaining about it, that means you’ve already failed. 

Chris: Yeah, some implementations are definitely better than others, and so it’s impossible to say never, ever, ever, but it’s so uncommon for it to be done well, and of course, every time somebody does it, now they have the legacy of all the other storytellers have done it, right, in a cheap way.

Bunny: That makes it even harder, at the very least, that legacy is accompanied by a lot of unhappy people.

Oren: I also think we should  consider another reason why you shouldn’t bring back a dead villain, and this one’s a little more subtle, but I think it’s just as important and it’s ’cause it’s repetitive beyond the lack of threat. We’ve already done this and you made it seem like we were getting a new villain, right? That’s what happens when you kill off a villain. It seems like we’re getting a new one that’ll be interesting and some novelty will be added, and instead you brought back the old one.

Chris: Or just new problems because usually when you have the same villain, there’s a limit to how different the next problem the heroes are gonna tackle will be, so that also just limits, besides just the villain character, other types of variety in the plot arc. 

Oren: Then of course there’s the practical consideration, which is that most settings don’t have an explainable way to bring a character back from the dead and the ones that do have their own problems. And so as a result, most of the time when a character gets brought back beyond the more abstract level of, ‘well now I don’t believe you’ when a character dies, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s just not believable. They almost always end up having survived an unsurvivable injury. How did they get back by not dying?

Bunny: I think the way to do this is just to say. How did they come back? That’s a secret.

Oren: If you don’t explain yourself, everything’s fine.

Chris: I also think that it can be, again, really unsatisfying and frustrating when the hero does everything right and they’ve gone through their climax, their turning point, they’ve proven themselves, saved the day, and despite, through some examples here that we’ll bring up, despite doing everything, somehow the villain is just comes right back again and it just feels like authorial fiat, where we, the story, took it in one direction and the heroes didn’t succeed because the author just said so, and it undoes all the agency that the heroes have in many cases. That’s just a really unsatisfying way to end the story.

Oren: So I think we’ve talked, covered the principles enough. I think we get to complain now about specifics.

Bunny: Specific examples! Okay, my favorite part.

Oren: I think we’ve had our vegetables, we can have our dessert now.  So spoilers for echo, but yeah, kingpins back. He’s alive.  How is he alive? It’s ’cause he didn’t die. That’s how he’s alive.

Bunny: It’s a secret!

Chris: It’s also, spoilers for Hawkeye, because Echo is a spinoff of Hawkeye, but that just tells you how many times Kingpin should have died  because he started in Daredevil. He was a Daredevil villain. I didn’t even think he was a good Daredevil villain.

Bunny: Isn’t his shtick just being rich, like being a crime guy?

Oren: No. His shtick is that he’s large.

Chris: Yeah, and he is a crime guy, but like he’s not very good at it.

Oren: And in Daredevil, he at least conceptually made sense. Right? Because Daredevil was a very gritty show. Daredevil arguably doesn’t even have superpowers, because his superpower, and there’s a lot of ableism wrapped up in this, but his superpower is that he can see.  He has about as much perception as a sighted person. That’s his superpower.

Bunny: About that – apparently, we’ll get to this in a couple episodes, but he has a really random grab bag of powers that mostly amount to extreme senses and also sight.

Oren: Right, but in that specific show, he almost doesn’t have a power, so going up against a normal crime boss enemy works fine and Kingpin can be a big dude who’s good at punching. That’s not a problem. In execution it was a problem in that Kingpin wasn’t very smart and seemed really bad at running his crime organization, ’cause I guess part of his character is that he throws temper tantrums. And I thought we all agreed after Kylo Ren, that’s probably not a good trait for your villain to have, but apparently it’s okay when Kingpin does it.

Chris: They make him almost an underdog because there’s other crime boss antagonists that are also Kingpin’s antagonists, and they all seem much smarter and more competent than he is, and he just comes off as really pathetic to me, just not an intimidating villain. He feels like a goon, a typical goon, who then somehow ended up in charge and had no idea what to do.

Bunny: But what if he’s really tall?

Oren: He is very tall. He’s a big guy. But then it gets way worse in Arrow. Where, in Arrow,he’s up against Hawkeye, who, yes, is the most loser Avenger, but is still an Avenger. Hawkeye has still fought intergalactic alien space warlords, and now he’s fighting a guy who is large, and the show even recognizes that at some point, because it just keeps beating up Kingpin. Kingpin will show up in a scene and get beaten up, and then someone will drive a car into him.

Chris: Yeah, there was literally a scene where somebody drives a car into him and then he just gets up again and I’m like, what is happening?

Bunny: The human punching bag.

Chris: Does he have indestructibility powers? ’cause he isn’t supposed to, but he acts like he does.

Oren: That’s a whole thing, and it did not make him a good villain, and then finally he died.

Chris: Oh, finally, I would just rejoice. Finally, this character, more minor antagonist, (again, spoilers) Maya, she finally shoots him in the head at the end of Hawkeye.

Oren: Not just in the head – in the eye. You could not be more lethal than that.

Chris: It goes into his brain. Okay, great. We hated that villain. We hated him when he showed up in Hawkeye, but at least now he’s done. He’s been in two shows, which is more than he deserved, but he’s done and – suffer – He wasn’t done.

Oren: No! And then he comes back in Echo and he has a little scarring around his eye. How did the bullet leave those scars? His eye is not even not working, his eye is intact! Did the bullet bounce off of his eye and he was just stunned? What happened?

Bunny: He’s not even that big of a guy. I’m looking these up and he’s smaller than some wrestlers.

Oren: Yeah, he’s a moderately large man. I don’t think he’s bulletproof. I, I don’t get it.

Bunny: You can get an action figure of him that comes with detachable fists.

Oren: Oh, that’s nice. That’s a good. He should have that power in the show.

Chris: Yeah, he should have actual powers. Oh man. And then of course, at the end of Echo, he is, instead of like, again, he’s willing to kill lots of people. He has no problem with that, but at the end, Maya decides to heal his trauma instead of killing him, and it’s like, oh no, he’s gonna be back.

Oren: I noticed we didn’t heal the trauma of the Rocket Launcher dude, that guy we just shot. Does he not have trauma that could be healed? Why does Kingpin deserve to have his trauma healed? He is one of the worst people in the Marvel universe. Bringing back Kingpin for a second time was just ridiculous and it completely killed a lot of the drama, and at least they didn’t kill him again knowing they were gonna bring him back. At least this time, they were honest enough to just have him run off into the darkness, like, that’s a little bit better, but man, that was so irritating.

Bunny: I guess he could come back evil again. Man, I didn’t wanna be de-traumatized.

Oren: The reason this happened was clearly that they just made a mistake at the end of Hawkeye, probably because they didn’t know if Echo was actually gonna get to be a show or not, and they wanted to give Maya’s storyline in Hawkeye some closure, so they have Echo kill Kingpin as closure, but then they get their spinoff and they decided it needed to be about Maya and Kingpin, even though it didn’t. There are so many things it could have been about other than Kingpin.

Chris: I just wonder why they brought Kingpin into Hawkeye in the first place. Were they out of villain ideas?

Oren: I do think that’s actually it. I think it’s because the MCU seems to really, really, really like pulling in all of the stuff from other stuff you’ve seen, and they’ve run out of most of that, so they were like, Hey, we haven’t used the Netflix shows – let’s grab those, people liked those! and that seems to be their motivation as far as I can tell.

Bunny: It was just extra weird because they have so many comics, dozens and dozens of villains that they could pull from.

Oren: People liked that villain in Daredevil, but from a storytelling perspective, it’s obviously a bad choice.

Chris: So somehow Palpatine returned.

Oren: Yeah. Ugh…

Bunny: I’ll have you know, it’s cloning Dark Magic Secrets only the sith know.

Oren: Palpatine returning is the opposite from Kingpin returning, and it’s still bad, but it’s the other side of bad because with Kingpin it’s like, how did he come back? He didn’t die, we’re not gonna explain it. With Palpatine, it’s like, uh, force Magic cloning – those might exist, who knows? Those technically exist, you can’t tell us we’re wrong.

Chris: At least we know why they did it. It was absolutely desperation.

Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause they didn’t have a villain. It’s ’cause they were like, oh crap, it’s the third movie, nobody planned anything! We can’t use Kylo Ren as the main villain for a number of reasons, and so we need a new one.

Bunny: When I went looking for that quote, because I was like, did they explain it anymore? Did they just say somehow Palpatine is back? And the answer is no, they didn’t explain it, but there was an additional quote about how they don’t explain it, and I found a lot of horrible discourse about how somehow Palpatine has returned is actually a really smart line.

Chris: Well, it’s definitely lamp shading, I think. There’s no question it’s lamp shading that ‘look, we don’t know, okay.’

Bunny: They’re trying to be like, look, it was actually so obvious! There was someone on Reddit who is ‘clearly, it’s a soul transported into a cloned body, everyone else just wants to be spoon fed.’

Oren: Oh, did they say spoonfed? That’s a classic. Yeah. You can tell it’s implied to be cloning. You don’t need to read Reddit discourse to tell that they have big cloning tanks. It’s just that it doesn’t matter.

Bunny: It translates to, yeah, we dunno.

Chris: I also just love the idea that they decide to make a clone of Palpatine and instead of making young palpatine as he looked when he was like a senator, they decide they’re gonna, once again age that clone, so he looks like the wrinkled dark Lord.

Bunny: Why isn’t he sexy? That’s my question. He could have come back as sexy as he wanted.

Oren: Especially since this is a story about him having a granddaughter come on, show us this face that wooed this lady that we don’t know who she is, but she was around, she had to find something interesting about him. 

Bunny: Yeah, why is he like missing fingers and stuff? Why is he being hoisted around on a crane? Does his clone not have legs?

Oren: There’s almost certainly a tie-in novel that explains how using the dark side of the force makes your body fall apart in this particular case.

Chris: And he used lots of dark side really fast. His clone did as soon as it was resurrected.

Oren: Lots of dark side characters don’t do that, but this time it did for reasons, read, this tie-in novel, it’ll explain it.

Bunny: He got up from his cloning tank and immediately shot lightning for two months.

Oren: Hang on, I’ve solved it, I figured it out. So in the old Star Wars D6 RPG, there was an exploit where your force lightning did damage based on how much dark side points you had, but using Force Lightning gave you a dark side point. So, in theory, if you could just force lightning a rock for several days and then your force lightning would do infinity damage.

Bunny: You just wrinkle yourself.

Oren: So that’s that. We’ve solved it, everybody. We’ve figured it out. He’s just power gaming. 

Bunny: Who would’ve known?

Oren: This is the ideal Sith body. You may not like it, but this is what peak force lightning looks like.

Bunny: Maybe it’s what the Siths find sexy? Maybe that’s why he removed his clone’s fingers? He’s like, oh yeah, that’ll get ’em going.

Oren: This is not the only character that Star Wars has randomly brought back. They usually do it in the animated shows, which is a little less annoying ’cause those are understood to be their own thing. Darth Maul is brought back, which isn’t great, but it’s better than Palpatine.

Bunny: I think they should have just gone in with Palpatine coming back and rather than explain it in the opening crawl, they should have had a character see him, slap their hands to their face and go, Palpatine’s crazy sister!, just pull a little mermaid, too.

Oren: That would be perfect. I don’t see a problem with that.

Bunny: You can bring your villains back as much as you want, but you have to say ‘villains crazy sister!’

Chris: I do think that the Palpatine Fiasco is a good example of how a film that’s even quite good, becomes terrible if you bring them back, for all the reasons.

Oren: Especially with Palpatine, because he was just so thoroughly defeated. That was just the completion of a really major arc. Whereas with Darth Maul, it didn’t really feel like his arc finished. He had a lot of unspent potential. People saw Darth Maul and thought he was really neat. He looked cool. He was the first character to use a non-standard lightsaber. He fought two Jedi at once. He seemed like he was an important guy, and so him just dying at the end there felt like a real letdown, and so we’re more willing to forgive when Darth Maul comes back. I’m still not advocating for it, but I see why that’s less annoying. Whereas with Palpatine, it’s, look, this guy has nothing left to give. Okay.

Chris: We fully explored this character. We spent a lot of time defeating this character. We defeated him very thoroughly. He’s been dead for quite some time now.

Bunny: He even looks like a towel that’s been rung out.

Chris: But I do think the tricky thing is if they had a third movie. Where is their villain gonna come from? I might have gone with a hut instead or something like that.

Oren: I don’t know. I have thought about this a lot.

Chris: How, where will the villain come from?

Oren: Randomly theory crafting: How would you fix episode nine if you can’t change anything in the previous two movies? And I’m at a loss.

Chris: Time travel.

Bunny:  Oh no, that doesn’t open up any other problems.

Chris: At the very beginning , your characters travel back in time. Change what happened in the previous films. 

Bunny: This can only go well. 

Oren: Both the sequel Trilogy and the prequel trilogy have the same problem and that there’s just so much wrong with them and it is so unclear what anyone was trying to achieve that it’s really hard to try to come up with fixes ’cause you just have to start from scratch.

Chris: The whole thing. The whole thing needs to go in the trash bin.

Oren: Teen Wolf is another series that likes to bring back dead villains, although after the first two, they just stopped killing them and just had their villains hang out instead of dying.

Chris: That’s what’s so funny about Teen Wolf! The teen Wolf, he usually has two villains per season, and the first season, they kill both of them and they both end up getting resurrected. It was like they realized their mistake, oh, actually we wanna keep those villains. Drat, why did we kill them? And so then for the rest of the seven seasons, two of those seasons are like, have a part one and part two with their own villains, right? They have lots and lots of villains and they never kill them ever again, so the show just collects more and more villains as it goes on. It’s like, oh, come on, you probably could have afforded to kill a few of those villains.

Oren: They just keep building up.

Bunny: Should’ve just put ’em all in a house together. They can share a condo and it’ll just be the villain house and they hang out there and antagonize each other.

Oren: They honestly did need something like that because that was a problem they had at the end of one, I think it was season three, where they have the big bad guy who they’ve defeated, temporarily, and they don’t know what to do with him, and so they just give him like a stern talking to and send him on his way is. He’s killed so many people, but don’t worry, they’re confident he won’t do it again. 

Bunny: You pinky promised.

Oren: It’s like you guys, I don’t know man, you need some kind of system in place. I just, I feel like your solution of doing nothing leaves a lot to be desired. 

Chris: I do think though that the villains that they killed and brought back do make very interesting case studies because they are handled in different ways. So we’ve got Peter and Kate, and Peter is probably the bigger villain in the season, and he’s brought back, but they don’t try to make him a big bad again, well, for the most part, there is one scene in one of the episodes where they have this like big hook where Peter’s scheming, like, ha ha, I’ll get you. And it’s like, really? That’s not – now, Peter, Peter, I’m sorry, You can’t handle this, this is not happening.  But for the most part, he becomes an untrustworthy ally so they don’t need to make him threatening again and he’s interesting in that role.

Oren: Although they do then try to turn him back into a villain in the climax of one of the seasons and it absolutely doesn’t work, but it like, just comes outta nowhere. It’s like, oh yeah, I guess he’s the bad guy, sure, why not?

Chris: They take care of that problem that way. They do also give his resurrection a lot more buildup, then they do for Kate’s, and it’s still a bit contrived, but I do think investing more time and building up towards it makes it feel better.

Oren: One of the reasons it feels better is that it helps alleviate the possibility that anybody could come back at any time. ‘Cause if you establish the rule, that is gonna take a lot of effort, like a lot of narrative effort to bring a character back. We can at least feel like if we don’t see that the character’s probably not just gonna pop up one day. 

Chris: It also just feels like, again, the show earned it and it doesn’t feel as cheap anymore. In this case, we have another character who is a banshee and she can sense death, so it gets combined with her arc of realizing she’s a banshee and she starts getting visions of him and doesn’t realize it’s him at first and that kind of a thing, so it’s a major investment to bring him back. Whereas Kate, instead of her becoming just a untrustworthy ally, she is actually a big, bad again and actually works pretty good because instead they put her their investment into revamping her so that she can be, but she has to be more powerful. She was originally just a human in the first season, and she’s a human who knows how to use firearms, which in Teen Wolf, has the whole constraint where only humans use guns.

Oren: Kate’s actually interesting, because after she’s brought back, she’s a were-jaguar or something, and she’s, I think, one of the only characters who has magic and guns, which doesn’t make sense, but that’s a thing. She’s able to break the guns rule because she used to be human, I guess is the argument.

Chris: It’s a little contrived that she’s a were-jaguar. Teen Wolf has established that when people get bitten by a werewolf, they might become something other than a werewolf, but to me it, feels contrived every time. This person has a tragic backstory, so they became this other thing, all these characters have tragic backstories.

Bunny: Jaguars are just more tragic.

Oren: If you look at a Jaguar, haven’t you ever thought, that it is a sad wolf? If a wolf was really sad, that’s what it would look like.

Chris: And they don’t take – her resurrection is a surprise, so they don’t really take time with it, however, they put a lot more investment into she gets new powerful minions and new magical powers and other things to make her more threatening again.

Oren: And to make her feel different. So it’s not just, oh look, it’s Kate again. It also helps that when she died, the heroes didn’t actually kill her, the other villain killed her, so it didn’t feel quite as repetitive. It wasn’t like, oh, well we’ve already beaten this person, so it worked okay.

Bunny: Compared to some of these other examples, I’ll say.

Oren: It worked well enough for me to use her as my case study of how to bring back a villain. If you’re gonna, this is the way to do it.  I still wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to try, this is probably the best model you’re gonna get.

Well with that, I think we are gonna go ahead and draw this episode to a close, since I’m going to go be permanently dead this time and not brought back again, I promise.

Bunny: Good riddance!

Oren: Pinky swear, but you might meet my weird sister next time. That’s all I can say.

Bunny: Oh, it’s Oren’s crazy sister.

Chris: Now, if you would like us to bring Oren back from the dead so he can host another episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, and for the first time, we’re thanking Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much, and we’ll talk to you next week.

[Closing theme]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast

Holy podcasting, Batman! It’s time for an episode about stories that have two main characters instead of one. A story so nice they main charactered it twice. Whether it’s a hero and their sidekick or two siblings equally sharing the spotlight, this week we’re talking about how to balance the needs of both characters. We cover how to keep them both in the plot, how to keep their interactions compelling, and why they shouldn’t steal development from each other.

Show Notes

• The Winchester Brothers 
• Bo and Kenzi
• Slayers: A Buffyverse Story
• Sherlock and Watson 
• Nine Personality Clashes Character Conflicts
• The Daughter of Doctor Moreau 
• Lirael and Sammeth 
• Frodo and Sam 
• The Mimicking of Known Success
• ART and Murderbot 
• Laurence and Temeraire 
• Tom and Diana
• John and Dorian
• Harrow and Gideon

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: So there’s two of us. So we are gonna need to divide the spotlight evenly, but I know you’re gonna try to steal it because you’re clearly the author’s favorite. 

Chris: What, me? 

Oren: Look, I’ll divide the spotlight in two and you can pick which one to take. Does that seem fair? 

Chris: I’ve got an idea. How about if I say things and then you doubt me each and every time so I feel very put upon. And then at the end of the podcast, I can be proven right about everything? 

Oren: Wait, how is that different from normal? 

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: No, careful, too much self-deprecating humor will make you Sokka.

Oren: Oh, no! Now everyone is Sokka. 

Chris: Everyone is Sokka. 

Oren: Okay. So. Today we’re talking about designing dynamic duos, which is not just an alliteration, which I’m very proud of. 

Chris: Here’s your Hugo. 

Oren: Yeah, one Hugo, please. [Chuckles] But is something that I work with clients and I see them try to do, and they don’t want just one main character. They want two main characters. And I could be wrong, but as usual, I blame TV. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: There are a lot of famous spec fic shows that focus on two characters instead of having a single main character. You’ve got Supernatural, Lost Girl, Loki, Harley Quinn, The X-Files, the list goes on. 

Chris: I also think though, that we shouldn’t underestimate a writer’s tendency to get attached to their characters. Maybe they just want multiple characters to be important ’cause they like their characters a lot. 

Oren: There is that too, for sure. And I think TV has a tendency to do this because it’s valuable in TV to have a character for your first character to talk to. Because they don’t have narration, so they have to explain a lot more through dialogue.

Chris: Basically visual media without much narration wants to have more than one character in pretty much every scene. And when they don’t have a character, sometimes they’ll have a pet. I’ve listened to the Buffy audio drama recently and they have a very convenient pet dog and a pet monkey so that whenever a character was alone, they always had a person to talk to.

Oren: Man, that is so much harder in audio dramas. You can’t use visuals even to communicate what’s happening. You can try to use sound effects, but that is dodgy. That is unreliable. But the reason why you then have perhaps just two main characters instead of a larger group of characters, like with a Star Trek show, is that having two regular actors you have to pay is a lot cheaper than a whole cast of regulars. So just from what I’ve seen, I think that is why this thing is popular on TV shows. I could be wrong. I don’t work in the TV industry. That’s just what it looks like from the outside. 

Chris: And we’re talking about, again, if you’re writing a story that is primarily about a relationship, like a romance, although romances don’t have an exclusive right to relationship-related stories, it could be platonic too. There’s a lot more reason I think to have two main characters, but I think a lot of visual media chooses that even when the story’s not necessarily as focused as much on the relationship. 

Oren: I do think that if you are going to have two main characters, deciding what kind of relationship they’re going to have is important. There’s obviously romance, but it does not have to be a romantic arc. There can also be a friendship arc or a mentor-student arc. 

If you don’t want them to have a major relationship arc, if you want them to start with the same relationship, that they more or less continue throughout the story, I would recommend thinking: How do they fit into each other’s emotional arcs? ‘Cause you don’t wanna have one character going through a really intense emotional arc and the other one is just there. ‘Cause at that point you’ll start to wonder why this story is about two people at all. 

Chris: Generally you want them to be equally central. ‘Cause I do think if one of them is having a lot of strong emotions, that sort of signals that maybe the problems are more about them than the other person. And usually you want the character that is at the center of your problems to be your main character. So that would put one character in the position of feeling more central, even if they’re getting 50% of the screen time, for instance.

Oren: That actually is another thing that you should decide at the beginning, is what spotlight dynamic do you want for these characters? Do you want it to be a co-protagonist situation where there is a 50-50 split, or do you want a hero and a major sidekick? Second one tends to be a little easier, but I know that a lot of people are really devoted to the two co-protagonists. 

I just think that it is important to choose that from the beginning because you can increase a character’s importance, but decreasing it is very hard. ‘Cause if that character was well written, then people will like that character. Some of your readers will get attached to that character, and if you then try to decrease their importance, those readers will be mad.

Chris: And they can also start resenting the character that becomes more important. Setting clear expectations so that people don’t find their favorite character has been downgraded, is important. The advantage of having a single main character is then you can focus your attention on one person and focus on making the plot about that one person, and it’s all very complimentary. You get everybody attached to that person and then make the plot about them. It’s all very synergistic. 

So if you divide that up more by having two, basically co-protagonists, then you have to be a lot more careful in maintaining that or else people can get upset. This is what I feel like when I watch the BBC Sherlock and I just desperately want Watson to get more candy, but everything is about how cool Sherlock is, and I just start to hate Sherlock.

Oren: Yep. “And Watson was there”.  In general, you can promote a character from sidekick to co-protagonist. So you could start with protagonist and sidekick and then evolve that into co-protagonists a lot more easily than you can have co-protagonists and then try to change that into co-protagonist and major sidekick. Honestly, at that point, you would be better off giving the character you want to leave some kind of grand farewell. And then just having them leave the story instead of demoting them and then sticking around. 

Chris: You might get some people who are like, “Okay, that character is why I was reading so I’m gonna leave now”. But they won’t stick around and be resentful. I guess whatever your goals are. I would personally prefer, just set correct expectations and say goodbye rather than have a bunch of fans that hate me. 

Oren: You might lose a few readers, but you’ll have fewer one star reviews.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: So the next thing that I would recommend once you’ve figured that out, is make sure that they are part of the same story. [Chuckles]

Chris: Yep. What we just talked about, consolidating your story, making it cohesive.

Oren: And that generally means making sure that they can both participate in whatever the activity of that story is. If it’s a demon hunting story, they should both be demon hunters. It’s possible to have secondary characters who are not demon hunters, but a co-protagonist or a major sidekick, probably not.

Chris: I was thinking of doing some Lord of the Rings fanfic, where it’s about Sam and Frodo, but Sam just stays at home.  

Oren: [Laughs] Yeah, and that’s the other thing is you typically want them to be in physical proximity to each other. It is much harder to have two main characters who are separated by distance. In a advanced technology or maybe an advanced enough magic setting, I’m not saying it’s impossible, if you have enough instant communication and the ability to interact over long distances, but man, is it hard and it is much harder if you don’t have that technology. Probably impossible to be perfectly honest. 

Chris: Going back to our demon hunters example, they both need a reason for collaborating in this demon hunting related plot. But for instance, if you didn’t want them to both be demon hunters, maybe one person is the person that the demons are going after. And the other person is a demon hunter. So they wanna protect that other person and use them as bait, maybe. 

But in those situations, you still need to make sure that other person who’s not the demon hunter has something to contribute. Maybe the demons are going after that person because that person is a scholar who has studied the history of how demons came into the world and knows the key to defeating them, for instance. So as long as they both have a reason to be engaged in these conflicts together and solve problems together, for the most part, then you should be good.

Oren: And this applies even if you aren’t talking about a action packed spec fic premise. If it’s a political story, you need both of your characters to be involved in politics in some way. It doesn’t really work to have one main character who is a politician and another main character who doesn’t pay attention to politics and never votes. That’s just not gonna work. 

Chris: Need to get some politics in this relationship. 

Oren: Speaking of politics in the relationship, one thing that you should also consider at the beginning is, what makes these characters interesting together? Some of this is just chemistry, which is the fact that their interactions are fun to read about, is typically what people mean when they say chemistry. 

It can mean romantic chemistry, it can mean a touching friendship, or it can mean a rivalry. They don’t like each other that much, or they have some beef that they have to work out. Those things are all fun to read, as opposed to two characters who exist in the same place and are polite to each other. That’s not really much. 

Chris: And I think they can have a lot of personal reasons to dislike each other as long as they have a compelling enough reason to work together. If they have something that makes it so they don’t want to be in the same room together, they just have to have a compelling enough motivation to overcome that. 

The other thing that I see, of course, is that people want there to be more antagonistic chemistry, but they just can’t come up with a reason. They have a hard time thinking of a reason why their characters would fight and so then they just randomly hate each other. 

Oren: Yeah… [Chuckles]

Chris: Or they just rub each other the wrong way. But you gotta think about that ahead a little bit. What exactly is it about their personalities that makes them rub each other the wrong way? Is one person very like, “I hate planning ahead ’cause I don’t wanna commit to anything. I just wanna do what I feel like in the moment and make sure to keep all of my options open” and the other person is like, “No, we need to have a schedule and we need to get on time everywhere”? That would be specific, different approaches that would clash with each other and create some of that rubbing each other the wrong way. Sometimes if you just try to wing it as you’re writing your draft, the characters seem to act out for no reason. 

Oren: Yeah, and if you’re looking for reasons why they might rub each other the wrong way, I would recommend the post: Nine Personality Clashes for Character Conflicts by Chris Winkle. 

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s got a very lovely picture of two birds yelling at each other. [Chuckles]

Chris: Yeah, that was very cute. I think you found that picture. 

Oren: Yeah, I might have. It’s been a while, but it’s a good article and it’ll give you a lot of ideas. Ideas that are very helpful without going into the area where it just feels like these characters hate each other and have no reason to be together or are just mistreating each other so badly that it becomes unpleasant to read about.

Chris: Normally our recommendation for that is to basically give them conflicting goals, but if this is like a dynamic duo, so that you want them to be together solving problems together during the story, it is a little harder to give them conflicting goals. Now what you can have is a temporary alliance, like they both need to travel from Point A through dangerous territory to Point B. And they know they can survive better together, but they actually have different ideas for what they will do, that are in conflict, which they reach Point B. 

And then that way, their different goals can still create some conflict because they know that other person is gonna do something they don’t like and they’re trying to convince each other, or something. So you could have a situation like that, but, again, if they’re supposed to work together that much, it can be harder to give them conflicting goals in that situation. So you might rely more on personality clashes in order to create that antagonism. 

Oren: Okay, so those are like the best practices for creating your dynamic duo. There are also some common mistakes I’ve encountered that I would like to talk about. The one that I was not expecting, but that I have encountered several times now and is really irritating is when the characters interfere with each other. This is like a scene in a roleplaying game where the GM has put out a plot hook that’s clearly for one character and another character is like, “No, that’s my plot hook now”.

Chris: Is this because that character is the writer’s favorite? Is that why it happens? 

Oren: It can happen for that reason. Other times it makes less sense. The time that I saw most recently was in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which has this really interesting social conflict story where Carlotta is working on this social manipulation that she’s doing, and it’s really important and cool. And then because another character, this guy named Montgomery, has this jealousy arc. Where he has to learn not to be a controlling asshole, he just calls in an NPC who unceremoniously ends the social manipulation arc, and we never got to see any conclusion. It just stopped. 

In that case, it’s hard for me to say that the writer liked this other guy more than they liked Carlotta. But in this case, for whatever reason, Carlotta’s material was sacrificed for Montgomery’s jealousy arc. And man, did it make me hate that character. I just wanted him out of the story so badly. 

Chris: Yeah, no, that would be very frustrating because, sounds like he took her agency away. 

Oren: And that’s not the only way it can happen. You can also have, in theory, you could have something like a wish-busting moment where one character takes away a cool item from another character and stuff like that. In arcs and other story material is the most common. That’s where it happens the most. 

Chris: That seems similar to spotlight stealing. Spotlight stealing on a very specific plot point, level. 

Oren: It’s a very specific kind of spotlight stealing, because with spotlight stealing, that can be anything that makes one character just seem a lot more important than the other one. Stuff like what we saw in Lirael, where it seemed like Sameth was gonna be important, but then once they finally meet up with each other, Sameth barely does anything. Lirael does everything. 

Chris: Well, actually, the dog does everything. [Laughs]

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. The dog does everything. 

Chris: I mean, Lirael gets two important roles and eventually we find some sort of title for Sameth, don’t we? But initially, he doesn’t get any of the magical roles we expect him to get. Lirael gets all of them and later he gets some kind of consolation prize.

Oren: Yeah, he makes a sword for her at some point. I had honestly forgotten that happened. I found out about it rereading the plot synopsis for this podcast. 

Chris: Lirael is just altogether a mess because neither of them have agency because there’s this “God dog” escorting them, on an escort quest, to get them to the end of the plot, because the writer clearly thought that was clever. But I do feel like, again, he’s given some consolation prize later, but it’s last minute at the end, he’s certainly not given the same level of development, or definitely not the same level of candy that Lirael gets. 

Oren: Yeah, so that’s a very broad form of stealing the spotlight, whereas interfering with each other, that one’s very specific. 

Chris: I will say that with Frodo and Sam, for instance. Frodo is just set as the more important character, and Sam is the sidekick. And so again, because those expectations are set, it’s okay for Frodo to have more of the spotlight than Sam does because we set that expectation in the beginning and we continue the expectation. So spotlight stealing happens when you deviate from the expectations that you set and what is rewarding to the audience.

Oren: Now in terms of dynamic duos that I think are worth imitating and I’ve tried to come up with a list that are from books just ’cause again, I feel like this is a slightly different situation in TV. So my favorite that I’ve read recently are two characters whose names I have trouble with. They are the main characters from The Mimicking of Known Successes, and I believe their names are Mossa and Pleiti. This is a Sherlock retelling, although you might not know it immediately. And I think Pleiti is the Watson character, and Mossa is the Sherlock character. One of them is one and one of them’s the other.  

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: And it’s basically what you were talking about earlier, where it’s watching the story and you’re begging, “Please give Watson some candy”. This is what would happen if you did that. It’s what if Sherlock and Watson were partners instead of Sherlock being a genius and Watson watching him be a genius.

Chris: [Chuckles] Definitely sounds like an improvement.

Oren: Yeah, I like it. 

Chris: How was that split up? What did Watson get that Watson doesn’t normally get? 

Oren: Okay, so the way that it works is that the Sherlock character is the eccentric weirdo who has big ideas and is their information compiler, more or less. Whereas the Watson character is the more action-oriented character. She is the one who gets things done and actually does a lot of the investigation legwork. So they have a fairly equal share of the spotlight.

 And of course she’s the one who remembers that they need to do non-investigative stuff. ‘Cause Sherlock is still the investigation-obsessed weirdo, that hasn’t changed. Maybe we need to go get medical attention before we run off after the weird space cat, stuff like that. And of course, they’re also lesbians on a gas giant, which is fun, but not actually the main important thing about them, in my opinion. 

Chris: How about ART and Murderbot? 

Oren: Yeah, that one was tough. ‘Cause I don’t like ART.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t like ART either.  

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: But in the last work, Wells did finally nerf ART quite a bit by having ART load its consciousness into a smaller drone. And then they went off with the drone. So instead of having a huge ship that could just bully anybody, they had a drone that was not as powerful. So it wasn’t as grating.

Oren: Yeah, and again, similar to Frodo and Sam, ART and Murderbot have a very clear hero-sidekick relationship where ART is the sidekick. It’s an important sidekick, but it’s still a sidekick. Murderbot is the main character. It has a pretty good split. Again, Murderbot is the one doing all of the action stuff for the most part. ART’s drone does a little bit of action, but it’s fairly minimal, whereas ART is running a lot of the support stuff and compiling data. 

Honestly, it’s not that dissimilar from what I was just talking about with the Sherlock and Watson split. You see that a lot in these kinds of stories. I’m also a big fan of the Temeraire books and the two main characters there. Laurence and the dragon, Temeraire. 

Chris: Yeah. You got to have your animal companion, except for Temeraire talks.

Oren: Temeraire does talk. 

Chris: So not really an animal companion in the way that we talk about it being the pseudo-character. Temeraire is a full-on character. 

Oren: Yeah. Although Temeraire does still have some traits that you would associate with being an animal companion in that he’s very powerful and strong, but he’s also just, extremely earnest and trusting, which is a trait because every animal on a long enough timescale becomes a dog.  

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Temeraire is just not at all duplicitous or capable of really thinking in those terms, so Laurence has to protect Temeraire from his own trusting nature, that sort of thing. Those two, they go for the touching friendship angle of chemistry where they are just really good buddies for the whole story. Except for briefly when Laurence gets amnesia. ‘Cause that happened. 

Chris: Yeah, that happened.  

Oren: [Laughs] Hey guys, we’ve been doing this for a while. We’re kind of out of story. 

Chris: We ran out of ideas. How about if Laurence gets amnesia? 

Oren: [Laughs] But beyond that there, the relationship doesn’t change a whole lot. They have their initial bonding period, which honestly, we cheat because dragons magically bond to whoever feeds them first. So that was easy. But beyond that, their friendship is pretty set. It doesn’t really change a whole lot, but it is like a rock that the two characters can hold onto when they’re having their turbulent emotional issues, which happens to both of them as they go through different phases of the story.

Chris: So how important do you think banter is? 

Oren: I like banter a lot. For characters who are a little bit antagonistic, banter can be great fun.

Chris: I think the main thing is to make sure it’s banter and not one character being an asshole. 

Oren: If it’s just one character being rude to the other one and constantly making jokes at their expense or getting to pull one over on them ’cause they’re so clever, that’ll get grating real fast. 

Chris: I’ve seen a couple TV shows like this. So for instance, in The 4400, there’s a cop duo and it’s noticeable, one of them is a woman and one of them is a man. And man is just really mean constantly. And I’m trying to remember if he’s actually explicitly sexist or it just came off to me like he was sexist because he was giving her such a hard time.

Oren: I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t think he makes any super overt, sexist remarks, but there is definitely a vein of, “Ha ha. Why are you taking this so seriously, lady? Do you not have a sense of humor, lady? Come on, lady”. 

Chris: And it felt very similar in Being Human, where we have a cop and a character that is an android, but also black. And so this white dude cop is supposed to be really skeptical and mean to this other character because he’s an android but it’s impossible for the viewer to ignore that he’s black and it really just looks like racism. Also just being an android, you could consider another form or something very similar, very akin to racism. 

Again, those types of stories assume that we will be on board with a character who is being mean because we identify with them. And so it reveals what audience they care about and expect to have, or that they just expect everybody to identify with that character because of their demographics. 

Oren: And to be clear, that absolutely works. It’s just narrowing your audience in a way that you very much don’t have to do. 

Chris: I have no doubt that there were people who either, just identified with the white guy in this scenario and liked him and was ready, like, “Oh, I know he’ll learn better”. And it’s like, okay. He probably would. I just have to not want him to die, first, to get through the show. So that makes some certain assumptions. 

I also think personally with the sexism example, that there are a lot of people who just have low expectations of the way that men behave socially and might just look at that and think that it’s normal. And that has changed over time, but especially when we get to generations that are older, their expectations for how men are supposed to behave towards other people can be lower.

Oren: I mean, it’s the issue of, the difference between an arc where the character eventually learns better, and one where that’s just the accepted way that they act, is hard to spot at the beginning. And you just have to ask the question: Is this worth that? Is it worth alienating a bunch of your potential audience so that you can have an arc where one of your characters learns to not be a jerk?

Chris: Now, there were not those exact same bigotry dynamics in Gideon the Ninth, but there were still power dynamics. So we’ve got Harrow and Gideon. And Gideon is an indentured servant who is not free, and Harrow has control over Gideon. Obviously everybody’s excited about space lesbians, and it’s natural that people were shipping them. But on the page, what’s happening is that Harrow has tons of power over Gideon and is also very mean to Gideon. So, why I was not a fan. 

Oren: Yeah, but it’s okay because Harrow eventually had an arc where she briefly questioned her magic powers and then decided actually her magic powers were awesome, and she was awesome for having them. 

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: She was supposed to feel guilty about her magic powers, but it never felt that way.  

Oren: All right. With that, I think we will bring this episode of the “Mythcreants Dynamic Duo Podcast” to a close. 

Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, please support 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 Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

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