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

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[music]

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

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: … and…

Chris: Chris.

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

Bunny: The Mythcreants podcast, famously powerful.

Oren: Yeah.

Bunny: And rich.

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

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

Oren: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bunny: I’ve been in that situation.

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

Bunny: Not a good look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oren: Very unclear.

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

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

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

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

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

Oren: They’re bad people!

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

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

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

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

Bunny: How subversive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oren: Aw.

Bunny: Rest in peace.

Chris: Yeah, wanted that guy to stick around.

Bunny: Rest in hell.

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

Chris: Wow!

Bunny: Oh geez. No, thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oren: Oh yeah.

Bunny: Oh, are you about to spoonfeed us?

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

Bunny: As 2 out of 10 females.

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

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

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

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

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

Oren: Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm!

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

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

Bunny: Yeah, pretty much the same thing.

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

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

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

Bunny: Oh, my gosh.

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

Bunny: I want to read that other one.

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

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

Bunny: Poor Thomas.

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

Bunny: Oh, my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

Bunny: Keep us rich.

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

[music]

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

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