The Mythcreant Podcast

In an unusual twist for the Mythcreants podcast, we’re talking about current events (gasp)! Don’t worry, we won’t make a habit of it. But when we heard that a Big Five novel had been pulled over accusations of LLM generated text, we had to look into it. Honestly, the story is way weirder than much of the coverage suggested. Show Notes Shy Girl Controversy  Frankie’s Shelf Video NYT Article: Shy Girl Why Does AI Write Like That The Em Dash to the AI Allegation Thaddeus McIlroy’s Blog Post Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]  Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris… Oren: …and I’m Oren. Chris: [pretentiously lofty voice] On this podcast, we give advice. Not business advice, not process advice, just craft advice. Advice that lifts you up like hope, that lulls you like peace. That pulls you forward like ambition. It’s not words, it’s education. Oren: God, I took psychic damage hearing that. Oof! [Chris laughs] Oof, Chris, you gotta warn me next time! Chris: I’ve now learned too much about what AI-generated prose sounds like, or AI-generated text. Oren: You’re absolutely right. What a great idea! Chris: Sorry about giving you that psychic damage. I’ll be sure not to do it again. Oren: Three seconds later… [both laugh] Chris: Three seconds later, on this podcast… Oren: So we’re doing something that’s almost current events on the podcast today. Kind of unusual. We’ll see how quickly we can actually get this out. Chris: Current events, and I also wanna kind of broaden this into talking about, what does AI-generated fiction look like? What patterns are we seeing? What are some potential ways to recognize it, knowing that there’s still a lot of uncertainty here, and it could totally change with every new version or between different LLMs. But a little bit more useful stuff too. Oren: Since we’re gonna be referencing the novel Shy Girl a lot, can I give a brief timeline of events? Chris: Yeah. Let’s give you the timeline of events around this Shy Girl controversy. Oren: I don’t have exact dates for most of these events. I’m just gonna give you the rough order they happened in, and they happened over the course of the last few months. So, the novel Shy Girl is self-published by an author who at the time went by Mia Ballard. It gets a little bit of traction online. It eventually reaches about 4,900 Goodreads ratings, which is not bad, not a runaway success, but better than a lot of authors do. People start to wonder if it’s LLM generated. There are Reddit threads. The YouTuber frankie’s shelf makes a nearly three hour video dissecting it. This guy named Thaddeus Mackleroy – I believe that is how it’s pronounced – I’ve seen some MickIllroy, but Mackleroy appears to be the more common version. [Transcriber’s note: The name is spelled “McIlroy”; this is a discussion about pronunciation.] He hears about this, and he decides to investigate. As you will see later, he is not our friend, but for now, he knows people who run an AI detection company, which he sends the manuscript to, that he has acquired through ~means~, and they come back claiming that 78.4% of it is AI generated. Not that they have a 78.4% certainty, but that 78.4% of the document is AI generated. That is how he phrases it. So he goes to the New York Times with the story. They then go to Hachette and Ballard for comment – Hachette being the company that is publishing it through their imprint Orbit – and Hachette/Orbit decides to pull the book. They make some vague statements about doing their own investigation. Very unclear what that means. Ballard makes like one statement in an email to the New York Times claiming that she’s innocent, she didn’t do this, but also makes a vague allusion that her editor is responsible, with the exact quote being, “All I’m going to say is please do your research on editors before trusting them with your work.” She then claims she can’t say any more because she is pursuing unspecified legal action. Her minimal online presence vanishes, and then McIlroy publishes a blog post explaining all of this on LinkedIn, which is partly how I was able to put together this timeline. I also looked at, of course, the New York Times article and what Hachette said. And I wanna talk about that blog post later, but it’s probably not the most important thing in this story. Chris: [laughing] To be clear, we don’t have access to any more information than the stuff we’re telling you that is freely available online, and by looking at the text of the book, and nothing is 100% for certain unless we traveled back in time and transported ourselves to see Mia Ballard and what she did to put this book together. Oren: I realized, I think in that timeline that I put together, I forgot to mention the most important part, which is that Hachette/Orbit decided to pick up the book after it achieved its modest self-publishing success. Chris: She got indie publishing success, and then was picked up by a trad publisher that did publish her in the UK, I believe, right before pulling it. But it had not been published in the US yet. Oren: Most important part of the timeline, I obviously forgot it. Chris: [laughs] But then completely pulled the book after the New York Times started investigating. Again, what I said is, we don’t know anything for 100% certain. At the same time, that said, I personally think that we can be all but certain that large portions of it were AI generated. Ballard kind of admitted it when she said, “Oh, you ought to be careful who your editor is.” Look, it is not normal for an editor to contribute that much text to your book, and when I say that much text, I’m not even talking about the 78%, and we’ll talk more about what its narration looks like. It is very uniform. There are some places that are perhaps a little bit more quirky and human, which might reflect places where Ballard actually did some work herself. But this is not a situation where the AI style is isolated to little bits here and there, or in a few places that an editor might have done something. All of us who are writers who care about our stories, I cannot imagine sending my work to an editor and then getting back something that was changed enough… That would be ghost writing, not editing. Oren: Here’s the thing, I was talking to some other editors about it, and they were like, “well, surely she would’ve reviewed the changes that any editor made.” And from the way that I was looking at this book and how many just like incredibly obvious formatting mistakes it has, I wouldn’t be surprised if the author reviewed no changes. I still don’t believe this “the editor did it” story. Chris: That’s what they all say. Every single time an author is caught using AI to generate text, they all claim it was somebody that helped them or they hired or something. It’s not very believable. At the very best, it would mean horrible negligence on their part, and also that they don’t really care about writing their own work anyway, because somebody else would be writing their work for them. That’s kind of the only way that this works, because this work, it’s very kind of monotonous and repetitive in the way that it’s narrated, so it’s everywhere. It’s the entire thing. That’s just not how editing works. Generally, editors, if you get them to do heavy editing, they will supply more suggestions. Changes are tracked. They are making an effort to adhere to your voice and keep things consistent with the way that you normally narrate. If you had sort of AI software that was making constant suggestions, that would basically rewrite every single paragraph…but it’s just not feasible. Not if you’re the type of writer who actually writes your own work. Oren: I have seen accounts from authors who claim that they hired an editor, quote, unquote, off of some race-to-the-bottom website, and what they got back was just their manuscript had been fed through an LLM. Chris: You get what you pay for, folks. Oren: It’s not impossible that that happened. It does strain credulity that the author would then go on to publish that. And even if that is what happened, I’d say they are equally culpable at that point. They had a responsibility to check their work. Chris: Just wanna say what I think the biggest tell of Shy Girl is, because even things that seem nonsensical or inhuman can just be bad writing. We see unpublished manuscripts, and writers do a lot of weird things, a lot of nonsensical things. When people are trying to pound out thousands of words at a time some weird stuff ends up in there by accident. Some awkward phrasing ends up there, and you could look at any of that and call that inhuman if you wanted to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s AI generated just because it doesn’t seem to quite make sense. However, the thing that is really the big tell for this one is the contrast between the fact that for most of the narration, the spelling and grammar is just fine, but the formatting and production quality is incredibly sloppy. Because the cover image of the original indie book was stolen, and it was like blown up, so it’s poor quality, but also the formatting of the book is just extremely sloppy. There are breaks in the middle of paragraphs. I’ve seen indie authors, they don’t have a lot of money, they’re trying to put their book out. So they don’t necessarily know what good design is. They could try to do something themselves, and it might not turn out right. But a normal writer, even a really bad writer, who has actually spent all of that time writing, loves their book. That is the difference. This book is their baby. If they got a paperback copy, they would wanna open it up. They would wanna be really proud of it. If they see things like that, they would fix them, almost certainly. And if they’re so neglectful, then it’s weird that there aren’t any spelling errors. Oren: Yep. That is very strange. Chris: Because if they’re not neglectful, they’re not gonna be polishing…because it takes polish to get the spelling and grammar everywhere to be that smooth. And if they’re so sloppy in the formatting, they’re probably not hiring a professional copy editor to look at it. So how did it get that smooth, if they’re that neglectful? Oren: You would expect way more typos that a basic spell check wouldn’t pick up, like incorrect words that are spelled correctly, but are the wrong word. That’s the sort of thing I would expect. The manuscripts that I edit are often extremely rough, and they can be rough in weird ways. So I am super hesitant to say that a certain thing is AI. I’m gonna be honest, if the author had not basically acknowledged that it was true, I would still be hesitant to say this was AI, just because I’ve seen so many weird things that human writers do, but there is a lot. There is a lot here. Chris: But I think it is worth knowing… We also have some personal experience with plagiarizers who have taken our material from our blog and done various stuff with it. And one of the things that you get to learn, if this is done to you, [laughing] is that plagiarizers are just super, super lazy. Because that’s why they’re plagiarizing. And they don’t cut those big corners just to spend their time carefully formatting things, and carefully marketing things and packaging things, typically. So this kind of sloppiness of the production is what I would expect with a plagiarized work. They’re plagiarizing in order to not spend time, so they’re not gonna spend time. So that’s pretty par for the course with them too. And that’s something to be aware of. The spelling and grammar being pretty good really suggests some automation happening there. That sort of is a little helpful because it gets out of some of the subjectivity that can be true, because a bad writer can create anything, or it will cover a lot of things that are characteristic of AI-generated fiction. It got that from actually good works. It got that from strong written works, and the most notable one being the em dash, which a lot of people came forth to defend. And the reason it’s so attached to em dashes is because professional writers are a lot more likely to use em dashes. And so the AI associates em dashes with strong writing. So if you would tell it to give you strong writing, it’s like, oh, well that means em dashes. Oren: Obviously, that’s what everyone else is doing. Chris: [laughing] Right? It’s a funny thing, because people seem to not even be able to tell it to get rid of the em dashes. It keeps using them. It can’t not use them. Oren: So what are the specific signs in Shy Girl that we were looking at? Chris: We did watch the three hour video by frankie’s shelf. And it was a good video. I’m gonna give Frankie credit for that. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t wanna watch three hours, but I would like to just come in at the end of the video and watch some of it,” you can do that, but it’s not gonna have the same effect. And the reason is because Frankie spends those three hours just showing you the patterns, because this is about the repetition, the thing that really kind of emphasizes it. It’s the frequency of repeating the same things over and over again through the entire narration that really makes it stand out as possibly generated work.  And if you don’t read the book, or watch three hours of Frankie describing this repetition, it can be hard to understand what’s so unnatural about it. But basically it uses some words with strange frequency, like in particular “sharp,” and “heavy,” and “humming.” It has a lot of similes that are either slightly awkward, or just overly dramatic. It uses tons of adjectives to tell readers what to feel. And some of those adjectives are just like similes that are literally true, [laughing] which I have also seen authors do. I have seen authors write similes that are literally true, and therefore not similes, before. This is all something an actual writer could do. Then I think personally, the thing that can really stand out as an editor is just the fact that the narration never changes to suit the moment. It feels melodramatic, because it has just exactly the same amount of drama throughout the entire thing. Oren: Which is funny, because this is supposed to be a super dark book about torture and abuse. Chris: But it never gets more dramatic. Or less dramatic. Everything is equally dramatic. It has like one little backstory summary near the beginning, but it doesn’t seem to pause to do a deeper dive to set up later events where it can be faster, for instance. It’s just the same amount. And when the character has what should be a serious emotional blow, it never stops to do more internalization, to explore the effect that it has on her in a deeper way. So even though there is internalization, even though there are emotional reactions, it ends up feeling shallow, because it never stops to lay more groundwork, give more background, dive deeper into her head. It just continues forward at the same kind of not-very-fast, kind of melodramatic, pace. And that kind of monotony of the narration kind of reminds me of, honestly, AI-generated voice narration that I heard recently. It was like somebody had picked a setting where they wanted the voice to sound kind of bizarrely dramatic, and then that sort of dramatic style was applied uniformly to the narration, even in situations where it just did not fit. Like the intro to the audio book that was just saying here’s what the title is was in the dramatic voice. And the opening had a character who was bewildered and found themselves a new world and was saying casual modern day phrases in what I imagine Phantom of the Opera voice would be [laughing] – not actually being that familiar with that story – just like uniformly everywhere. It’s not what – it’s not normal.  A new writer could totally do that. And then Frankie brings up some places where people just don’t talk like that, like an eviction notice that says, “pay rent or quit,” even if that’s technically accurate. When I did the intro to this podcast, that was an imitation of AI style, like a little section. When I hear it, it starts to have a very distinctive voice that you could recognize. It has a lot of short, succinct fragments that are meant to add drama. And the pacing could almost feel stilted, and I can kind of recognize it because I automatically start reading it in that voice that I used at the beginning of the podcast – this sort of stilted, overly dramatic… So in this case, here’s just like one paragraph: [dramatic voice] “Rent. Bills. A parade of due dates I couldn’t outrun. My brain gnawed at the problem, like it could chew its way to a solution, turning it over and over until every angle was frayed. Borrowing money felt like begging. Job applications felt like flinging darts in the dark, the targets moving further away with every throw. What I needed wasn’t politically correct – em dash – I needed something that was immediate. Radical.” [/dramtic voice] Again, it’s very dramatic. Those kind of one-word sentences throughout the paragraph, the em dash… The other thing about the em dash, it is a very dramatic punctuation mark. It adds a lot of drama to a phrase, so it also can make things feel melodramatic. But that kind of slightly stilted, overly-dramatic phrasing with a lot of repetition – which is not normally bad – in the way things are phrased, is kind of what it sounds like. Oren: The first really interesting feeling that I had, looking at this whole thing, this whole scandal, was relief? Because if this is representative of where the AI slop book makers are, then the solution is don’t read really crappy books, like even if you can’t recognize that it’s AI or not. And I was already doing that. We should point out that we don’t know that. This could just be a particularly bad example, and that’s why it got caught. But my first thought was, okay, I think who this really indicts is Hachette, who was willing to publish this because it got a modest amount of social media traction. And it’s like, I don’t know, Hachette, try not publishing crappy books. I’m not a businessperson. Maybe publishing crappy books is where the money is now. It just seems like maybe that’s the solution to this. Chris: It’s interesting, because certainly LLMs by themselves cannot write a good novel. I feel like somebody who tried to put more of their own legwork in mixed with LLM-generated text might be able to go further, but at the same time, we kind of know that the nature of this is A, people are more likely to choose generative text if they are lazy and don’t wanna do the work themselves, and that people tend to quickly become dependent on LLMs in many cases, and over time are likely to cede more ground to them, and also let their guard down. Because AI makes mistakes. Unfortunately, it makes them just infrequently enough that people can’t maintain their vigilance when it comes to checking it. Oren: And that’s sort of what I’ve been bracing for, because my experience with LLM-generated text is primarily nonfiction, as far as I know, because I run into it a lot on blog posts and social media. And the way I know this is that often the person who does it will admit that they did that. They’ll either brag about it, or they will admit it under pressure. Which I’ve always wondered why they don’t lie, but often they don’t. And the characteristic of these are that it has grammatically correct sentences, each of which is a proper sentence, but that it doesn’t add up to anything. And that they tend to be very long, and they tend to have a lot of organizational formatting that doesn’t mean anything. But of course all of that is things that a person could do. A person could write a really long Reddit post with a bunch of bolded headings for no reason that never gets to a point. So that makes it kind of impossible to tell. It’s just that it’s bad, and that’s the more useful metric at this point. So that’s why I was expecting that to be the big scandal, and I suspect we will probably still get there. There will probably be someone who is willing to put in the work to make an AI-generated book not so obviously terrible, and then they’ll eventually get caught out, and that’ll be a big scandal. I’m sure that’s gonna happen eventually. Chris: I’m sure that an actual human working with an LLM could go farther than just the LLM. But I do think that would mean very bad things for that writer long-term. Because we’ve seen people’s skills degrade, have a hard time remembering the story if you don’t write it yourself, all sorts of things. I think it would just be very easy to become dependent. And also a lot of the things that Frankie felt that were bad about this novel was just the fact that the similes weren’t there. And they either were too literal, or, just, I don’t know what that’s supposed to convey. If you’re a person who is going over and has to check all of that LLM text, the idea of not letting any of that through seems unlikely to me. Eventually, you’re gonna start kind of accepting more of it and just letting it… And, as I see more about what AI-generated text looks like, there are more commonalities. I also think that if there are becoming more books that are written this way, people are more and more gonna recognize its voice, because it has its own voice. Even if we can’t identify – because other people might start copying it inadvertently, because there is style pollution. If you read a book with a certain style, you’re more likely to sort of subconsciously start copying that style. That’s how it goes. But at best that’s gonna be the general background style against which if anybody wants their style to stand out, and they’re writing to stand out, they’re gonna have to deviate from that. A really funny anecdote – there’s an NYT article by Sam Kriss on what AI writing looks like that is quite informative – that apparently if you ask AI to write science fiction, it has an uncanny habit of naming the protagonist Elara Voss, specifically, and male characters are usually named Kael. Oren: God dammit, Kale! Chris: [laughing] Like K-A-E-L. And so, according to Sam Kriss, there are now hundreds of self-published books on Amazon featuring Elara Voss or Elena Voss. Oren: Yeah, of course there are. That cannot be a surprise. That’s just exactly what we all knew was going to happen. Chris: [laughing] I just find that very funny. So if you read sci-fi and the main character’s name is Elara Voss, or Kael, just run in the other direction. Oren: And I do think it’s important to emphasize that there are no good guys in this story. It’s been pointed out that Hachette either knew or should have known that there was something fishy going on with this book. Because presumably they would’ve looked into its social media history, since that was in theory the reason they got it. And they would’ve noticed that there were a whole bunch of people asking, “Is this book AI generated? And also it’s really, really bad.” They at the very least were negligent. And I mean that in the colloquial sense. I’m not suggesting they were legally negligent, not a lawyer. But also I wanna take this moment to talk about our good friend Thaddeus McIlroy, who is the one who brought this all to light. Because his blog post about all this is bizarre. First, he mostly wrote this blog post to complain that the New York Times didn’t give him enough credit. And if he was anyone else, I would agree with him, because the New York Times barely mentions him. But you then start to wonder, okay, Mr. McIlroy, why did you launch this investigation in the first place? Because he is actually very upset at what happened, that Ballard lost her book contract and had to give up this pen name. Like, he thinks that was an unjust result. Chris: Was he thinking, like, “see this book is AI, glory to the AI”? Is that what he was doing? Oren: I don’t know. He’s really unclear why he decided to do this. He has a section where he says, “Trade publishers are (somewhat) quietly adopting AI tools themselves, dancing delicately around whether this conflicts with their public-facing ‘principles.’ I was more than happy to use this story to highlight the conundrum.” So maybe he thought he was gonna pull a gotcha on Hachette, and they were gonna be like, “oh yeah, actually LLMs are fine”? Surely he didn’t think that was going to happen. If so, he’s extremely deluded. There is no way, especially not with a book this bad. So then he’s upset that this is what happened. This obviously predictable result of his actions is what happened. This is a bit like a cop bemoaning that after catching someone for assault, that person went to jail. It was like, “Well, I didn’t want them to go to jail. All they did was beat up a bunch of people.” Well, okay, why did you catch them then? [Chris laughs] Remember, he’s claiming that these AI detectors, they work really well according to him, and this idea that they don’t work is like an outdated idea from when they were bad. And he lists some studies that claim that the AI detector he’s using has an error rate of 0.5%. That’s how accurate he thinks these things are, but he also thinks that we just have to accept that books are gonna be made with LLMs now, because there’s nothing to do about it. What are you doing here? He is both bemoaning witch hunts, selling witch detectors, and also telling us it’s impossible to do anything about witches. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen accusations that his blog post is AI generated by people who ran it through AI detectors, and maybe it is. Maybe he’s just bad at writing. I cannot believe what I read. As I was reading this, I was like, what was the purpose of this thing you did? Chris: That sounds like somebody who thought that “here, if I reveal this book as AI, then Hachette will be forced to defend it and forced to defend its use of AI,” and thought it would go the other way. “If I bring AI out into the open, then it will cause AI to be acknowledged and lauded instead of canned.” Oren: Instead of the obvious thing that was going to happen. We do know that a lot of AI boosters are completely disconnected from reality, so maybe that’s what’s going on. Chris: Or just surrounded by other AI boosters, so they don’t seem to know how many AI haters there are. We hear again and again from so many people that they’re surprised when they do an AI thing and it’s controversial, and it’s like, who are you hanging out with that you didn’t know that? Oren: It’s just so weird that the people who are selling us the product which is supposed to be the solution to the problem, do not want us to use their product to solve the problem. Chris: Well, maybe that could be one reason, if they’re not reliable. Oren: I don’t think they’re reliable. And he doesn’t think they’re reliable, because he’s like, well, you gotta presume innocence. And it’s like, do you? With an error rate of 0.5%? I don’t know, man. That’s your study, not mine. I’m just saying you seem to think it is. Chris: Before we go, I’d love to talk about, just go over quickly, some patterns of AI writing in general. It tends to have very specific tells that you can learn. Again, these things will be found in writing, especially strong writing, because that’s where they come from, unfortunately, and it could vary with different versions. We talked about the em dash. Professional writers love it, but LLMs like to use it a lot. Sets of three. That’s another thing that culturally we just find pleasing. If there’s a set of three, that’s another thing a strong writer is likely to use, but LLMs use them a lot. Repeating similar phrasing, using the same phrase is a way – that’s actually a lyrical technique that makes the words, you know, the style more rhythmic. But of course LLMs have picked up on that, so they have a lot of repeating phrasing. And then there’s specific imagery and words that LLMs tend to like, like “quiet” and “silence” and “humming,” and apparently they love ghosts, and phantoms, and the word “delve.” Oren: Okay. [laughs] Chris: The other thing that really stands out, that is very present in Shy Girl, and I think that there is a name for this, but I cannot find it anywhere. It’s a specific literary technique of basically pairing a tangible thing with an intangible concept, a concept that is often kind of emotionally loaded. For instance, in this case, when we say the main character’s mother is about to abandon her, we say that her suitcase is big enough to hold forever. So the forever would be like the intangible concept in the suitcase holding forever, and it kind of creates contrast, and can be kind of evocative, which is why this is a well-liked literary technique. A lot of the writing tends to feel very, like, kind of flowery, and it gives it the illusion of having emotional depth. Even though it doesn’t really, if you actually keep reading it and look deeper, try to put it together after it’s done a paragraph of this. But the interesting thing about this is it’s a replacement for something LLMs seemed to be having trouble doing, which is sensory description. If we were to describe the suitcase physically, or like how it smelled or felt, that would basically put more burden on accuracy. It would really require knowing what a suitcase looks like, or feels like, or smells like in order to do that. Whereas if we just say it’s big enough to hold forever, you could associate forever with all kinds of tangible things as an artistic strategy, and so it gives the LLM more leeway. But eventually you’ll see that these intangible concepts are kind of nonsensically paired with things, or they’ll be mixed metaphors, or they’re just not used in as thoughtful a way as a human would do it. So that’s another thing that’s very common. Oren: With that list, I think we’re going to have to finally call this extra-long episode to a close. Chris: If you would like to support some actual human writers, [laughs] you can always become our patrons. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll 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.

Look at your main characters, such good friends! Be a shame if anything made them turn on each other in a conflict that’s as full of angst as it is cool action moves. Who are we kidding, that sounds awesome. But how to go about it? We need disagreements that are big enough to turn heroes against each other while not seeming like they’ve suddenly turned evil (unless they’ve suddenly turned evil). And you probably want to leave room for a reconciliation at the end. We’ve got some thoughts! Show Notes Dark Shadows Tidelands Janeway Sheridan  Korra  The Librarians  Nine Personality Clashes for Character Conflicts Seven Ways to Create Rifts Between Close Characters The Last Jedi Transcript Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.  Oren: And I’m Oren.  Chris: Oren, I know you wanna keep using Audacity to record the podcast, but I have this gut feeling that it’s evil and will destroy us. And no, I can’t give you evidence, but I’m really mad that you don’t believe me about this. Oren: Well, I think that the obvious solution is for us to spend the next eight episodes repeating conversations in which I tell you this isn’t real, you insisted it is real, and we don’t go anywhere. Chris: So we’ve watched hundreds of episodes of the soap opera, “Dark Shadows”.  Oren: Yeah, we have done that. Chris: And how do you write a show that’s like, a thousand episodes long? Not by moving the plot forward.  Oren: Yeah, don’t do that.  Chris: Well, obviously, since you don’t believe me, I’ve gotta go behind your back and maybe kidnap some Audacity developers to prove that I’m right. Oren: It just makes sense.  Chris: It’s just a very constructive action that will cause no further disagreements.  Oren: Yeah. Afterwards, I’ll be like, “oh, I guess you were right the whole time. My bad.”  Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about when protagonists fight.  Oren: First thing to do is get some popcorn, I guess.  Chris: Yeah, get some popcorn. So let’s just start with why make protagonists fight?  Oren: Because it’s fun. I like to use the Let Them Fight GIF over and over again.  Chris: Because we like drama. Or sometimes you gotta romance and you gotta keep the lovebirds apart for a little longer. You know? You gotta come up with something and the fight is a way to do that. Or in a suspenseful story, maybe it’s ‘no one could be trusted’ and so you wanna create separation between people so that you don’t know who is a friend and who’s an enemy; trust no one. Or you just really like great conflicts with nuance. Oren: Right. The characters fighting could be a number of different things, right? It could be characters who start off on the same team and have a temporary disagreement. It could be characters that start off from the same team, and then one of them, you know, decides they can’t work together anymore and becomes an antagonist. Or maybe they are opposed to each other from the start and you’re following both sides of a conflict. There’s several different ways this could work.  Chris: Yeah. And of course we also have situations where people are at odds at first, and they solely come together, and then there’ll be some relapses when additional differences surface they break up again or whatever. So, certainly a variety of situations when we have these kinds of relationship arcs where people have to, you know, encounter problems in their relationship and work things out. But there are lots of issues. I’ve seen many, many storytellers struggle with this one.  Oren: Right. Well, at the core of it is if you want characters to disagree about something strongly enough to oppose each other, not necessarily in a physical fight, they could just be arguing a lot. Something that goes beyond just a mild, oh, maybe you should do something else. It needs to be something that is important but also something where in most cases, you want to be able to see both sides of it, because if one character just seems unreasonable, that character is gonna get a lot of hate.  Chris: And again, there’s just a lot of people who just have trouble coming up with great conflicts. That’s just something that storytellers struggle with a lot. And what can happen here is that the writer just doesn’t come up with a reasonable fight, so maybe the fight feels overly petty over something that is not a big deal, or people could be talking it out and instead they’re fighting instead of just reasoning with each other, or, this happens a lot in long running shows, where the characters change personalities. Like, in order for this fight to happen, a character manifests a new flaw we’ve never seen before and is just overly dramatic. And often a character comes off like an asshole maybe ’cause we need them to be an asshole for this divide to occur in the first place. Oren: Yeah, you know, we need these two characters to be in opposition or the plot won’t go forward, but we don’t really know why, so I guess one of them is just mean today.  Chris: Yeah. This reminds me, we were just watching the show, Tide Landers or Tidelands. We also referred to it as Violent Women because it’s about like these half-sirens and sirens, you know, gotta be sexy ladies. So there’s just a lot women who do violence in the show, which is kind of fun, but this main character, Cal, which is short for Calliope, man, she is just very angry with people because while they’re in like emergency situations they won’t stop and take her to the place she wants to go. Oren: Yeah, I liked that show way more before we had clearly jelled around Cal as our viewpoint audience insert character.  Chris: I thought she was the main character from the beginning.  Oren: She was supposed to be, but early in the show there was a lot more focus on the different factions in the town and what they’re doing. And Cal’s story doesn’t really heat up until a few episodes in and before that it’s just a lot more like a mafia drama where everyone’s kind of bad and you’re just waiting to see what types of extreme violence they inflict on each other.  Chris: Because the half-sirens in the show are dealing drugs.  Oren: Right. Chris: They’re supplying drugs. We’re not actually sure where they get the drugs from, but they supply the drugs.  Oren: They never explain where the drugs come from. Don’t worry about it.  Chris: They manifest drugs from the ocean, I guess, but we also don’t know what the drugs are. I think that if they named what the drugs were, then it would feel more real and the viewers would be more likely to be like, “uh, I don’t know. Do we like these people? They’re dealing cocaine.” Right? Whereas if we don’t know what the drug is, it’s like, “I dunno, maybe it’s a fantasy mystical drug that’s not so bad, but that people kill each other dealing ’cause it’s illegal.”  Oren: Yeah. Who knows what it is.  Chris: Any case. So the conflicts in there are just her not understanding that somebody else is in an emergency situation and like, yeah, she’s going through some stuff. She just found out she’s not entirely human and that would affect a person, but the other person is [in] a very understandable situation and she just doesn’t see that. It’s like, yeah, somebody just tried to kill your brother and he’s being hunted right now, so this is not really the time to complain about the fact that he won’t drive you where you want to go. Oren: Yeah. That whole show is full of characters just not having great motivations for things they do. As you go, you’re wondering, “okay, why are the sirens and the drug dealers at odds with each other? And why does anyone care which siren is in charge? It doesn’t seem like it makes that much of a difference.” There’s a bunch of stuff like that going around.  Chris: And I do think it’s one of those situations where we have a set list of characters and we have to fill the show with scenes with those characters at odds with each other. And sometimes the writers might be struggling to be like, “okay, so why did these characters hate each other? I don’t know. I just need them to draw their guns.” Oren: Yeah, they need to point guns at each other. It’s very dramatic.  Chris: So anyway, not having a natural reason for characters to fight and then making them come off as really petty, that’s a very, very common one. Another one that I see is a character – this is the “Voyager” problem – a character getting too much candy. Oren: Mm-hmm Chris: Because sometimes what happens in these protagonist fights, is that one character who is the writer’s darling, the whole point is that everybody doubts them so that they can later be proven right. Jane Way has some of these arcs on “Voyager”, and usually to make that work, you know, if you have this one beleaguered character who just, nobody believes in, but they’re right, well, okay, why doesn’t anybody believe them? So all of the other protagonists have to disagree with them, which probably means that they don’t have a very good reason for doing what they’re doing, and then they’re proven right, usually by luck.  Oren: Yeah. The whole “everyone’s against me and I have to prove them all wrong” is, it’s not that it can never work, but man, that is a steep hill to climb. “Babylon Five” does the same thing with Sheridan and I find it just as annoying there.  Chris: Yep! Korra has it once in Legend of Korra too. So there’s a number of characters where we’ve seen this arc.  Oren: Yeah. It’s just like, look, if everyone disagrees with your protagonist, what is it your protagonist sees that none of them can? Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: Why is your protagonist the only one who is correct?  Chris: Which is one of the reasons I brought up this like, oh, it’s just my gut, which we have seen on Star Trek before. I don’t think that one was Janeway, I think that one was a different character.  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: But again, why have people doubted you? It was like, “well, look, I just know this to be true, but I can’t give you any evidence.” It’s like, okay, well this doesn’t feel like a hill to die on then if you don’t have any evidence, this would be more interesting and more realistic, but take some more thought where there’s evidence that can be interpreted in different ways. And then you have to establish, okay, why is each person heavily invested in their own interpretation? Oren: Yeah, and you can make this easier on yourself by introducing a time limit. If the characters have to make a decision quickly and they have limited information, then they can’t just be like, “all right, everyone, hold up. Let’s calm down. Let’s reorient and see what we’ve got.” You know, there’s no time for that. You gotta make a decision now. And so the characters are gonna come down on the sides that they are, you know, predisposed to for various reasons.  Chris: And you can also have a situation where characters disagree but you’re not endorsing a particular person as necessarily being right. One of them might succeed in getting their way and the other won’t or maybe they’ll compromise, but you’re not trying to be like “this person was right all along”. But if you do have a person who’s like, “this person was right all along,” that’s a lot of candy. And so if the character is already candied, really feels like too much. Whereas if you had like a really downtrodden main character who was marginalized, and that’s why nobody takes them seriously, then that would be seem a lot more reasonable. We know why people aren’t taking them seriously, they already have lots of spinach, they could use a chance to show everybody what they’re made of. That’s very different than a character who is kind of insufferable and then gets to be the one person who’s right when everybody else is wrong. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Another really common issue that I see in a lot of these protagonist versus protagonist kind of fights is things that feel morally twisted. Sometimes that’s to vindicate the character who looks wrong. We need a character who looks wrong. If we had a situation where it’s like, “no, I swear in my gut these people are evil,” and then I break in and kidnap them, and then it turns out that I’m right, there’s something still wrong with that! I didn’t have any evidence, I still broke in, kidnapped somebody without evidence. Even if I’m right by luck, that’s still kinda like, ugh. Or another one, because storytellers have so much trouble coming up with gray conflicts, gray washing a black and white conflict.  Oren: Oh God, that’s such a problem. Chris: This is where you’re like, okay, you present a situation, oh, these are the oppressors and these are oppressed. But what if the oppressed people also did crimes or something?  Oren: Right. It’s like, so there are two sides out here, and one side murders, crucifies and enslaves people, and the other side is vaguely problematic. So they’re basically equal.  Chris: Or “The Librarians” did an episode where they were talking about this American Civil War. It’s like, okay, no, no, no, no, that was not a black and white conflict. One side was a bunch of rich slave holders that wanted to continue enslaving people.  Oren: Yeah, or specifically it was a black and white conflict. Which is not to say that the North were like perfect good guys, but there was obviously a bad guy side in that conflict. It was good that the Confederates lost.  Chris: Ironically, the thing about this is that if the Confederacy had not withdrawn, there’s a good chance the North would’ve never, at least not soon, pushed the slavery issue. What happened is that these rich slavers were sure that Lincoln would try to abolish slavery, and so they preemptively wanted to withdraw from the Union. Oren: It’s a little more complicated than that. What they also wanted to do was expand slavery because they thought, or at least this is what I’ve read, they thought that the institution of slavery would die out if it stayed contained to the current states that it was in and so they wanted to expand it. And some of ’em had these wacky plans of like, conquering Mexico and instituting slavery there. And that was also part of why they decided to secede ’cause they knew that Lincoln, while he was unfortunately not an abolitionist, would not countenance the expansion of slavery and would try to curtail it slowly over time. And that was just not acceptable to them.  Chris: But the North previously had done a whole bunch of appeasement of slavers, so not showing a lot of moral bravery there, not– [chuckle] when the war started. That was definitely the correct side. So when “The Librarians” comes and it wants to do this whole brother versus brother framing, where they go to a historical town where they’re doing civil war reenactments and they have two of the characters get possessed by civil war ghosts or something like that. And it, it definitely is trying to basically reframe it as a gray conflict where both of them learned they were wrong. And it’s like, no, no, don’t do that.  Oren: Which is funny. They could have just used the Revolutionary War if they wanted to do that. Like yeah, absolutely, have a story about a patriot and a loyalist who realized they were both wrong. Works for me. Chris: So basically trying to take a black and white conflict and then be like, okay, but it’s too simplistic. It’s black and white, and then adding something to try to make it, that really ends up creating some very morally twisted storylines. You wanna take an issue that is inherently gray and you’ll know it’s gray enough when you talk to different readers and they all have different opinions about which side is right. I did an article on doing moral dilemmas a while back and had some examples of moral dilemmas that you could have in your story. And it was really funny that commenters would come in and be like, “how dare you say that that’s a moral dilemma, this is obviously the right side.” And then another commenter would be like, “how dare you?” And then pick the other one. And it’s like, “yep. That’s why we call it a moral dilemma, folks.”  Oren: Yeah, it was funny reading that ’cause on the one hand, the fact that some people are willing to take up for one side and other people will take up for another side doesn’t inherently make something morally gray, but in this case it obviously was if you just reasoned through it a little bit. And so you just seeing people like both confidently take different sides in the same comment thread was very funny.  Chris: Yeah. Those are some things to look out for. I do think that it really just helps storytellers a lot to just have ideas because I think a lot of these problems, maybe not the candy issue, but a lot of these problems are just rooted in struggling to come up with something that works. I think offering some ideas and templates for how you can have a big disagreement that turns into a fight and gives people somewhere to start with is helpful. And I have a couple articles. I have one that’s specifically “Seven Ways to Create Rifts Between Close Characters”. That one is for what I think is the trickiest situation where your characters are already getting along well and you need to add a new issue that can put them at odds with each other. I also have one on personality clashes, which is generally from characters that don’t have that much exposure to each other. They’re not already friends and writers also have a lot of trouble with personality clashes and tend to make characters come off as very unreasonable. Now, a lot of times you don’t need to do a personality clash ’cause that’s a particularly tricky one. You can do something that’s a little bit more significant than just they rub each other the wrong way. But there are ways to do that productively.  Oren: Yeah, and one aspect of this that is I think, useful to think about that isn’t just setting up the argument itself is making sure that you have room in the plot for this kind of split, because this is something I have encountered occasionally with client manuscripts, thankfully not that often in published stories, where you’ll have two good guys, right? You’ll have two characters on team good, and then a villain that they’re both opposing. Then there’s a split between those characters and now one of those characters is opposing the protagonist, but there’s still this villain, so now you’ve got two villains and what are you doing with both of those? Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: So depending on how long the split is going to last and how serious it is, you usually want to make sure that it is tied into whatever opposition you already had as opposed to just, well now a new challenger has arrived and, and now what am I doing with him?  Chris: Right. Or have the story have somewhere to go with it. Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: If a protagonist is going to split off and just even become an antagonist, where does it take the story that it wouldn’t have gone before in interesting ways? So we’re not just, “Okay, well characters caught in a fight, but we still need to like go in this direction. So I guess they make up now.” Now granted, a fight can matter for multiple reasons. It can change the way the external plot goes, but also it can just be part of a character’s arc. If they have some issue that they need to resolve, the fight can be part of that and show them overcoming that, just part of their relationship arc, whatever. But you know, you do want somewhere to go instead of just, being like, “okay, well I counted on the protagonist doing this and now their head lieutenant is against them. How is that gonna work?” So should we go over some ideas for types of disagreements?  Oren: Yeah. I have found that a very good one is, who should we be helping with whatever it is we’re doing? If you have two characters who have found a bunch of money, how should we spend this? You got maybe one character who’s like, “we should spend this on ourselves and our friends and our family,” and the other characters like, “we should spend that to buy a building that we can use to help people who don’t have housing.” And that’s a sort of conflict where you can sympathize more with the second character, but you can see where the first one’s coming from. Chris: So they have different priorities that kind of separates them, I think that also works really well. Something similar is risks. What risk are we willing to tolerate? And we can combine that, “okay, we wanna help somebody, but that person is also a fugitive, but we know that they’re innocent, but they’re still being hunted and we can get in trouble. Do we wanna prioritize helping this person or not getting in trouble?”  Oren: Mm-hmm.  Chris: “Do we wanna make sure we protect what we have or are we gonna decide we’re gonna go and proactively attack the enemy even though that’s a risk because we’re just getting weaker if we stay here?” So that kinda like risk tolerance can definitely be a dividing point for characters. Oren: Yeah. The uh, “are we willing to face danger on someone else’s behalf” is [a] good thing that can drive otherwise reasonable characters apart.  Chris: Another one, we had a recent episode talking about questionable allies, trust and loyalty I find are really useful for dividing people. If they have some kind of authority figure, can be useful for authority figure to show up who’s just kind of questionable. Which brings up the question of like, okay, even though this person is doing some things that don’t seem quite right, are we going to trust them and still follow their orders? And if one character does a lot more rules following than the other, that one works really well. You have an ally, right? And if you have somebody questionable, you do want them to provide some benefits. So we’re again, talking a lot about priorities and risk here, we have a questionable ally, that person might not be trustworthy, but they can bring us really valuable information. I think the nice thing about loyalty and trust is we can get a lot of emotion in there and a lot of drama, if that’s what we’re looking for. Sometimes the questionable ally might be somebody’s childhood best friend or something suddenly shows up, then you have one character who’s really attached to this person already and might take offense if somebody else doesn’t trust them.  Oren: You can, she can use that to show that this character trusts the new ally because they have a history. This other character doesn’t have a history and is just looking by what we know this person to have done. And that’s a great way to build conflict between characters.  Chris: It can be fun if the characters are not already close. This one kind of requires, if it’s clear that there is a spy somewhere, there is a mole. That can be great fun because all the characters can suddenly start following each other, spying on each other, trying to find out who the spy is. But that behavior may also make them suspicious, and everybody can suspect everybody else.  Oren: Yeah. The fear of a spy is also the perfect way to establish why characters aren’t sharing information. Chris: Mm-hmm.  Oren: Which is very useful and writers really struggle with that. I’m still baffled to this day that they didn’t use that in the Last Jedi just to explain why Poe and Admiral, what’s her name? Holdo.  Chris: That was just an easy one. That was a really easy solution right there!  Oren: Especially since they had this question of like, how is the Imperial fleet following us? It’s like, well, I just assumed they had a spy on board. But no, they have a new techno what’s-it. I mean, hell, they might not even have been a spy. Sometimes all it matters is that they think there’s a spy. We could have had a reveal where there is no spy, they have a techno what’s-it, but everyone’s been acting like there was a spy ’cause that’s what they assumed. Chris: Yeah, that would’ve been perfect. Oren: I just assumed that’s where they were going. But no, apparently not.  Chris: There’s a number of conflicts that happened with protagonists where if everybody just talked it out, they would be fine. And that is really hard to deal with. But suspicion is one of the best solutions to that if they actually suspect each other. Sometimes otherwise making characters just like less knowledgeable. I actually have a list, I have another list of how to try to sabotage communication. It’s still pretty tough. Another solution is to have a malicious go between who, you know, you need a reason why people are talking to this person instead of to each other directly. But if they both trust somebody and that person is malicious, they can distort messages.  Oren: Right, and if they are clever about it, they can insert themselves into the communication line and then the protagonists who are getting their messages garbled, increasingly distrust each other and only wanna communicate through this new person who is totally trustworthy. Don’t worry about it.  Chris: Another big source of protagonist disagreements is just prior secrets. So this is something where when they first met, somebody had kind of a dark secret and they were like, okay, well you know, obviously I’ll tell this person when I get to know them a little bit better and they trust me. But then the closer they become, the harder and harder it is to tell the secret, leading it to just be held onto for years, which the other person considers a betrayal. And you do want something that’s kind of personal.  Oren: That one is tricky because it can absolutely work, but you need this balance where the secret is significant enough that we can believe the character wouldn’t have wanted to share it, but also not so significant that it becomes impossible for the characters to reconcile after it’s shared. Assuming reconciliation is what you want, maybe you don’t. Sometimes writers don’t want their characters to reconcile, but that’s, you know, sort of the default assumption.  Chris: Yeah. Involvement in an organization that’s antagonistic, for instance, is a good one because that person could have come to regret their involvement and left. We don’t know exactly what they did necessarily as part of their organization. So there’s like a variety of things that kind of can create a level of distance between them and some of the horrible acts the organization was doing. But it’s also very implicating when the other person could have been, for instance, personally harmed by this evil organization. So that’s one that I think works pretty well.  Oren: Yeah, I would agree.  Chris: And then probably one of the most robust ones, just giving them conflicting goals. So they actively want different things. And sometimes that can occur with people who are already, for instance, best friends, but sometimes that’s a good one for characters who meet each other and form a temporary alliance based on their needs right now. But then just at some point in time have to turn against each other because they have mutually exclusive missions, for instance.  Oren: But they have shared needs early or they need each other, and so they need to cooperate, but they also have something pulling ’em apart because if they know they’re going to different places at the end of this. Chris: Maybe they’re both danger-ing through dangerous terrain and they need each other to survive. But then when they get to the temple at the end, one of them wants to take the artifact, the other wants to destroy it. Something like that works really well, and then they can be allied for much of the story and then get to like each other and then, oops! Now we can’t be friends anymore. That’s just a nice, easy one. Of course, you do have to come up with a reason if you want them to make up again, often you would come up with a reason why one of them would change their mind.  Oren: Right. It needs to be something that’s not so far apart that they couldn’t ever reconcile over it. Assuming that you want them to reconcile, it might be that one of ’em changes their mind, they might have a compromise, or it might be something that one of them gets their way and then eventually enough time passes that the other one is willing to put it behind them, something like that. All right. Well, now that we are finished having our conflict, we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: Now if you want to hear about us actually fighting with people, not each other, but people we were attempting to get along with, we do have some juicy stories in our collection on Patreon. I’m not gonna name any names. I’m not even gonna mention the blog nemesis, but it’s in there. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 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’ll talk to you next week.

Do you like spooky nights spent sneaking through dusty old libraries? Of course, literally everyone in the world likes that. Fortunately, now there’s a whole subgenre for all your creepy academic needs. Kinda. Maybe. We’re actually a little unclear what dark academia even is. On the bright side, everyone else seems confused, too, so maybe we can figure it out together.  Show Notes Dark Academia  The Secret History  Ninth House  Yale Societies  Magic for Liars  Piransei  The Order  King Sorrow  Rackham Graduate School The Atlas Six  The Librarians  Academy for Liars Transcript Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. [Intro Music] Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: I’m Chris. Oren: So, I’ve been hearing a lot about the dark academia subgenre, which makes sense, because what’s spookier than student loans? Chris: Hmm. They are pretty spooky. Oren: I assume that’s what it’s about. Chris: They follow you forever, wherever you go. And just when you thought you got rid of them because they were canceled, it turns out they were un- canceled. Oren: Yeah. It’s actually illegal to cancel your student loans, apparently. Great job. I love this country. Chris: Perfect bureaucracy horror. Oren: First of all, you might wonder what is dark academia? The answer is that it’s a social media aesthetic with a little sidehustle. Chris: Another meme genre. Those never go wrong. Oren: Yeah, it’s just a little sidehustle as a fiction genre. The actual origins of the social media aesthetic are highly debated and I don’t know much about them, so I can’t really comment on that. I tried to research more of it and I immediately was hit with videos about how “dark academia doesn’t mean anything anymore, it’s changed so much.” It’s like this is a three-hour video. Um, okay, I don’t think I actually need to know about this part. I only need to know about the fiction genre. Chris: Um, this is why all the serious scholars are on TikTok, Oren. Oren: Yeah, obviously. So, it’s a marketing term. Nowadays things get labeled dark academia if they involve vaguely higher education and anything spooky. Chris: Yeah, I mean I guess it’s pretty self-explanatory. There’s dark and it’s academia seems to be all it is. As far as I can tell. Oren: The label is applied retroactively quite a lot. Donna Tart’s The Secret History is from 1992. It absolutely was not advertised as dark academia, because that term didn’t exist yet. But now it’s often considered a foundational work in the genre. Chris: And that book is not speculative, right? Oren: No, it has occult elements, but it’s not actually magic. Chris: Right. I mean that does kind of make sense because I feel like if we have a speculative subgenre, we usually have something with more novelty than a college or university in it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Otherwise, there would probably be something else to remark upon. Other than that it’s academia. Oren: That is interesting to me, right? Because supposedly the social media genre is all driven by nostalgia. I have not read a single dark academia book that I would consider nostalgic. Some of them are willing to acknowledge that some parts of college are fun, but each and every one of them—except for the one that like barely had any college in it at all, and I don’t even know why it’s called dark academia— was deeply critical of the institution of higher learning. So maybe there are some nostalgic novels out there somewhere with the label dark academia. But of the eight that I read semi-recently, none of them were like that. Chris: Yeah. I’m not sure dark works are known for being nostalgic. Oren: Right. Chris: I’m trying to think of where have I seen a work that is dark but also nostalgic? Yeah, that’s a hard one. Oren: I can only assume it just makes more sense in the social media aesthetic because in the books it’s like, hey, it’s a dark story and it takes place in college. So, chances are the college is not going be the greatest place to be, otherwise we wouldn’t call it dark, it would just be a campus novel. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that if this is in a very visual medium, then what we’ve got are lots of really pretty pictures of gorgeous university architecture, that kind of thing, and even if it technically looks kind of creepy somehow, I could still see how that would be perceived as glorifying because we’re showing pretty pictures of these institutions. Oren: Ninth House is kind of like that (the novel by Leigh Bardugo). It makes a big deal of the aesthetics of Yale and how cool it is to be in a dusty room full of old books. We love that, but it’s still deeply critical of Yale’s student societies, sometimes called “secret” societies, which exaggerates how secret they really are. But they do get up to some pretty, uh, not great shenanigans. As a book, it’s very critical of all that, which feels definitely like something someone wrote before 2025. Back before our own government just declared war on higher education. Now that would seem kind of weird because we’re trying to save higher education over here, but before then, yeah, it made total sense. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s always been a little bit of that dynamic when it comes to universities and the fact that they have done lots of bad things, but they also have done lots of good things, including sometimes being very inclusive, even though they did a lot of harm. Oren: Right. Well, and the people who are most likely to critique and dissect institutions also all went to university. You have these institutions whose job it is to train people who critique institutions. So yeah, they’re going to get critiqued a lot. That’s just the nature of the beast. Chris: Although I’m sure, like any other institutions, they’re not that inclusive, too. Oren: Sure. Chris: They probably all have old, white, privileged people who don’t want to let others in. Oren: You know, we all live in a society. Chris: We all live in a society. I have obviously been critical of universities many times in our field, but they still do good work and we need them to not be destroyed, please. Oren: Much more fun to critique universities back when that wasn’t a thing that could actually happen. But onto the more fictional side of darkness that is happening, I do find dark academia a little interesting because I have had a number of clients who have told me that they want to write dark academia. Then the question becomes, is there anything different about dark academia compared to other novels that you have to think about when you’re writing it? No. Call that done. Chris: The thing I find interesting about it is it’s like the Magic School genre generally. Especially if you’re writing speculative, generally that means that university’s teaching magic things. It’s not impossible to get away from that, but it would be a little hard to get away from that. Gosh, I still remember when I ran that role playing campaign for you folks in a university and you were all expecting the classes to be magic classes. And I was like, no, no, the afterschool clubs are magic. And you kept wanting to go to class. And I’m like, oh no, I’ll have to come up for something for you to do in your normal computer class. Oren: I have to create content for English 101 over here. Chris: Yeah. Eventually you figured it out that the action was in the outside of your regular daily classes, but that was a little bit of an uphill battle at first. Oren: Well, that is the first thing to think about: are you writing a dark Magic School story? Because that is pretty specific. A dark Magic School story does have a lot of requirements because magic schools in themselves are a very tricky genre to write. Chris: But I do think that if we are willing to make the school dark, we have made it easier. Oren: That’s true. Chris: Because the trickiest problem with magic schools is you have to ask the question: why are loving parents sending their young kids to such a dangerous place? Because if it’s not dangerous, then there’s no story to be had there. And you have to figure out, okay, well if it’s safe, how do I get excitement into this tale? And one option is just, well, no, the school’s totally evil. But that takes away from the wish fulfillment part of it, usually, but if we’re just going for creepy, that’s fine. Oren: And also, because dark academia by default is assumed to be college, your characters are adults. So it’s much easier to create a motivation. Chris: Yes. Oren: Parents are not sending them to a dangerous school. They are going there of their own volition, and they can have their own reasons for doing that. Chris: Right. And it could be risky, but they think the payoff is worth it and they are not in immediate danger as soon as they step at the door. It’s just a lot easier. I published a post recently talking about how to keep your characters in the danger zone. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And the thing about the stories I was talking about is if you have a haunted house story, for instance, there’s usually a point at which just being in the house is clearly an immediately life-threatening situation. And you have to figure out, okay, why don’t they leave the house at that point? But if we don’t have a serial killer sitting on the other side of the entrance who’s going to immediately “ax” you a question, then we have a lot more flexibility when it comes to why is the character there in this dangerous situation? And people at college age are fairly reckless anyway. Not haunted house reckless, but still somewhat reckless. And so being like, okay, well I’m going to be one of the people who makes it through this situation unscathed and then makes a million bucks. Yeah, that’ll do it. Oren: And you also have a lot more flexibility when your setting is a college campus, because those are generally pretty sizable as opposed to a haunted house, which is a single structure and, short of some pretty intensive conceits you might add, not that hard to just leave. Whereas with a college campus, sure you could also leave the college campus, but you have a lot more room to build reasons why they don’t want to leave, why there’s something there that they need to do. Chris: So it is like magic school, but easier. Oren: Of course, you don’t necessarily have to go the full magic school route. I do think that you usually would want to incorporate the fact that this story is related to higher learning. Otherwise, why are you using that label? But you don’t necessarily have to be as straightforward as we go to class to learn magic. This could just be a normal college, but have some magic around the edges. Have some spookiness in specific electives or hidden in a certain textbook or something. Chris: Yeah. Usually has to be involved somehow. Would you consider Magic For Liars to be possibly dark academia?. Oren: To the extent that it’s a very flexible genre term, sure. Chris: Magic for Liars is basically a noir, but it was a magic school. Oren: Yeah. Chris: The non-magic main character is investigating a murder at a magic school. Oren: I, personally, wouldn’t have called it dark academia because it’s high school. And I just associate that term with college. But as we’ve seen, people will label almost anything dark academia as long as it has someone wearing tweed, like Peranesi. Chris: Like Peranesi. I guess he is studying the house? He is taking notes in his notebooks. There’s not really an institution, I guess we could call the house an institution. Maybe the house is his university and he’s a student. Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s one of the biggest stretches I’ve ever seen as far as genre-categorizing goes. But Magic for Liars is an interesting example because it isn’t about going to class and learning magic, which is what typically takes up a lot of your time in a magic school story, but it is still about being a school, because it’s a murder investigation where the dynamics of high school are very important to solving it. Because we’re looking into who is this kid friends with? Or they may have been bullied. What’s the teacher relationship here? There’s a lot of that sort of thing. Chris: The other one that we see a lot besides the school just teaching magic is they’re being a cult at the school. So, I don’t know if you consider The Order to be dark academia. This is an urban fantasy TV show, but there’s a secret society at the university that the main character joins called The Order of the Blue Rose. And they do magic, and they’re clearly supposed to be kind of menacing. Oren: I mean, I would call that show pretty bad, but you know, if it was written as a book, sure someone would absolutely slap the dark academia logo on it. I would be kind of disappointed because it does take place at a college, but it could take place basically anywhere and very little of it would change. Probably the most college aspect of it is the fact that the werewolves are all written like frat bros. To a pretty extreme degree, right? Where they all make difficult decisions by playing rounds of beer pong. Otherwise, it’s just like, yeah, there’s a secret society and it happens to be on a college campus. The characters almost never go to class, and the classes they go to don’t matter, and there’s the fact that there is no interesting use of the academic organization. I keep coming back to Ninth House because I think it did a really cool job with this. We don’t really go to class much in Ninth House either, but the way the school functions is still important. The student societies play a really big role and the way that they operate and the way that they really don’t want to be regulated, and it’s the protagonist’s job to regulate them, that plays a very big role in the story and really makes the most of its setting as a college campus. Chris: So, a book I know that was praised for its dark academia atmosphere is the indie queer romantasy Love Immortal. What that one does is it has a New England university and it has a special vault with like super rare books, and Dracula’s diary is in there but has been stolen, so it’s part of the plot. And then the main character’s internship is working at this rare book collection. And then he also attends a gothic literature class, so then we have discussions. It’s kind of like a love letter to gothic literature honestly, this book, which is one thing I enjoyed about it. So then being in that class gets you discussion of gothic literature, and then there’s a rare book collection, but the actual external plot is frat bros sacrificing people in order to make themselves vampires. Oren: Like one does. Chris: But at first people are disappearing and there’s a murderer about, so it manages to do enough with those different aspects and kind of weaving them together that people liked the atmosphere and felt that it was dark academia. Oren: An interesting example was the Joe Hill novel, King Sorrow. So, some spoilers for that since this is a pretty recent book, which starts off having all the dark academia that I crave because the protagonist is at an elite liberal arts college on a scholarship, but he’s kind of precarious. He doesn’t come from money the way that all of his classmates do, and so he is kind of in a risky situation. And so then he ends up getting blackmailed to steal spooky rare books from the cool rare books collection he works in. Rare books are common theme in a lot of these, and I really liked that concept. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. Sadly, that’s only about the first fifth of the book, and the rest of it kind of goes off and does something else, but that was a really neat idea. I also thought it was very funny that he goes to a place called Rackham College, which is a real place, but the real one is in Michigan and this one is in Maine for some reason. It’s not exactly the same. The one in Michigan is a grad school, and this one seems like it’s both an undergrad and a grad school, but it’s odd that you picked that name for it. It feels like you could have done a Google search on that one. Chris: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like what dark academia maybe needs is more bureaucracy horror. And that’s something that I think a lot of writers just aren’t prepared to write. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because it’s complicated. But that also allows you to have creepy stuff, but like thoroughly grounded in academia as opposed to, gosh, I just don’t feel like I can do anything fun while hanging around at the university. Okay, well, let’s just put the plot over there then. Oren: A number of these books that I’ve read that are tagged with that label start that way. Oh, we’re on a college campus and the protagonist finds a spooky book. All right, cool. Tell me more. It’s like, well, he immediately leaves the campus and we never go back. Oh, okay. Chris: I would guess that the storytellers are just having trouble putting plots at the institution. Oren: I also suspect that the storytellers probably never had this particular sub genre in mind when they were writing and their publisher was like, Hey, this, eh, there’s enough university in here. We can call this dark academia. That’s a hot genre right now. Or at least it was when these books were being published. Who knows if it’s still a hot genre? Chris: Who knows. What also can happen with this kind of things is that sometimes publishers are like, Hey, look, this is really popular on BookTok, and then start labeling books with it. And if they don’t actually see sales bumps from that after a while, they might be like, okay, that doesn’t work, and they move on or something. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell just because something is being passed around or talked a lot about on social media that doesn’t necessarily translate to a lot of sales. Oren: I have read a couple of books that did have the academic part down, but not the plot part, which is interesting. It’s usually the other way around. Chris: So instead of starting in a university and being like, oh, look over there and going, running off to some other plot, they just stayed at the university and there’s no plot? Oren: Yeah. So in this case it wasn’t technically a university. It’s technically a magic library, but close enough. And it’s called The Atlas Six, and these six mages get hired to work at a cool magic library. And it’s very cool. We love this library. It’s great. And then they’re told, oh, but at the end of your trial period, one of you must be sacrificed. Chris: Oh, no. Oren: This place is cool, but it’s not that cool. But then again, we twist it where it turns out that actually that just means one of you is going to be fired and doesn’t get to stay. Chris: Really? Oren: .Oh, well, why does that mean anything? What is even the point? You find out early enough that it just completely kills the plot. And so these characters are just hanging around at this library. Chris: So is that like grimdark Librarians then? Anybody’s who’s not familiar, there’s a cute kind of campy show called The Librarians that was filmed in Portland. But that one actually has plots in it. But, of course, in this case by “librarian” they mean the keeper of a huge magic archive who also basically has magic. Oren: Yeah. They don’t really do much book collecting in The Librarians. Chris: They don’t do much library work. Unfortunately. Oren: It’s almost all artifact hunting. It’s basically Warehouse 13, but instead of working for the government, they’re five randos. What made The Atlas Six interesting to me was that this was clearly an example of an author who was very passionate about books and about reading and about libraries, but just hadn’t quite been able to translate that into a compelling story. It’s not like it didn’t work for anybody. I found some reviews that really raved about it, but it was clear you had to be in exactly the same headspace as the author, or it’s just six characters hanging out at a library for 10 hours. Chris: Yeah. It sounds like that really needed some stakes that were actually linked to doing academic research, et cetera. Oren: Yeah. What it needed was more stakes and some urgency. Chris: Solving a mystery in a library by doing book research, if you really want to get into like the books or looking through documents could be a thing. Definitely in a lot of mystery stories we go out and we fight danger. But if somebody knew enough about books and was passionate about it, I think they could make a compelling story with somebody examining documents and books in a library, especially if you have weird visitors come in so you get some interactions with people. Oren:  And if your characters are already magic, they can have cool magic duels in between serious book reading sessions. That’s kind of what I expected The Atlas Six to be at first. I thought what the book was going to be was going to be these characters all maneuvering to get advantages over each other to make sure they’re not the one that gets sacrificed, which wouldn’t have been perfect, but would’ve at least provided them things to do and some tension. But they find out way too early that they don’t have to do any of that, and so they occasionally still flare their ruffs at each other, is the best way I can describe it. It doesn’t really matter. Chris: I just love that. Oren: It’s like, yeah, okay, sure. Chris: They’re all in this dark library wearing regency costumes with ruffs and lacy frills. Oren: They kind of come up to each other and try to out alpha nerd each other and, okay, look, this could be interesting if it mattered. If the outcome of this had any effect on anything, I could potentially care about it. Chris: Yeah we could do library intrigue if we did have a really compelling competition between them. But, again, all of this stuff takes more thought and work to plot than your average plot and plotting is already pretty hard, so a lot of storytellers are just not going to feel up to doing something like that. Oren: It’s also worth thinking about how evil do you want the institution to be? Assuming that an institution is actually going to play a big role in your story. And I would say that by default, you probably want to go with the idea of it being more like an amoral place where bad things happen sometimes, as opposed to like an active force for destruction. Because even though I wouldn’t say any of this glorifies college, there are still usually some things about it that people like, and most people writing this have been to college, and our memories of it are not usually wholly negative, but that can be kind of weird if you make the whole college evil and then at the end you’re like, no, wait, we have to save the college. Like, do you have to save the college? Chris: That’s so funny. Oren: With the book, An Academy For Liars—not to be confused with Magic for Liars, different book, also some spoilers—when we first go there that whole school is evil. It’s a school that teaches nothing but mind control, which is traumatic for both the person using it and their victim. So ,everyone is messed up. And just completely in it for themselves and love hurting other people. The students and the faculty are all like that. All right, well, I guess we’re going to have to end this story by the protagonist either turning evil and that’s going to be the big sad ending, or we’re going to have to burn the school to the ground. No, neither of those things happen. Instead, the big climax is about how we have to heroically save the school. Um, do you? Chris: Did we find some reveal where they were secretly appeasing the elder gods or something? Is it a load-bearing school? Oren: No. Instead, what happened is that out of nowhere, the student body turned good and helped the protagonist fight the evil professors, which was wild to me because the students were just as evil as the professors until that point. They did a hazing ritual where you have to mind control the other person into stabbing themself in the hand. Chris: Because you could do something like Cabin in the Woods, where we have an evil organization that does sacrificial rituals. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And then we find out they’re doing it to appease the elder gods. Oren: Right. And they have some reason for it. Chris: Or we could just not do that and have everybody change their character. That’s another option. Oren: That’s an ending where if you wanted an ending like that, you can definitely show that this college, to the extent that it is magic or not, has some good things and some bad things, much like real colleges do. It was just that this book went a little too far into the school is evil and irredeemable side of things. Chris: Yep. That would be a problem. Doesn’t make for very good stakes anymore. Oren: Another thing to consider is how much magic your character has. Because again, you know, this is speculative fiction and this is as much a problem in any darker or horror themed genre because the more magic your character has, the harder it is for it to be spooky. Chris: Yeah, that is a problem. Oren: Because if your character’s just a normal person, a ghost can be spooky. But if they’re a level 12 mage and they can cast teleport and see astral plane and all that stuff, well okay. A ghost is just another manifestation of magic that you know how to deal with.  In general, you want to limit how much magic they have just because otherwise the story’s not going to be very scary. Chris: Yeah, certainly. I mean, if we want that spooky atmosphere, a human protagonist who does not have magic is very helpful so that magic can stay mysterious. Oren: In Ninth House—this is going to be both praise and critique—I really liked that the protagonist’s power was that she could see ghosts, and we did a lot with that. She’s not a powerhouse. She doesn’t cast lightning bolts, but she can see ghosts and that does matter in some circumstances. And then eventually we reveal that she can also become super strong by absorbing ghost powers. Chris: Wow. Oren: And at that point I was like, why? Why did you give her that ability? It trivializes a lot of her problems. Chris: That definitely takes away, because the more empowered the character is, the less scary things come off. Oren: There are just so many issues that she has that as she’s trying to deal with, I’m like, you know, you could solve this by just hulking out? Right? Ghost style. Chris: I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for characters that like power up during the course of the story, but I definitely like less powers end up being cooler in the long run. Just simpler, smaller powers that are used in creative ways. Oren: Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and say that class is dismissed on this spooky episode of the podcast. Chris: Well, since we know that Piranesi is definitely dark academia because the narrator is very intellectual and writes notes, and we’re very intellectual and our Patreon is just full of our notes. So, when you really think about it, is our Patreon, not dark academia? Oren: Hashtag makes you think. Chris: Yeah. So, if you want to read some of these dark and mysterious notes, you can sign up at patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’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’ll talk to you next week.

Your novel (a book over 50,000 words) needs a premise that is novel (new, fresh, exciting). Also, words are hard! But how are you supposed to find a novel premise when so many other writers have already put their own ideas out there? Are you doomed to keep repeating what has come before? Fortunately, no! The answer isn’t as simple as adding a wizard, but adding a wizard probably wouldn’t hurt. Show Notes The Book Eaters  High Concept  The Abbess Rebellion Crusader Kings   The Familiar and the Frost  Romantasy  YA Distopia  Follow the Sound of Snow  The Goose Girl  A Sorceress Comes to Call The Snow Queen Of Monsters and Mainframes Bleeding Mars  Piranesi The Southern Reach  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies  Red Riding Hood’s Bargain  Dracula  The Way of Kings  Blake Snyder Lucifer  Dresden Files  Warm Bodies Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  [opening theme] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: It is getting harder and harder to find unique podcast topics, because we’re nearing 600 episodes and we’ve done everything. Usually we’ve done things twice, I swear. Oren: Yeah. We have a lot of episodes that are X topic again, because it’s been six years.  Chris: What if we just do an episode about putting googly eyes on your computer mouse, and using that as a substitute for human companionship? That would be unique. That would be original. Can we just do that? Oren: Would it be novel or would it be bizarre? Hmm Chris: Hmm. This time we’re talking about finding a novel premise. Sometimes words intersect in weird ways, so we don’t mean novel as in a long story that’s 40,000 words or more. We mean novel as in fresh and interesting, and feeling relatively new, so that it still has entertainment value. Oren: You do need one of those for your novel, usually though. Chris: Yep. Yep. Oren: Just to be clear, those two words are used a lot together and it’s horrible. We don’t like that. Chris: It’s a lot clearer when we talk about novelty if it’s not an adjective, if it’s in a noun form, which we’ve talked about a lot before. But just in case anybody’s new and hasn’t heard us for five years or something, basically novelty entertains people, part of what we refer to as ANTS, which are four engagement factors that almost all stories try to cultivate at some level. Some will use some more than others, but whereas there can be other ways that engage audiences that are pretty unique to specific types of novels, these ones are usually found everywhere, and novelty is one of them. It just means that it’s different in a way that’s entertaining, and that’s why we like to use it. It also is really useful because it gets people excited pretty quickly before they read, which means it is particularly handy for marketing. Oren: Often a high novelty concept is what people will use to sell the book, like vampires, but instead of drinking blood, they drink knowledge from books. Wooh. That’s cool. Right? That’s neat. Right? Chris: That’s what they refer to as a quote unquote high concept. And so that’s very useful, and you can do it without a premise. It’s easier to make your novel novel – it’s easier to make your book novel if you start with your big picture choices. It’s easier to do anything if you start with your big picture choices and plan it from the beginning, surprise, surprise. Oren: Whoa. So shocking. Chris: So shocking. So you can do it a smaller scale way, but it’s a lot harder, like how witty are you? Because a lot of books that have a lot of novelty, that’s not obvious from just the premise or concept of the novel, is because they write really entertaining narration, for instance. Oren: Or they have funny characters or unusual characters. There can be novelty bonuses from those things too. Chris: Yeah, so it’s not that you can’t add novelty without thinking of a novel premise. It’s just certainly an easier way to see that it’s taken care of and that your story stands out a little bit and can attract readers. Oren: I noticed something interesting as I was looking at some of the work I’ve done as an editor, which is that this is an aspect of storytelling I don’t have that much experience with, and the reason is that by the time someone gets to me with their manuscript, they’ve already picked a premise. Usually what I’m trying to do is help them fulfill that premise to the best extent that it can be. It’s very rare that I’m telling someone to completely change premises. The premise has to be, in most cases, deeply flawed for that to be a thing. And in that situation, I’m usually trying to help them create a premise that isn’t just completely broken. The one time I can remember recommending a more novel premise was with a client who had a somewhat anonymized story where it was a fantasy world, but everything was weirdly modern in a way that did not fit. It wasn’t just an urban fantasy setting. It was a second world high fantasy, but the world was strangely modern. And so I had recommended making it into more of like a crystal-punk setting since magic crystals were already a big part of the plot and clearly interested the author. So that’s the closest I can think of to helping an author find a more novel premise. Because usually they’ve already picked that by the time they hire me. Chris: I did work with an an author who wanted to find more ways to distinguish her setting. I remember that happening. In many cases, when people come to us, of course, they already know what they want to do. And so we may be helping them iron out things in their setting that are kind of working against each other, which does help novelty, because you want a unified impression. We’ve talked about with world theming, if your world feels like a random assortment of stuff that has nothing to do with each other, that does take away from the novelty. We kind of help people straighten that out. We’ve had a few instances… also in your own stories. I know this is something that you’ve worked on. Oren: Well, that was interesting, because in my book that’s actually published, that premise is not very novel. I was doing a lot of research on the Byzantine Empire and playing a lot of Crusader Kings. So that’s where that concept came from. And it doesn’t have a magic system, which probably is its biggest drawback to fantasy fans, but I decided that was worth it because any magic system I could have come up with would’ve just been kind of tacked on and I think would not have really been good. But I can tell people read it and they’re like, oh, it’s very tense, and I kind of like the characters, but the world’s a little uninteresting. And it’s like, yeah, I get it. I get it. It’s just a medieval-ish setting. There’s no wizards or stuff. I’ve been trying to work on that more with my short stories, I sometimes have more luck, because with a short story, you could have a much more idea focused narrative, like a familiar who has to fight the physical manifestation of her witch’s depression. That’s cool. That isn’t something you see very often. I’m sure it’s not never seen, but it’s not normal. And that would be hard to make a novel out of, but a short story – heck yeah. Get in there. Chris: The thing about novelty is that it creates lots of excitement, but it does tend to fade somewhat quickly, and so short stories can actually rely on it a lot more. This is where we see those little meme stories that get spread around social media. Those things are always very novelty focused because it has to generate attention and excitement very quickly so that somebody actually reads it and then quickly shares it, and then if they lose interest in it after that, it doesn’t matter. Whereas in a novel, usually what happens is it draws people in, it gets them entertained while the plot is booting up, which is very valuable. But then as the novel progresses, it usually starts to take a backseat to things that take a lot higher investment. Oren: And that’s one of the key things here, is that premises that are novel often do it by being very strange in such a way that it would be difficult to support a long story using that premise. Part of the reason is that if that premise could support a long novel, we would see more people using it. Chris: That is definitely the biggest issue, or one of the biggest issues right now is we have a very crowded field with mass media. You see stories from so many different people in so many different places, and it becomes difficult to find something that will set your novel apart. You know, there are different levels, right? It’s not an all or nothing thing. In this case we’re talking about a story in a Byzantine setting and, you know, that one is a little niche. It’s not that there aren’t people who are fascinated by Byzantine history. Of course, we discussed that and you told me that wouldn’t work because anybody who loves Byzantine history that much will wanna see characters get blinded. Oren: No, absolutely. This book is not for huge Byzantine history nerds. They’ll read it and be like, what is this? This is not what the Byzantines did. Yeah. It’s not. Because I didn’t wanna write that. I was inspired by Byzantine history, but I did not want to write that level of brutality, and to a certain extent impenetrability. There’s a reason why we use the word Byzantine to mean complicated and confusing. That was just not within my capacity to write. So no, it’s not really for big Byzantine history fans either, which is my own fault. Chris: Yeah. But sometimes just having something that is interesting to some people is a benefit. And even genres that are a little bit tired right now might still have a few fans. The one that that I think everybody thinks is overplayed right now is a lot of superheroes and Marvel stuff, because so many Marvel stories have come out that people have been oversaturated. When something has been a big trend and now it’s on the receding end of the wave, that’s a really bad time, unfortunately, to have your story be about those things. Oren: Although it’s also kind of irrelevant to authors in this particular case because superhero novels have just never really been a thing. They exist, you find occasional superhero novels, but they’re very rare and most of them aren’t very good. And very few of them attain any success, and I think there are some reasons for that. Chris: Yeah, I think we’ve discussed that before a little bit. Oren: And this was true before Marvel, it was true during the height of Marvel, and it’s true now. But in terms of books, those same trends happen. For a while you couldn’t go anywhere without hitting YA dystopia. Then people got tired of that. Right now it’s romantasy. People will eventually get tired of that. Things will continue. Chris: Fairytale stories… I had a fairytale novella that hit the wrong place in the wave. And I was not thinking about trying to write to trend at all. It’s just that’s how it worked out. And it also just, you know, I don’t think it had enough of a concept that distinguished it, that set it apart. Whereas usually when you see like a fairy tale story, it’s all, oh, from this character’s perspective, or we’re gonna twist it in this way, or what if Cinderella died? Oren: Well, it was also based on the Snow Queen, right? Which is a cool fairy tale, but not one very many people are familiar with, like how most people know about Frozen. Chris: Probably still more popular than the Goose Girl though. Oren: Well, I mean that’s the trick with Kingfisher’s Goose Girl retelling is that it’s not a Goose Girl retelling. Chris: Not a Goose Girl. And the only way they can get away with saying that is because nobody has read the Goose Girl. Oren: I have no idea why it’s marketed as a Goose Girl retelling. Is there someone in the publisher’s marketing department who’s like, yeah, Goose Girl, there’s a big market for Goose Girl retellings out there? Because I don’t think there is. Nor is that an accurate description of it. So why? Someone tell me. Chris: But any case, generally, you know, your subgenre often determines are, is your audience interested in, and you’re trying to do for a little bit broader audience than something that’s super niche. But then you also wanna do it in your own way, right? Which is kind of where you get to the real novelty of your book. Should we talk more about what is the difference between something that’s novel and something that’s bizarre? Because the most obvious thing about novelty is that you do want it to be different. But again, when something hasn’t been covered yet, there is often a reason why it hasn’t been covered yet, and not everything that’s different will really be novel. It has to make sense to a certain degree, have a little bit of plausibility or a little bit of realism. If it feels completely off the wall, it’s more likely to be interpreted as absurdist. An example I could come up with is a world where the letter H is paramount or something, and everything is shaped like an H. It’s too off the wall. And some people like absurdist stories, but I think they’re not really novel for most people. As far as I can tell Oren: There are always gonna be books that are kind of toeing the line, by which I mean pushing boundaries. And some people will see them as like, oh, that’s cool and neat. Other people will be like, that sounds kind of silly. Chris: That’s too weird for me. Oren: Right. I saw one recently that was a space opera retelling of Dracula, specifically the part of Dracula where Dracula is on a boat. And in this case it’s a spaceship, and the spaceship is alive, and there’s an evil vampire that has killed its crew and passengers, and it teams up with a bunch of other mythological creatures to go hunt Dracula. And I read that and I was like, eh, no, I don’t think so. That’s a little too weird for me. But from what I can tell, other people seem to have liked it. So that’s a question. It’s gonna depend on personal taste sometimes. Chris: I do think that once you get into that area, it can also sometimes start to be humorous, even if that’s not what you intended. I guess don’t really like that. I could imagine reading something like that, but not taking it very seriously.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: That feels like there is a lack of theming. Right. When we talked about when you have different, clashing things together, right. And it’s like, okay, maybe I could laugh at this team up, but it doesn’t feel like a world that feels real anymore. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Now, granted, I have seen some surprisingly good integration. So the book Bleeding Mars has got vampires in space. It actually does a really good job of blending those two things together. The world feels really colorful and the vampires are the upper classes, right, who have come up with like, rigorous technology to keep themselves live forever. It’s got heavy themes of classism happening in there, but it’s also very colorful and it just works, because it’s been thoroughly thought through, and those different elements that normally feel like they’re clashing have been thoroughly integrated together. And that’s great. That does get harder the more random things you put in there. Oren: If you’re willing to put in the work, you could probably mesh vampires and aliens. I think you could probably do it and it could be interesting. But if you were then like, also, my setting needs to have unicorns. It’s like, hmm, okay, now that’s a third thing that’s not really related to either of the other two thematically, and that’s gonna make it even harder. Chris: Mm-hmm. Or the unicorns aren’t really unicorns anymore. Oren: Right. Chris: Possibly things have been changed so much that they no longer resemble the original trope. Oren: It’s always funny when someone will be like, this is my long lived, pointy-eared, beautiful humanoids, and I call them the lendarians, and it’s like, that’s an elf. Chris: Why? Just call it an elf. Oren: I know what an elf is. Versus, this is my made of rock, sort of shambling creature that eats dirt and has a five minute lifespan… that’s an elf. No, no it’s not. Why are you calling it that? Don’t call it an elf. Which way, modern author? Chris: We don’t see that latter one as often, but we do see it sometimes. Another book that for me has lots of novelty, but I get the feeling for other people is a little weird, is Piranesi. Piranesi takes place in a kind of giant, world sized mansion that’s open to the sky and completely filled with statues and water. Oren: See, we’re getting into Southern Reach territory here, because I thought it was a labyrinth. I know the main character refers to it as a house, but in my head – Chris: He refers to different areas as different wings of the house. Oren: He does say that, but in my head, it’s never not going to be the labyrinth. That’s what it looks like to me. Chris: Well, what we have is presented as some kind of built structure with different hallways and rooms, and it is constantly filled everywhere with all of these statues of everything imaginable. And it is open to the sky and has water in various places, in lots of the places, and tides. I think that’s real cool and neat, but I can see how somebody else would be like, okay, but that’s a little random. And I don’t know, maybe if there were more context, if this was a place in a world and we saw, oh, this is the labyrinth that this god built, or something that gave it context, maybe it would feel a little bit less on the weird side. But I was still good with it. I liked it, thought it was cool. I can see why somebody else, because it’s just a little bit out of the blue and a little bit wait, why and how – Oren: Yeah.  Chris: – did this happen? Oren: Although we were hardly alone. Piranesi was quite popular and successful. I get it’s not gonna appeal to everyone. Chris: I think it’s novel for most people, but I think it’s bizarre for a few. Basically an easier route that definitely avoids getting into bizarre territory and creates lots of novelty, but may have a limited shelf life, is putting two very different things together and contrasting them. This is the whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies thing, and it’s just easy to take an initial concept and say, okay, what haven’t people done yet? This is very similar to when we were talking about putting new twists on classic genres. What if Little Red Riding Hood, but she’s a villain hunting the innocent wolf. Right. Which actually reminds me of a Red Riding Hood story that you had, Oren. Oren: Yeah, that one was all right. Chris: But no, this is, there is something interesting about this. So Oren had a story that was based on Red Riding Hood, where Red Riding Hood was a werewolf hunter. Not a big stretch if you wanna take her in a badass direction, have some action in there. But an interesting thing that we found in beta reading was that some of the readers started the story without knowing it was about Red Riding Hood, and then at some point caught on. Oren: It was like, oh, okay, so the girl in the woods with wolves named Red? Okay, I get it now. Chris: And it clearly added entertainment value for them. And that’s one of the ways we kind of started to think about novelty. Because then we learned, oh. We should actually put this in the title because this improves the experience. Not that it wasn’t fun to have readers catch on at some point, but you do need to market your story in some way. Usually. part of a collection, Maybe you can get away with not doing that, but usually Oren: I probably should have just advertised it as a goose girl retelling. [Chris laughs] Chris: But yeah, reversing the hero and the villain, telling it from the perspective of a new character, switching genres. You could do sci-fi Dracula, that would be fine. Probably less weird than the Dracula and a living ship and then all these other –  Oren: Yeah. Chris: But you could absolutely do a sci-fi Dracula if you wanted to. Oren: Dracula is a very enduring aspect of storytelling. Dracula has stood the test of time. A lot of the classics have. It’s a lot more risky if you’re gonna be like, I want to do a romantasy version of the novel The Way of Kings. Those are two fairly recent things, we don’t know how much longer this romantasy wave is gonna last, how long are people gonna be talking about The Way of Kings? Now, of course, you’d also run into copyright issues, if you could somehow get past those.  Chris: I don’t know, people have been copying The Name of the Wind and getting away with it.  Oren: Yeah, so maybe it’s fine. Chris: You just don’t call it The Way of Kings and then you can copy the plot and the prose style apparently, and it’s fine. Oren: Alternatively, just do romantasy version of The Name of the Wind since we know this has been successful twice. [laughter] Chris: It seems like a good way to go that might help Name of the Wind, because that story needs some more plot. And if you added romantic, so this is, this giving something a twist is also what Blake Snyder refers to as “same but different,” although that’s kind of in a Hollywood context where we want to follow a formula. Oren: I mean, “same but different” is the most reasonable title that Blake Snyder has ever come up with. Chris: It is. It’s ’cause it’s not buzzy. Oren: It’s like, come on, Blake. That just means what it says. You can’t call it “same but different.” You gotta call it “blimp, but plane,” like what does that mean? And then open the section with a five minute anecdote about how one time you saw a blimp and thought it would be more familiar if it was a plane. Chris: I have to say the “same but different” makes me think of, oh, we’re doing yet another crime serial. Now let’s just give the detective a new, weird profession. Uh, they’re a circus acrobat now, and they use their acrobatic silks to solve crimes somehow. Oren: Look, I got nothing against crime serials. I have seen a number of crime serials do this in ways that I thought worked really well, and others that I did not think worked particularly well. I watched Lucifer a while back, and we both tried, and – Chris: I mean, that show is honestly really bad, for reasons that are pretty unrelated to the fact that it’s a crime serial. Oren: I actually think it is related. Chris: Oh, you do? Oren: I do, because he’s Lucifer. Why does he solve crimes? What does that have to do with being Lucifer? Nothing, whereas if it’s like, Harry Dresden, he’s a wizard who solves crimes, and it’s like, okay, he’s got magic you can use to find things. That’s a common wizard concept, but Lucifer is just too specific. And it shows in the TV show, he is like, why are you here, Lucifer? What is the purpose of your presence? Chris: Okay, so admittedly I was thinking about the misogyny of the show. Oren: I mean, yeah, it is also very misogynist, but when has that ever stopped a show? Chris: Well, it’s why I stopped watching it. Some of the stuff does get that dated. I think that show was really too recent to be doing the stuff it was doing. Oren: When I watched it, I was like, wait, this is from 2016. Chris: What? Oren: I know that was a whole decade ago, but really, I would’ve guessed this was an early aughts show with the way that it’s written. Chris: Yep, not great. So yeah, that’s kind of the easiest way to do novelty. But there are other ways. Make your main character an unusual creature; if your main character is someone who’s really novel, that really helps, and spreads things over the whole book and choose, you know, an unusual environment or setting works, subversions of any kind, of course. Subversions are kind of twisting something that exists. Come up with something that you’ve seen before, and then what is your own spin and your own take on it. And then the last thing to really think about here is, of course, that you need to make use of your premise. It is definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing. It needs to actually matter to the story. Like with Lucifer, we’re trying to make Lucifer solve crimes in a crime serial and God, one of the things I initially did not like about the show is he just did not feel like Lucifer. Oren: Yeah. He just seems like a guy. Chris: He’s just some guy, but you know, you need to actually have the plot related to whatever the novelty is. If it doesn’t matter, it’s just not gonna provide the same level of entertainment. It’s gotta be part of the story. Oren: If you were gonna have Lucifer solve crimes, you would think that they would be, I don’t know, religious in some way, like him being Lucifer would matter to the kind of crimes he’s solving. And I mean, in Dresden Files, he is solving magical crimes. He’s not going around as a wizard just solving insurance scams. That’s one of the things about it that’s so strange, is it’s like, yeah, I guess Lucifer could solve this normal blackmailing case. I suppose. I don’t know, maybe he could investigate a stolen holy relic or something. Chris: And then you need to go into some detail. The novelty really comes to life when you actually delve into detail about whatever it is that is fresh and unique. Show people how it works, how it runs. For instance, the movie Warm Bodies, which, it was part of the zombie craze, but it was very different at the time because the main character was actually a zombie and has a romance. It opens by going into his life as a zombie from his perspective, and it’s funny, demonstrates why he needs love, that kind of thing. If you have an unusual environment, give some people details about the environment. If [you have] a strange character, tell people what their life is like, and how it is slightly different because they’re a zombie or whatever they are. Just make sure that you actually bring it to life, and that’ll be easier if you like it and you’re not just playing it to be a crowd pleaser. Oren: If you have some passion, that’ll show through, as opposed to just, [robotic voice] I have been contractually obligated to include this Pride and Prejudice sequence. [Chris laughs] I mean, that is kind of how Pride and Prejudice and Zombies felt. It doesn’t really feel like they put in very much effort to make the dialogue that they weren’t just taking directly from Pride and Prejudice sound like it came from Pride and Prejudice. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: You could tell; the dialogue would audibly change gears when they were quoting Pride and Prejudice dialogue. It just doesn’t sound the same. And I was a little disappointed by that. I was hoping that more of the characters would talk like they were from Pride and Prejudice. Chris: You also have to decide, okay, how are you gonna manage humor? Because in many cases, when you have a really high novelty premise, especially if you’ve got two contrasting things, it does tend to slant towards humor. It doesn’t necessarily have to be humorous. One of the things that really surprised me about Pride and Prejudice Zombies is how seriously it took itself. I expected that to be a really funny slapstick movie, and it’s not. That really upped the bar for how it had to integrate the zombies and the original Pride and Prejudice characters and all of those other things, and it didn’t really meet that bar. You do have to kind of sometimes work harder if you don’t want something to come off as silly. Oren: All right. Well with that, I think we will take the fresh twist of calling this episode to a close. We’ve never done that before actually. Chris: Asking you to support us on Patreon is not very novel. Everyone’s doing it. [evil voice] But what if I asked you to support us with an evil voice? Wa ha ha ha ha. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. It’s all part of my evil plan. Oren: Well, I’m sold. Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [closing theme]

Is there anything more terrifying than an argument about canon? Maybe an argument about having several cannons pointed at you. But a messy fight over continuity is the more likely scenario for most of us. This week, it’s time for a discussion on whether canon matters. Yes. Maybe. But also no. Did you really think that was gonna have a firm answer? Show Notes Starfleet Academy  Anti-Corruption Purges  Lura Thok  Terry Pratchett George RR Martin Interview The Cosmere  Picard  Logan Star Trek: Nemesis  Droid Rebellion  Women Can’t Be Captain  Warp Drives Destroy Space  Star Wars Extended Universe  Discovery Enterprise  Solo Obi-Wan Kenobi Andor Rogue One  K-2SO Transporter  The Avatar State  Hull Plating Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. 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 Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: Chris, did you know that we’ve never recorded any episodes that were longer than half an hour? Chris: Geez. You know, I thought I remembered that, but I think that just never happened. I think somebody told me that that wasn’t real and I just accepted it. Oren: Yeah, and it’s always been that way. And we’ve never had any other hosts but the two of us. Chris: No, not at all. Oren: One day we’ll have, you know, someone named Bunny to co-host and we will never have met her before. Chris: Nope. Nope. Never happened. Oren: Yeah. It’s our canon and we can do what we want with it. We’re talking about how much does canon matter, and this isn’t only because there’s a new Star Trek show out, although it’s not not because there’s a new Star Trek show out. Chris: Did that Star Trek show actually do anything to change canon? Oren: No, not really. Chris: I mean, it takes place in like the far future when there is very little canon. Oren: And anything that does appear to have changed is like, well, it’s been 800 years. Honestly, the weird part is how much is still the same. I was kind of winding up some trolls the other day about—because you know, people love to accuse new Trek of ruining canon in vague nonsense ways. And I was just kind of winding them up a little bit and saying, Hey, go back to 1226 and just see how much has changed since then. The world is just a very different place in 800 years. But you know, people will still accuse it of breaking canon because canon violations are kind of like what corruption is in politics, where there’s usually some of it around somewhere if you go looking, and so it provides a very convenient cover for whatever unsavory thing you want to do, is that you can just say, well, I’m going after corruption, and like, are you? Maybe. Like, who knows? And so it’s the same thing with people who are like, that breaks canon. It’s like, okay, does it, and if it does, is that really why you’re mad about it? Are you sure it’s not just that this character is played by a Black woman who’s loud and in your face and you don’t like that? Chris: Yep. That definitely happens. And also, I mean, some people know better than to say, I don’t like this character because she’s played by a Black woman. Oren: Yeah. They like to do little stealth bad faith arguments. And this is the thing that’s weird, is that so many people are attacking [Star Trek: Starfleet] Academy over its supposed canon violations when it’s trivially easy to show that that’s not the case. And you wonder, okay, if they’re being sinister already, why not just say something that’s harder to disprove? Like, well, I just, that character’s not well written, or the acting’s bad, which would also not be true, but is harder to demonstrate that it’s false. And I think the reason is that even regressive Trekkies are still weird nerds, and we like to be able to concretely prove something and there’s this idea that like, well, I could concretely say that this is a canon violation, therefore the show’s bad, even when it’s not true. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I do think that’s like citing facts, even if they’re fake facts, right? Because if we were to say, that character is written badly or the acting is bad, that’s clearly a subjective opinion, right? Whereas if you can claim that it’s [that] the canon is wrong, then that sounds more factual. And also, do you think that some of these nerds talk about canon as a way to kinda like brag or like, Hey, look what a nerd I am. Here’s my nerd credentials. Oren: Oh yeah, absolutely. They a hundred percent do that. Chris: This is like the weird fandom gatekeeping thing where like, see, I’m a better fan ’cause I know more than you or something. Oren: Yeah. I mean it’s especially funny when they do it and they don’t even know that much. Like one guy I was arguing with was being like, oh, this new Jem’Hadar character doesn’t make sense ’cause the Jem’Hadar didn’t evolve to be that way. It’s like, you think the Jem’Hadar evolved to be like anything? All right, I guess someone hasn’t seen Deep Space Nine. I mean, I’m vulnerable to it too, right? Like I was just doing it, I was like, ha, I actually know more about canon than you do. Therefore, I’m a better nerd. So like, I get it. I understand. I just try to use that impulse for good. Chris: Yeah. It’s funny though, because canon, with these big franchises, is ultimately such a kind of arbitrary line. Oren: Right. And when you’re talking about a big franchise, there’s almost a hundred percent guarantee going to be some kind of continuity problems, right? It’s almost impossible for them not to be. Chris: But I do have the answer to whether canon matters. I can just answer the question of this episode. Oren: Oh, good. Do it. Chris: When I don’t like the canon, it doesn’t matter at all. And when I do like the canon, it’s everything and it matters a lot. Oren: Absolutely. That makes sense. Okay. We can call it, wow. Most efficient episode ever. Chris: Yep. Oren: And the good news is that this is not as big a problem for most of our audience because we’re typically writing novels and not big giant TV show franchises. Chris: It will be a problem if you become George R.R. Martin. Oren: Or if you’re Terry Pratchett or you’re just really prolific, it can become an issue. But most of us are probably not gonna write and publish enough books for it to come up. Chris: And Sanderson says that all of his books are actually in the same universe. Oren: Yeah, sure, Brando. Chris: If he actually makes good on that, he may run into some canon issues, or maybe he won’t, just because it’s like, well, I guess that’s happening in another of the multiverse or planet over there, and so the stories don’t actually interact with each other in any way. Oren: I’ve been told that he actually has started having them interact, which maybe, right, like I haven’t read far enough into any Brandon Sanderson series to know if that’s true or not. Chris: The question is, does he pay for a secretary to track all of his canon for him? Oren: Well, we already know that Brando is obsessively tracking his magic system on a spreadsheet, right? So I could buy that he also— Chris: From what I understand, he also employs, like, his entire family because he’s got this whole thing going. So he might, he might have an employee who does nothing but keep track of what his canon is. Because, man, that would be so hard. Oren: I mean, when you’re Brandon Sanderson and you’re that level of prolific, that could make sense, right? Like, that could be a good business expenditure. But mostly this comes up in big TV and movie franchises, right? Because they not only tend to have more content, but they also tend to have big teams of people working on them. So that’s when it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have a fully consistent continuity, right. Especially when you’re dealing with something like Star Trek where the original, they just didn’t care. They had absolutely no thoughts to give about whether or not one episode lined up with another episode. They were just not doing that. Chris: Oof. Yeah. That would become abrasive pretty quickly. Oren: Yeah. The episodes contradict each other left, right, and sideways. Chris: Can I share one funny thing from an interview The Hollywood Reporter, I believe did with George R.R. Martin recently. Oren: Oh, please. Chris: Because he still feels like he’s gonna finish or he’s still trying. He says he’s still trying to finish his series. And the funny thing about it though, is he’s planning on giving it a different ending than the Game of Thrones show, which of course had a very unpopular ending, and he gave them his notes. So not clear whether he was like, oops, that’s not popular, and then decided to make changes or not. Or he only gave them a broad picture, right? And so for whatever reason, like, there are characters who are dead in one and not dead in the other. And I think one of the biggest reasons he has not finished his series is because he’s trying to give creative input on a dozen different things that are part of this universe. Oren: Yeah. He’s got a new show now. Chris: Right. And so to deal with the canon differences between the end of the novel, end of the show, they were thinking about doing a Jon Snow sequel spinoff because Jon Snow was up by himself in the north, away from the other characters. So it won’t call attention to canon differences in whether those other characters in the south are dead or alive, which, okay, do what you gotta do, I guess. But then apparently the actor really wanted to do a really sad, depressing story where Jon Snow, you know, drives his wolf away and loses his sword and is just like building huts. And HBO was like, yeah, so don’t really think this is what we want. Oren: HBO made the right call there. Chris: They really made the right call. Yeah, because I mean, the fans who super love Jon Snow, love him as like an empowerment character they identify with. That would not go over well. Oren: I mean, and maybe this is just the mood right now. Maybe in 20 years this won’t be a big deal, but I, at this point, if I never see another sequel where the character is all beaten down and sad, it will be too soon. Chris: I feel you so much there. I mean, Picard, oh, can we make Picard not canon, please. Oren: I mean, Picard is also bad, right. But even the ones that are good at this point, I have seen so many of them and I’m just, I’m tired of it. Please, something else, like, I liked Logan, right? Logan’s a good movie, but I just, I don’t want another one of those. Chris: Yeah, it’s true. I will complain less if it’s good, but it’s just like, Hey, we had a good feeling and from the happy ending of the last story, why did we have to suddenly make it sad? And you retroactively take away that character’s victory. That’s… Oren: Actually, everything’s terrible and you’re depressed. I was like, all right, sure. Chris: So I really do resent when a franchise insists that unpopular and bad material is canon and stick to them, and I get that there’s subjectivity here. For instance, Star Wars with some of the prequels or sequels or, it’s like the idea, all this stuff with Data that happens in the TNG [The Next Generation] movies and then in Picard, it’s like, do we really have to do this? Like this is just a horrible fate for Data. Oren: Well, okay, here’s the thing. There are instances where you, as the new person brought into helm, a big franchise, have a bunch of constraints created by the last people who helmed the franchise. And if you’re JJ Abrams, sometimes those last people was also you, which is very funny. But that does happen. But in a lot of these cases, that’s not really what’s going on. Like in Picard. Yeah. Okay. So Data dies in Nemesis. Terrible movie, but nothing in Nemesis required them to do what they did with Data in Picard. That was all them. Nemesis even ends with the implication that actually Data has been brought back to life in his weird clone brother they found. It leaves them that door and they decided not to go with it and instead to go with the idea that Data has been trapped in a box for 20 years, which, there’s nothing in Nemesis that even hints at that. They just made that up. Chris: It’s like, now that it happened and it’s horrible, I just want it to be not canon and to just forget that ever happened, right. And so then the franchise is like, no, that’s totally canon. Picard is all canon. Then now, there might be references to that or I just, I want it to not be true, basically. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it. Picard was awful and it made me feel bad watching it. And I don’t want that to be—but then of course season three of Picard happens where they try to undo all of that and it’s just as bad. Chris: I just wanna take an eraser and just be like, this show never happened. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I think in general you have to decide what are you going to reference and what are you not going to reference. Like, it’s weird to me how much of the prequels modern Star Wars seems to be interested in channeling. George made a mess in the prequels, right. I understand that much. But I’m not sure we had to continue with the idea of the Jedi as child kidnappers. Like, yeah, that is what George said, but I think if we just didn’t talk about that, no one is gonna be wondering, Hey, what about all those children the Jedi kidnapped? That’s a very strange choice. Especially since they’re not gonna end up by being like, actually the Jedi are terrible. They can’t do that. They still need you to buy Jedi toys. Chris: Yeah. This is just like, the only solution to the droid slavery problem is to just quietly forget the droids are slaves and never speak of it again. Just quietly make them actual people with rights and just forget all that. Oren: Yeah, and then of course we should also consider that sometimes canon’s bad and you should just ignore it. The one that always comes to mind for me is there’s a lot of bad Star Trek canon because there are a billion Star Trek episodes and some of them were just bad ideas and it would be weird if you were constraining the franchise with that, like, I don’t think you need to pay attention to the part where they establish women can’t be captains, or the part where they establish that going to warp destroys space. Those are both bad ideas. They should not have been included and we should just ignore them. Chris: They were remarkably consistent with that warp speed global warming thing, or were they? Oren: No, they abandoned it after two episodes. Chris: Really? Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Maybe I was just surprised they remembered it for two episodes. Oren: Yeah, no, they have like two episodes where they—there’s like one episode where they mention we’ve been given permission to break the warp speed limit, even though that will cause space global warming. And then I think there’s some line, I don’t remember if this is actually in an episode or if it’s in a technical manual somewhere, but there’s a line about how Voyager’s new engines don’t do space global warming. So we fixed it. Don’t worry about it. Chris: Oh, okay. Oren: And it’s like, yeah, that was the right choice, because this is a show about exploring things at warp speed. Doing that probably shouldn’t destroy the universe. Chris: See, it would be better if they talked about how there was now a cap and trade program where they could trade in their licenses to go faster than, you know, warp five. Oren: No, I don’t like this. This is a bad idea. I hate this. Chris: Hey, just, you know, be an example of what we need in the world if we’re going there anyway. Oren: And of course, the place where it gets the most messy is when you’re dealing with franchises that are multimedia franchises. And there’s like, there’s no way to win there. Like you’ve got—hey, this show has a bunch of tie-in novels. Like, okay, are we expecting the people who watch the show to have read the novels? Because most of them won’t. Chris: Yeah. I mean, there are some—it’s not impossible to keep those things as canon and work around them and have references that aren’t too noticeable. I think the problem is that if the novels are about anything important, right, which is what will sell them, then they will put constraints on the movies, which having a much bigger budget, the storyteller of the movie isn’t—you know, director or whoever is not gonna want to have those constraints because that makes it harder for them to tell a good story. I mean, if all the novels were like, Hey, this is Jon Snow up north, right, then maybe we could avoid that problem. Oren: Hey, this novel is about when Data went to a violin tournament. It’s like, okay, yeah, that probably fits. That was what was so annoying about the start of the Abrams movies, was there was this weird marketing push, if I remember correctly, where these comics were supposed to be totally canon. Like everything that happened in these comics, it’s like it happened in the movie, which admittedly, I guess is sort of true because the movies also don’t make sense with each other. So I guess it’s kind of true. Chris: Mm. Sounds like false advertising to me. Oren: I mean it absolutely was, right. And that’s always how it’s been. That’s why, you know, people got upset when Disney was like, the extended universe Star Wars novels aren’t canon and like, they never were, guys. No matter who owned the rights, if they ever made more Star Wars movies, they were never going to continue the Star Wars universe from where the novels were, that was just not going to happen. Chris: I mean, I do think the fun of having a vast canon is, of course, when you have something like Lower Decks come and it has tons of references, right? It is definitely fun and very immersive to see them do the references and get them right. But yeah. What is the thing, if you were to take one thing and make it not canon anymore, what would you choose? Oren: I mean, pfft, you can be really mean with this one, right? It’s like, that movie that other people like, and I don’t, I would get rid of it. Chris: Enterprise, Star Trek Enterprise. Oren: I’m not really interested in telling people that I would excise whatever their favorite is. As far as from Star Wars, I would take out the thing about the Jedi being child kidnappers. George obviously didn’t think that through, did not consider the implications and now we have this weird elephant in the room whenever we talk about the Jedi, that no one is willing to really acknowledge. What about you? Chris: If I had to choose one thing, I could just choose Jar Jar Binks. Just like, the whole character is now non-canon. Oren: I mean, he definitely doesn’t, you know, have a big impact, right. So it’s not like taking him out is gonna change much. Chris: Granted, he does appear later and he is much less obnoxious when he appears. Oren: Yeah. He’s in Clone Wars and he’s fine, right? Chris: Right. Or I could non-canon Ben killing Han Solo. Oren: Not a fan of that? Chris: No, I think it was a really bad move. It was clear that they still wanted people to sympathize with Ben—Kylo Ren, but that was not gonna happen after he killed Han Solo. So I think what happened is, you know, they realized Harrison Ford really wanted his character killed off. The storytellers couldn’t resist doing something dramatic that they would not normally get to do because Harrison Ford was leaving. So they put in that twist, but they didn’t really think very hard about how it would impact a character that they actually wanted to be a likable villain. A sympathetic villain. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And it led to one of the reasons Kylo Ren really doesn’t work very well. So yeah, that should just be zapped. Oren: Yeah, fair enough. So we’ve been talking a lot about when canon is not really that important or when people overexaggerate it or when it was never gonna be true in the first place. But coming at it from the other side, I do think continuity is not a bad thing. And if you can have better continuity, I think you should if you don’t have to give up something critical for it. And there are just some choices you could make that will help you have better continuity, and the one that keeps getting me is why prequels? Who is it at Hollywood that is just demanding more prequels? Like you guys know you can just make sequels, right? You can just keep going forward. Time doesn’t stop. Chris: I mean, they’re probably desperate to reuse story elements that people will recognize so it still feels like part of the franchise. ‘Cause you can keep making sequels, but at some point it becomes really hard to use existing characters and we have to be like, it’s their children or something. Oren: Yeah. But a lot of these prequels don’t use existing characters either. I guess when you’re doing a Star Trek prequel, you can use the really long lived characters. Like, you can have Spock show up and maybe that’s the entire reason for doing Discovery as a prequel, but man, does it create weird problems. Chris: I wonder with Discovery, with Star Trek in particular, there is the fact that TOS [The Original Series] was like in an old timeline, and maybe they’re trying to associate it with classic Trek. And there’s also the fact that the technology in Star Trek is very out of hand, and certainly with Enterprise, at least, right, where they didn’t have transporters— Oren: Well, until they did. Chris: Until they did, right? That might have been something that they were trying to do. It’s just very weird with Discovery because then they add all of this technology that seems even more advanced than TNG. There was also a change in creative leadership happening there, right, and other weird things. Oren: Yeah. I feel like the reason Discovery is a prequel is locked inside Brian Fuller’s head and we’ll never find out until he writes a book about it. Chris: Yeah. Whereas, I don’t know, the whole young Han Solo, that was the one that everybody was like, why? Why are we doing this, a young Han Solo? What is it about Han Solo that means that we need to see? And I think maybe that was just, Hey, we wanna do a recognizable character, but we also want an excuse to cast a new actor because Harrison Ford totally defined that character so much. Maybe that was what was going on there. Oren: Yeah. And then it didn’t work out very well and Disney decided they were just gonna do deepfakes from now on. And it’s like, oh great. Thanks Disney. That’s what we wanted. Chris: Whereas far past prequels can work better, right? For Star Wars has like, oh, the Old Republic Glory days, right. I can see the attraction of that. And then you don’t have many constraints, so that’s one option. But yeah, I don’t know. I think they’re just looking for something recognizable. I still, you know, think about Obi-Wan [Kenobi], the midquel. Oren: Oh man. Chris: How very well they did considering it was a midquel. Oren: Yeah. The ratio of terrible premise to pretty good execution is unusual in that show. It’s like, yeah, I mean this is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, but yeah, you know, it’s not bad, you know, you kind of made it work. As long as I ignore half of the implications. The idea that Leia had an adventure with Obi-Wan and knows him really well, is deeply funny. Chris: And then got amnesia afterwards, of course. Oren: Or even Rogue One, right? It’s very funny to watch New Hope and imagine it in the context of, Vader just saw Leia’s ship escape from the big battle and then look at their dialogue with that in mind. Chris: Yeah, or unfortunately, we decided to have a go at watching Rogue One again after Andor, and gosh, I wish they lined up better. Oren: Yeah. Not so much. Chris: But no, they don’t quite line up and that’s too bad. Yeah. Oren: They mostly, at least from what I could tell, they mostly don’t line up in terms of tone. The biggest continuity thing that I noticed is that for some reason in Andor they made K-2 invincible. Chris: Yeah. That was really strange, yeah. Oren: I don’t know why they did that. Chris: Now you have to find reasons to leave K-2 behind. I think they wanted to leave K-2 behind anyway though, because it’s a very serious show and K-2 is a comedic character. Oren: Yeah, it’s really funny to see how little K-2 there is and it really feels like the reason is ’cause he makes jokes and we don’t make jokes on Andor. That’s not a thing we do here. This is a little less flashy, but another thing that just helps that I wish more storytellers in big franchises would consider is to think about the implications of the stuff you’re introducing. If we go all the way back to TOS, they introduced the transporter to save money on landing scenes because the shuttle set and effects were not ready yet. And Star Trek has been dealing with that choice for more than 50 years now, and it has been a plague on the franchise ever since. Chris: Why did they add the transporter back [in] Enterprise?  Oren: I don’t know, for the same reason why they decided to have “polarize the hull plating” fill the same role as “raise shields.” Chris: Maybe they brought in a bunch of Star Trek writers who just didn’t know how to write episodes without it. Oren: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say exactly, like we know that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had a lot of creative control for the first three seasons, and they just, you know, don’t seem to have been great at it. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think the thing with the shields is because, again, the problem with guns, it’s like a gunfight, but at ship scale where usually shooting is gonna become deadly and maneuvering is not that—I mean you can make it interesting in some cases, but if it’s just like a bunch of empty space, right? Trying to fly around and communicate strategy there is gonna be difficult. So we need a way for fights to last a little while and to build tension. And I feel like the shield is just a very convenient, okay, it’s down to 80%, 60%, 40%, and it’s not very good, but it does something. It shows that the ship is in more and more trouble and it allows the fight to last longer. And without that, you kind of have to do more work to come up with an actual battle and communicate what the impact of, you know, the shooting is without just letting the ship instantly explode. And so I can see why, you know, that just might become a nightmare and it’s easier to just [be] like, okay, we need shields. Oren: Yeah. And a lot of continuity problems are introduced because the writers added something as a way to get out of a problem they didn’t otherwise know how to get out of, like the Avatar State in the Avatar setting is like this. The Avatar State causes a ton of problems in [Legend of] Korra because it’s way OP and Korra can use it for most of the series, and so they just have to keep coming up with excuses why she doesn’t use it. But in the original show, the Avatar State was clearly a way to put the characters in a situation where they couldn’t possibly survive and then give them a way to survive it. That’s the main purpose that the Avatar State serves, and as a result, it causes all these problems later and it’s like, well, maybe you could have just not done that, you know, just a thought. Chris: Yep. Yeah, I mean it’s that oneupmanship I talk about with plotting, right, where you make a problem for your character, don’t know how to get them outta that problem, so you give them a new ability, new gun, new weapon, whatever. They use that to solve the problem, and then somehow you have to create a problem that’s even harder because they have the new thing, and then you keep building the problems and the character’s capabilities until it just becomes impossible. Oren: Yeah, the power creep is real. All right, well, with that, I think we’ll bring the canon of this episode to a close. It’s over. Nothing that happened in this episode is actually canon, so if you get mad at it, you can’t ’cause it’s not real. Chris: But if you would like to see more actually canonical material in the Mythcreants Universe, you can become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants Oren:  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 music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We’ve all seen this moment in TV and movies: a character we thought we knew is revealed to have a completely different history than we imagined. The soft cinnamon roll protagonist has actually been an assassin this whole time. The grizzled mercenary hero is using a glamor to disguise the fact that they’re actually a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed adventurer. This kind of backstory reveal is often exciting and memorable, but is it a good idea? Listen and we’ll try to figure that out. Show Notes Homophones  Castle Rock  Meta Mysteries  Difference Between Filmed and Narrated Stories Boneshaker  Carnival Row  Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale  Warrior Princess Assassin Omniscient Viewpoint  Unreliable Narrator  The Haunting of Hill House 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? Or am I?  Oren: Are you? Who knows? We just don’t know.  Chris: Who knows? Have you seen the scene where I was born and named by my parents? Because unless you’ve seen that scene, maybe I’m not Chris.  Oren: I haven’t seen that scene. And for all I know, maybe you actually fell into a seam in reality, in a scene I haven’t seen.  Chris: So this is obviously an episode about tongue twisters.  Oren: Just as much alliteration and as many… homophones? The ones that sound the same, but is different. I forget which one that is. [Chuckles] Chris: We’ll just say it’s homophones because I’m not gonna look it up. Maybe we need some online real-time fact-checking. Oren: Someone could point out what the actual one was. So this episode we’re talking about secret protagonist backstories. And the reason is that we’ve been watching Castle Rock, which is a fairly old show by now, but still some spoilers. And as I’m watching it, our protagonist is Annie and she’s got some problems. It’s based on various Stephen King stories, so of course she has problems.  And then, boom, huge reveal halfway through the show—or at least through the season, ‘cause it’s sort of an anthology show—that her entire backstory is not what we thought. Her daughter isn’t really her daughter. Also, she accidentally killed someone and then attempted to kill somebody else. It’s a whole thing. And the moment I saw it, I was like, “Oh boy, so many authors are gonna want to do this.” Maybe not this one specifically ’cause I don’t know if this show is popular enough for that. But I see this sort of thing a lot and I work with authors who see it and they wanna do it too. Chris: Flashy stuff of course is always gonna be attractive. And reveals and twists are very flashy. And that’s why we rarely encourage a lot of reveals except for when they’re absolutely needed. For instance, the end of the mystery or something like that. Just because we’ve seen so many people go for the flash and not realizing what they’re wrecking. And we generally just… tell a good story. Get people emotionally invested. Keep them entertained. You don’t need the shocking reveal. And this has, “Oh, I just wanted to shock people,” written all over it. I wanna talk more about that. But first perhaps, this might be a good time to, when we’re talking about protagonist backstories, I feel like we need to go over the meta mystery issue again. Oren: I was gonna say, “But Oren, isn’t this just meta mysteries again?” Well, yes, but also no.  Chris: It depends. What a surprising answer. It depends. In many cases, yes. And most of the time when I’m talking about meta mysteries, I just tell people they shouldn’t hide anything a viewpoint character knows. But I think it’s a good time to get a little bit more nuanced into exactly how this works, because I want people to be able to use their own judgment and also do edge cases. That’s where a lot of the fun is, in these little edge cases, and how far can I push this, and et cetera. So there’s multiple reasons, like execution. “How do we pull this off?” is one thing. But for me, the biggest thing is the emotion of the situation. So the base problem that we run into here is that a character’s feelings and motivation just don’t resonate unless we understand the full reasoning behind those things.  Basically, storytellers, particularly writers tend to think that emotion will kind of rub off directly from the character to the audience. So if the character is sad, then the audience will feel sad with them. And if you have a good actor and a visual medium, on film, there might be some empathy there. But especially in a written work that doesn’t really work. Instead what you need to see, you need to give the audience the stimulus that caused that emotion so they can react to that stimulus along with the character. And feel some of that too. So if you hide that stimulus, ’cause it’s a secret backstory. Basically, there’s no emotion and the story ends up feeling surprisingly emotionally flat and kind of dead. And if you’re not trained to look out for it, a lot of times that is more subtle than the reveal. Which is why meta mysteries are so attractive, because they’re easy to pull off. The reveal is very flashy, and if you’re not trained, you won’t realize how much you’re missing.  Like one example is in the novel Boneshaker, there’s two POVs. One POV character is Briar and she’s the mother, and her son has run off into this really dangerous area full of steampunk zombies to find his father. And she goes after him and we are told that she is full of regret. She’s like, “Oh, I should have told him everything and I didn’t, and therefore this is my fault.” But we can’t feel it with her because we’re like, “Well, why do you feel so guilty about this?” It feels flat. It doesn’t resonate.  And then only at the very end of the book, spoilers for this book, we’re revealed that Briar actually killed his father years ago. And so by not telling her son—’cause her son wants to believe that his father is alive—because she didn’t tell her son the truth, now he has put his life in danger because she was not upfront with him. And so if we had that information, we would have a lot more feeling in her POV for most of the novel. And it both gives the novel more emotional power and intensity and makes it more compelling, which is often really important to the story. But it also really helps audience connect with the character to feel what they’re feeling.  Oren: And what’s interesting is that there’s several different varieties of this kind of missing context. There’s the Boneshaker one where we are told something is missing and we just spend the book waiting to find out what it is. Then there’s something like, Carnival Row is our go-to example where a critical part of the character’s backstory that informs all of his actions and is really important is withheld. And as a result, the character is really boring until we find out what his deal is.  Chris: I have a whole article going over this issue in Carnival Row, but the central thing is that Philo is really supposed to be the main character. And again, he falls emotionally flat. And this is a visual story. We can see Orlando Bloom plays Philo, great actor. But it’s weird because he doesn’t seem to have anything personal at stake in the situation. His problems seem to be smaller than the other characters, and we don’t know why he does what he does. He’s feeling things, but we’re not sure what or why exactly. So the reveal that happens in episode three is really instrumental in illuminating his character and it makes him a much better protagonist. But we needed that earlier. It wasn’t worth it.   Oren: And the example in Castle Rock is a little different because it’s really not either of those things because we did get hints that she had a secret backstory, but it turns out her secret backstory is completely different than what all the hints were. The hints were all just lies. [Chuckles] Chris: I think in some ways. So, one of the nuances of this meta mystery thing is judging how important is this information to the way the character feels, and the story at hand. And the less it’s actually relevant to what’s happening in the story—you can’t just dump the protagonist’s entire life. You can’t tell the audience absolutely everything. It becomes a meta mystery when it matters, when you hide it. Which unfortunately is also what makes it a good reveal.  But in the case of Castle Rock, we have Annie. There are some things like, she has a daughter. If something happens to her daughter, she gets really worried. We can understand and empathize with her wanting to protect her daughter without knowing what her backstory is, for instance. Those things are fine.  Oren: And the hinting at her secret backstory is that Joy, the daughter’s father is somehow sinister. And then it turns out that the backstory is completely different. Really had nothing to do with that. And it’s weird because before that reveal, I wasn’t really thinking, “Oh, well I need a backstory reveal to help me understand Annie.” I felt like I understood her pretty well, and so that was a little strange where it was like, “Oh, actually everything’s different than you thought it was.” Okay, sure. I guess.  Chris: I think with Annie, the thing where we are missing out on is, we don’t know exactly what she’s running from. We can conclude that she’s kind of on the run from the law or from a person, but we don’t know that she stabbed Joy’s biological mother and then stole Joy as a baby. [Chuckles] And ran off with her. And without that information, the tension between Annie and Joy, where Joy wants to know more information, and Annie’s trying to put her off. That would certainly be a lot more riveting, with the knowledge of the backstory. Or you don’t understand her fear of discovery, that her daughter will find out what happened, for instance. So there are emotional elements that would play out very differently.  Part of the weird thing here is, of course we have to look at, “Is Annie a good protagonist?” Because it does feel like we decided to make this shocking at the cost of Annie’s character. I’m not completely objecting to a character who did something bad in their past and is now just trying to deal with it, but I was expecting an explanation for why Annie was so violent. Oren: There really isn’t one. The explanation is that she has a mental illness. That’s the explanation, which is a little bit unsavory at this point, I would say.  Chris: Annie’s not violent all the time, but when she’s actually threatened by a guy, she turns on. She actually knows how to be violent when necessary and does it on the drop of the hat and very effectively, which is actually a cool thing about her. And she’s very scrappy. She’s a very good liar. I actually am impressed. I am kind of tired, I realized, of all of these protagonists that struggle to lie all the time because the storyteller wants the character to lie, but also wants them to be seen through instantly by another character.  So it’s refreshing to have a protagonist who’s really good at lying. And that doesn’t mean she gets away with it every time, but she always has a good lie at hand and sometimes she pulls off some very impressive talking her way out of situations. But in this case, expecting some backstory to explain how she ended up sort of being used to violence and this, “Oh, she’s just always been that way. She just sometimes gets violent when something happens.”  Oren: Also, she apparently spontaneously picked up nurse skills somewhere?  Chris: That was the other thing, is that she’s a registered nurse. And it’s like, okay, even if we say she’s not really a nurse, she still knows enough to fake it well. ‘Cause nobody’s caught on that she doesn’t know what to do. So how did she get those skills?  Oren: Just trained herself on the job.  Chris: It has all the hallmarks as, “We did this to be shocking.” You thought Annie was on the run from some terrible man who terrorized her, but actually she’s the killer. And it doesn’t really fit all the pieces very well, unfortunately.  Oren: And if this was a written story, there’s a whole extra layer to it. Because at least in television, there isn’t an an expectation that you’re always gonna know what the character is thinking, and all those things. Whereas in most narrative premises, you are expecting to know that stuff and it will also be way more obvious that you don’t know them. It will be harder to drop some hints and then move past it, because you’re in the character’s head the whole time. You can’t just cut the scene.  Chris: Don’t think about it. “Don’t think about your backstory,” character tells himself repeatedly.  Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh gosh. Okay. I can’t believe people would say that sometimes. People would be like, “No, you can’t say that’s a meta mystery. They said not to think about it.” Have you ever tried not thinking about something? Chris, Oren: [Laugh]  Chris: Even if that were possible, it doesn’t change—first of all, it’s very heavy handed. It doesn’t feel natural. It definitely feels like the author is doing that on purpose—but also it doesn’t change the basic dynamics of, the information is missing so the audience doesn’t have that stimulus to emotionally respond to. Therefore, the book just falls emotionally flat. We still have that same problem. It doesn’t change anything.  Oren: Now the obvious solution here, if you want to have a big startling backstory reveal like this for an important character, is to make that your most important secondary character. So in this scenario, Joy would be the protagonist and would find out this terrifying thing about the woman she thought was her mother. That would work perfectly well.  Chris: We talk about viewpoint characters a lot. Or I talk about who should be a viewpoint character and who shouldn’t, based on who are we supposed to sympathize with and relate to and get familiar with, versus who should be mysterious. And some types of characters would be better off mysterious, depending on their role.  So in this case of Castle Rock, if we were in Joy’s perspective, Annie might come off as pretty menacing. And that would be interesting in itself. That would be a slightly different story than we have, but it would still be a very interesting story if Annie was mysterious. She would probably be more threatening.  But then, what often happens with non-viewpoint characters is at some point, the storyteller decides, “Okay, I would like the audience to sympathize with this character more now and get to know them more now.” And then we reveal the backstory. So we could have, Annie seems super menacing, and we could have even a positive reveal like, “Oh, actually Annie is better than we thought.” Or we could have the negative reveal. But then Joy still realizes that Annie loves her like a mother anyway, decides to forgive her. So that would’ve been an interesting story.  Oren: Hilariously, I actually felt the same thing about the show Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale where we were finding out weird reveals about Sarah, the main character, that actually make her a bad person. And I thought those would’ve been more interesting if the show was focused on her daughter Harper, who is kind of a cipher for most of the show. But it turns out the reason she’s a cipher for most of the show is that she also has big reveals to make. So we would’ve had to pick one. [Chuckles] Chris: “I have the magical ability to take care of the situation anytime,” like that. Oren: That’s a problem. No matter if it’s secret or not.  Chris: The thing I really liked about the show is that it was really good at setting up all of these… I shouldn’t say great conflicts, because they’re essentially—the antagonists are bigots in the story. But at the same time, you can see this stuff happening. One thing leads to another and how the situation escalates. Nobody thinks of themself as pure evil. They’re reacting emotionally and they have their problems. And how the situation kind of naturally builds up and gets worse with all of these different actors who do something that escalate and inflames the situation, and that’s really neat to watch. But as you go on, you increasingly realize that the protagonists are not allowed to actually do anything, because—again, this has happened before. I think we talked about this in our agency episode. I’ve seen this many times, where the storyteller wants a situation to go worse and doesn’t know how to give the protagonist agency while still having things get worse. And so the characters just don’t make a difference ever. And finally at the end, they actually just use their magic to fix it. It’s like, okay, well. [Laughs]  Oren: Well that’s nice. Chris: That’s nice. And we didn’t know that character had all this powerful magic, but apparently she does. And I guess if she was the main character and we understood her, we would know that she has these powers. Oren: Back over to the Castle Rock example. If you’re gonna make Joy your protagonist instead of Anne, that is totally viable. But you do have to refigure who is the main actor in the story. ‘Cause in the show as it exists, Anne has a lot of storylines where she goes off and does something that not only is Joy not there for, but that Joy never really interacts with at all. And so that would be weird. If Joy was your protagonist, it would be very strange to have huge chunks of the story take place in ways that Joy’s not involved in. And then you either never find out about them or you have to be info dumped later. That’s not ideal. But it wouldn’t take that big a change. Joy would have to be looking into, “How did this guy get murdered?” And then find out, “Oh, my mom murdered him. What.” [Laughs] That could be really cool. But you would have to make some changes.  Chris: I have a blog post that came up recently on Warrior Princess Assassin, which is a throuple romance, MMF. And so it has three protagonists that all get a viewpoint and cycles between them. And it’s kind of interesting because each protagonist is kind of handled a little differently when it comes to what we know and what we don’t know.  So the character that is supposed to be the audience insert, we just know what her deal is immediately. She’s the first viewpoint we’re in and she has a secret that she’s in a political marriage. And the benefit the other party is supposed to get is access to her father’s magic. But she learns her father is dying. [Chuckles] And now she’s gonna have to keep this from her fiancé and that’s gonna be a problem. And then, we know that. And so we know how she feels, and that adds tension to the romance. Whereas we have another character, Asher, who gets less of a viewpoint in the beginning. So that he can seem kind of like a danger boy and seem menacing when he’s first introduced. And that’s kind of an interesting effect, especially since he’s the best-friend, love-interest character. And that’s usually a safe boy.  So we put emphasis on, “Oh, he’s changed and somehow he acts different and the protagonist doesn’t know why or how.” And then when there’s actually a chance to move to his viewpoint, you’ll get all of his traumatic backstory. He becomes a very sympathetic character instead, even though he can still be inclined towards violence. So sometimes with a certain amount of viewpoint shifting, you can cast a character as mysterious, sometimes. Granted, once you start to reveal a character’s backstory and get to know them, it’s hard to go back again. You can do a little bit of stuff. And then of course there’s a third character, Ky. And he kind of has a meta mystery where we know something is going on at home and he feels responsible for his people being afraid of him, but we don’t really know why. And so that kind of doesn’t feel like he has a character arc, or really has emotional issues like the other two characters.  Oren: I guess it would be less annoying if you only had to spend one third of the story in his viewpoint. Don’t have to deal with it as much.  Chris: And it’s not always relevant because it becomes more relevant when they head to his country and then we reveal it. And so if it’s not very relevant in the story, usually the character can just not think about it. I think the problem that’s happening here, is that the author wants, just like with the other character who—“Oops, my father is dying and now I’m in this arranged marriage”—that can be used to create tension. But if he’s vaguely worried that they’ll learn something bad about him. If the character is, and we don’t know what that bad thing is, it’s kind of hard for us to feel that tension or feel that concern. You can’t just tell the audience, “Oh, that thing is very dangerous.” You have to show them and give them the deets. So it doesn’t really work to just tell. Which is why hiding a backstory can become such a problem.  Oren: So what about the option that we get asked about a lot, which is getting weird with your POV. You’ve got either omniscient or the… *Spooky Voice* …unreliable narrator. Wooo.  Chris: [Chuckles] I think that’s an execution difference. There’s nothing that really changes the motion difference. Well, okay. There is one thing I’ll mention in a second. But with omniscience, if you have an omniscient narrator, if your character isn’t narrating, it is way easier to leave stuff out. So if you want your character to know something and don’t want your audience to know it, an omniscient narrator definitely has the leeway to just not say things. And so that definitely smooths over the execution problems of having that awkward, “Oh, don’t think about it. Don’t think about your backstory.” Have the character tell themselves not to think about it. We don’t have to do that with omniscient. We’re already outside the character’s head. The narrator doesn’t have to tell us if they don’t want to. That’s how omniscience works.  So we have that, but that’s never gonna get rid of the issue with emotions not being there. Now, granted with omniscient narration, a lot of times the goal is to be less emotional and more jokey and snarky and lighthearted. So maybe if the narrator is entertaining that would be less damaging, but it doesn’t take care of that problem. There is one thing though, we talk about the hidden plan reveals sometimes. So if you have a character that has a secret plan for besting the villain, and you wanna hide that plan, and then they get in a conflict with the villain, and then you find out, “Oh, everything has gone according to the secret plan.” So this actually follows all the same principles. It does work as a turning point, technically. Does make it feel like the protagonist earned that victory.  But remember what I just said about tension where you can’t just say something is threatening. And what can happen there, is now you kind of have to lie to the audience about how threatening—’cause this is a protagonist who walks into a dangerous situation already knowing that they’ve got a plan for success. That’s not a situation that creates lots of tension.  Oren: Your hidden plan has to be very carefully calculated so that it’s something that is credible and can explain how they win, but also once they find out about it, the reader’s like, “Oh yeah, there was still a chance you could have failed that.” So that it justifies why your character is worried and why the scenario seems dangerous. Chris: So you can do things like that, but generally the briefer the time period is when the character has some kind of plan you don’t know about, is better. Because during that time you’re trying to kind of play it both ways. Often make the audience think that they don’t have a plan, but also have them act believably, and it’s gonna be harder to create tension during that sequence. So I think those work best for more minor conflicts and not the climax, for instance, because it’s gonna be harder to create tension. But if for a short period of time, that can be worth it sometimes.  Oren: And it’s similar if you are using an unreliable narrator, and I mean an actual unreliable narrator. Not a narrator who has opinions, which is how people sometimes define it. But one who you can’t trust what they’re saying. If you’re actually doing that, actually establishing it, you can use that to hide the protagonist backstory. But that still raises the question of, should you? You could still end up in a situation where the readers don’t know what they need to know to feel emotionally connected. Or, you could end up with a backstory that doesn’t match the character you’ve created. Those things can all still happen.  Chris: Although, sometimes unreliable narrators, I think, was it House on Haunted Hill? The old one. In this case, the character is an unreliable—wass that an omniscient? I think it gets into her head anyway.  Oren: It sort of zooms in and out. Chris: So when it zooms into her head and she’s unreliable, she still believes what she falsely perceives. So she thinks, for instance, that characters are scheming against her. We might have doubts, but we still see her experience that and we see kind of what evidence she uses to conclude that they’re scheming against her. And in that case, the goal is, “Okay, maybe that isn’t convincing to us.” Maybe we don’t think they’re really scheming against her, so maybe we don’t feel that tension. But we do feel tension of seeing that she is not perceiving the situation correctly. And so it’s just a different effect and in that case, you still get an authentic experience of what the character is perceiving and thinking. Because the character believes their own lies in that case.  Oren: And in both scenarios, it’s something where I wouldn’t recommend that you make as heavy impact a choice as going omniscient or going with an unreliable narrator, just to have a smoother secret backstory reveal. I think you would want to be getting more out of those choices. But if you are already doing that kind of story. If you are writing in omniscient and you are writing your story closer to what we would see in a television show, you have more options. And similarly, if your story benefits from an unreliable narrator and you’re actually using it for something, then hiding things about your protagonist is a more open option. But still not necessarily the right one. You still have to think about if you’re hiding something the story needs or not.  Chris: Of course, the ultimate way to hide protagonist backstory is amnesia.  Oren: Yeah. [Laughs] Chris: It’s something we haven’t even brought up yet. But this is why amnesia is so popular in stories, is because it totally gets around this problem. You’re just trying to get the audience on the same page as your character. If your character can’t remember their own backstory, it’s not causing any feels in them right now. And so, no, the audience doesn’t need to know it.  The audience should be on the same page as them and find out about their memories when the character does, which is why it’s so popular. It doesn’t mean that it’s never weird. In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, the main character, uncover a lot of memories. That makes sense. And then later he covers a memory that, doesn’t make as much sense. [Chuckles]  Oren: And admittedly I have grown a little tired of amnesia, just as I have learned more about how amnesia actually works. Chris: Shh. Shh. We don’t want anybody to know that.  Oren: No, don’t tell ’em.  Chris: It’s so useful for us storytellers. We don’t want people to know that it’s not realistic.  Oren: It’s easier for me to accept a magical brain fog than, a character bonked their head, and now doesn’t remember anything about their life, but still has all the skills they learned during their life. Chris: Okay. But what you can do, I’m pretty sure this is realistic. If your character still knows who they are, but they don’t remember the last five years, for instance. That you can totally do, they’ll also have lost any random facts or knowledge they’ve gained in those five years.  Oren: Another thing that I think is a underused option, which is another way of hiding the information from your protagonist that doesn’t require amnesia, is for them to learn that a thing they thought about their backstory was not correct. And in this case, Joy finds out that she was actually kidnapped as a baby by her half-sister and not from her actual mother. So, she’s a baby. We don’t expect babies to remember that part.  But you could also have this be like, “Your protagonist thinks that they worked at a lab creating vaccines or creating medicines of some kind.” And then the evil bad guy is like, “Actually, you were helping me create the genetically modified super soldiers that I’m using. Your work was invaluable.” And they didn’t know that. That is a big backstory reveal. And if what you’re going for is a shocking twist, that can do it and not have all the temptations of hiding the emotional context that people need. Chris: That could definitely work. I can say some situations where authors would try to do something like, “Oh, the character thought they saw one thing, but actually it was a different thing.” And then we try to describe it to audiences being like, hmm. It’s like character death. “Oh, that character totally died.” Okay, but have I seen the character’s broken body? And then has it been set on fire? And also chopped into lots of bits.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: There’s a lot of times if you’re trying to have a situation where your character misperceives something, that’s going to be somewhat easy to catch on. But in that case maybe they have no way of telling that they weren’t working on—well, they would know something about the work that they’re doing in that lab. But still you could have, “Okay. No, this was just beyond their knowledge.” Or something like that.  Oren: Well, with that, since that was the last thing I wanted to cover, we can reveal that secretly this podcast has been going for over half an hour and therefore, part of our backstory is that we have to end it right now. Chris: And did you know if you become a patron, you can see extensive backstory of our Patreon rambles? You can. Going back many, many years. It’s very, very secret. Only patrons know about it. So check us out on patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: It’s very exclusive. But 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’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Do you narrate your stories like a distant god looking down on the scene or as if you’re right behind the protagonist’s eyeballs watching events unfold? This is the question of narrative distance, something that’s really important in writing but also often goes unremarked upon. Well, have no fear, because this week we’re remarking upon it quite a lot. Show Notes Breaking the Curse of Distant Perspective  Narrative Premise  First Person Narration Terry Pratchett Douglas Adams Omniscient Narration The Raven Scholar  Deep POV Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: In a year where the internet was controlled by large corporations, and where podcasting had become a professional venture with a large production budget, two podcasters simply continued their cash-strapped 13-year podcast, completely unaware that they were behind the times and no one listened to them anyway. Oren: Yeah, but it turned out that actually the secret was to not care about things like production values. Who needs that? It was just… just two people chatting is the ultimate podcast form. Chris: And then one day, one of those podcasters somehow got it into her head to discuss narrative distance, even though such a dry subject matter would drive away any remaining listeners. Oren: I mean, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t be riveted by the distance of which you narrate things. That’s how far away your viewpoint character is from things, right? Can we measure it in school busses? I love to do that. Chris: This is one of the issues that comes with… sometimes with blogging, instead of writing a book, is when you have something like a huge piece of instructional material or, you know, if people are going through a college program or something, if there’s something that’s really important, but it’s just not sexy, you could be like, “Sit down, you’re going to listen to this part before we move on.” But when I write blog posts, I’m always looking at, “Okay, how is this useful to people and why do they need to know this?” And it has to be more obviously useful to people. But narrative distance is just so important that I can’t actually cover any PoV-related topics without mentioning it. So what’s happened is that I’ve defined it in like, I swear, a dozen times in a dozen different articles, even though I don’t have an article that’s like, “Here’s the guide to narrative distance.” Oren: Well, I did read “Breaking the Curse of Distant Perspective” for this podcast, ’cause I wasn’t really sure what narrative distance was. And I know that’s an older post of ours, but it’s still pretty relevant. Chris: Yeah, I talk about it in a lot of stuff, but there’s no “Here’s just an overall guide to what narrative distance is.” So maybe I’ll do that sometime, but at this point it almost feels like I would be… it would be too redundant with all of the other PoV articles where I’m like, “Okay, before I can talk about this, I have to first explain narrative distance,” ’cause I really think the narrative distance makes a bigger difference to narration than things that people talk about all the time, like what the tense is or whether it’s first or third person. And when I wrote my article, for instance, on first person, it just felt so silly to do that because it was just, “Okay, but what kind of first person?” Because I think that different first person narration has more differences than things in common. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And… but everybody, first person versus third person, or tense, because these are so obvious traits it’s led to everybody categorizing narration that way, when I just don’t think that’s actually the natural way to do that. So it just becomes very awkward where, you know, if I wrote a similar post on third person, it would be very similar to my post on third person, with some adjustments because narrative distance makes such a huge difference. Anyway, what is it and what isn’t it? Oren: Before we can talk about this, you do have to explain narrative distance again. Chris: I do have to once more explain what narrative distance is. Okay. But I also want to talk about what it isn’t, because… Oren: Okay. Chris: …there are some disagreements in this industry. Everybody has their different terms and their own definitions. So when I’m talking about narrative distance, I mean strictly where the narrative camera is, which… basically, the narrative camera just… I’ll go into it more later, but in short: Are you looking at the story from the perspective of a character? Is a character essentially narrating the story? Or are you kind of looking at the character from the outside? And the camera can like move around like it would in film, right? It can start at bird’s eye view and then come closer and closer to the character and go inside the character’s head. So that’s kind of what it is. But I’ve seen other people sometimes kind of equate it with narration that has personality, or saying that personality is a factor in distance or alters distance. So that the more personality the narration has, the closer distance it has. I do not like this. Oren: Nah! Chris: The reason I don’t like this is because, when you look into how narration works, it’s just clearly a separate factor, right? Like if you add personality, that doesn’t automatically move that narrative camera closer, right? Oren: Whose personality? Is it Terry Pratchett’s personality when he’s writing third person omniscient? Because I wouldn’t consider that close. Is it the first-person retelling’s personality, the personality of the character 20 years later when they’re retelling the story? Again, that doesn’t seem close to me. Right? Chris: And I do think, even sometimes, even though more personality is supposed to be closer distance, I think sometimes what you’ll have is, as you zoom in with a camera, you can actually change to a certain extent who the narrator is. And in that in-between space, there may be less personality temporarily, for instance. So I just think that when we conflate two things, properties that are actually separate factors (even if they often appear together, right? because that can be why people conflate them), but let’s look at what’s possible and doable, what we can do with narration, not what just tends to happen by accident. Oren: Can you tell me a little bit more about changing the narrator as you zoom in? I’m not really sure what that means. Chris: Well, for instance, if you actually look closely at the narration of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but Terry Pratchett especially, what you’ll see is that he tends to start his scenes with a very bird’s eye view, and there’s clearly an omniscient narrator that is outside the character and has a separate personality. And then as the scene progresses, he’ll mention the protagonist of that scene, and he’ll start to factor in the protagonist’s thoughts, and then he’ll close in the distance until the protagonist is basically narrating, and then he’ll keep it that way until the end of the scene. So the scene breaks and chapter breaks and all that are very useful for kind of resetting, because the dynamic that happens is that closer distance can be more restrictive, and so it can be harder to zoom out than zoom in, usually. And so, if you don’t stay in close very long, you can still zoom out, but once you hang out in close long enough (and there are advantages to close, and it’s the reason why Pratchett would do something like this), you know, it’s a lot easier to jump back when the scene ends, and kind of expectations are reset a little bit. So let me describe exactly what the effects are in more detail, so we know what we’re talking about. The more distance would be like a bird’s eye view. For instance, when I was doing the intro to this podcast, and talking about, “Oh, in an age where the internet is controlled by corporations…” not even talking about a person there, I’m talking about the general time period. Or you could, you know, “Hey look, there’s some cool mountains,” right? So there’s a very bird’s eye view. And then you can place a character in the scene, but it can still feel like they’re far away and we don’t know how they feel. So we’re looking at a landscape and we see a character and a horse riding down the road. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And then it gets a little closer, where we start telling readers what the character’s thoughts and feelings are. But we’re not showing them; we’re just telling them, right? So this is how Pratchett would start. And often what we have is either character thoughts are just told, right? “He thought that was a bad idea.” We don’t have, “Hey, that’s a really bad idea” or something the character would think directly. Or we do have something in italics where the character’s like, Wow, that’s a bad idea, but it’s treated a lot like dialogue where it’s in italics, so it’s set off from the rest of the narration, and then it has to be attributed just like dialogue is attributed. Wow, he thought. That’s a really bad idea. Oren: Yeah. Yeah. I see. Chris: We can see a clear distinction between what is character thoughts and what is narration. Then, once we get in closer and we’re starting to actually look through the character’s eyes and we’re in close perspective, what happens then is their narration starts to reflect what they’re thinking and feeling. And we don’t need direct thoughts anymore because instead the whole narration is their thoughts and feelings. But it’s not dialogue; it’s just reflected in kind of the reality that the narrator is saying. You know, “Wow, this character had his whole plan and didn’t seem to realize it was a bad idea.” It’s kind of built into the narration. Now, you can still do direct thoughts with italics in close narration. I’ve started doing it for effect sometimes. So: I had one story where it was in close perspective, but when the character was in a really urgent situation and was just like, “Run!” right? I would sometimes put in a direct thought because it’s just more kind of immediate feeling, especially since direct thoughts are always in first person present tense. ’cause they’re what the character’s thinking. Oren: Yeah. I mean, if you put something in italics, it emphasizes it. And that’s why you should put everything in italics, ’cause all things should be emphasized. Chris: So you can still use direct thoughts for effect, but generally you wouldn’t have tons of direct thoughts anymore, because you can just include lots of thoughts and feelings in a much more smooth and natural way, because direct thoughts, sometimes you want things to stand out, but often you don’t. And it’s going to limit how many thoughts and feelings you have if they have to be set off like that every time and if they’re always like yelling and calling attention right to those lines. So indirect thoughts allow for a lot more kind of like internal perspective from the character, right? And so now the character basically is the narrator and things are being told from their perspective. And it’s similar to what I would call the Knowledge Factor and PoV, but it’s different. So the Knowledge Factor is just, we talk about this a lot, it’s how much does your narrator know? So: Omniscient, we talked about, the narrator is all-knowing, and generally omniscience requires a distant narrator because individual characters don’t usually know everything, ’cause that’s usually story-wrecking. Oren: Usually. Every once in a while there are exceptions, but… Chris: Right. There are very niche scenarios, but generally that is going to be Distant, and that’s like a storyteller persona/personality, not a character personality. Oren: Yeah, you generally don’t want to reveal who the narrator is and then have the reader wondering, “How do they know all that? Who told them that?” Chris: And then the other one that we have is Limited, which means that we know as much as a specific viewpoint character knows and no more. So, once you’re in close perspective, that’s almost always going to be Limited perspective, where you should not introduce things that the character wouldn’t know anymore. That’s very jarring. It’s going to be called head-hopping oftentimes, or a viewpoint break. But people do sometimes write in Limited Distant, which I often am very skeptical about, ’cause the whole purpose of getting Distant is to give yourself the freedom to include more information. Otherwise, you would just want a more intimate perspective. So doing something where you’re not getting the intimate perspective, but also you don’t have freedom, eh… I mean, it can allow you to kind of blur the lines a little bit between whether the character and the omniscient narrator is narrating a little bit more, because as long as you don’t include information the character doesn’t know, it’s going to be less jarring, right? So it’s sometimes used for that. But then the other one I call Future, which is when you have a character retelling their past. Sometimes they’re kind of like an omniscient narrator because they know the future, they have that additional knowledge, a little bit of an outside perspective from the actual character going through the story, but they’re not fully omniscient. Oren: That style’s great because, technically speaking, you can pause the narrative any time you want and just ramble about whatever comes to mind. Chris: It’s true, you can. Oren: And because you can technically do it without breaking your viewpoint. Chris: But should you? Oren: You definitely should. Like, if you can do a thing, it necessarily follows that you must do that thing. Chris: But yeah. Another pet peeve, another thing where people are wrong, is just the general… again, the conflating of two other concepts where people say that first person is Close Distant and third person is Distant. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. And, okay, there is a, granted, you know, a little bit of truth to this and that on average, first person is more likely to be Close Distant, particularly since omniscient narration is almost always going to be in third person. And I also think that in some cases, if you do nothing else but switch the pronoun from third to first and don’t change anything, it is possible that it can feel a little bit more intimate that way, but just some first-person narration is much more distant than some third-person narration. So there are different factors and I just don’t think we should conflate those things. I think when we do that, we kind of limit ourselves and we limit the possibilities and what our narration can be. Oren: Right, and you end up with people with really distant first person, because they assume that switching the first person is how they make something close, and they don’t actually know what it is, and so they just end up writing this really zoomed-out first-person perspective. Chris: Yeah, it’s been interesting because I’ve been drafting a story that is a first-person retelling, right, and has, like, Future. And to see like, “Okay, how much can I go into future knowledge without having to kind of transition?” Because what happens is the very useful thing about having an omniscient narrator or a first-person retelling narrator that has a little bit… isn’t quite the character, and therefore has a little more flexibility, is that anytime you want the reader to just know something, you can, without ado, just stop and tell them for the purpose of telling them, because you have an actual separate narrator that is intentionally telling the story, as opposed to the idea that your character is just experiencing things. The unfolding events, narrative premise, as we call it, kind of requires a lot more natural… You should not try to do it 100% realism, okay? Don’t do that to yourself. But it’s still, you know, aiming for a little bit more seamless narration and a little bit more seamless way of introducing information. Whereas when you have a retelling narrator or a storyteller who’s telling the story, like an omniscient narrator generally is, they could just stop and be like, “Oh, I should introduce this character. Here’s what they look like. Here’s funny facts about them.” A retelling narrator will also kind of skip to future tense, and I found that I can sort of have the future narrator drop exposition for about a paragraph, and then seamlessly switch back to the story. But if it’s more than a paragraph, I have to transition and be like, “Okay, so back to that day I was telling you about.”  And that’s a little awkward, right? Because at that point we kind of lose track of, “Wait, are we still in generalized exposition about the world, or are we talking about this particular day now?” Oren: Also, “What was happening before we went off on this little future knowledge tangent,” right? It’s been two paragraphs I’ve already forgotten. Chris: I’ve already forgotten! Oh yeah. But as I was saying, it’s harder to move from Close narration to Distant than vice versa. And the reason is, when I was talking about that knowledge factors, that Limited versus Omniscient, it’s because everything a character knows in Limited is also known by an omniscient narrator. So that makes it very easy for Omniscient to move to Limited because there’s no information that’s not allowed. But it can be very jarring to move from Close to Distant because in Close you usually have a limited narrator, and therefore that narrator cannot just tell you things that that character would not know, which makes it more difficult to move back—not impossible, but more difficult to move back to Omniscient again. Oren: Right, and it’s also just more likely to be confusing. Because, if you start introducing things that the character doesn’t know, and you’ve zoomed in, it’s like, “Wait, hang on. What? Is that something the character knows? How do they know that?” And that’s not usually the feeling you want to create in your reader. You don’t usually want them wondering if your narration is from the protagonist’s viewpoint or from the omniscient narrator’s viewpoint. Chris: Yeah, I just get annoyed when the narration does not, because for instance, The Raven Scholar… Oren: Yeah. Chris: …that we both read recently. And I mean, I did like the fun omniscient narrator who was a raven, you know? sometimes. But at the same time, we can see that the narration isn’t really written like it’s Omniscient, but the storyteller wants to use that flexibility. So just the way that all the scenes are framed, and in what details we include and what we don’t include, is clearly following a character perspective. The whole story is framed in terms of the main character Neema, and feels Limited until suddenly we include information that Neema would not know, and that’s what’s jarring. Oren: And the transitions are not well marked. I am always having trouble telling if the narration is something that Neema knows or if it’s something that the narrator is swapping in… or, heck, if it’s even something the narrator knows, ’cause sure the narrator is the Raven God, but I can’t even tell if the Raven God knows everything or not. Sometimes the Raven God has to go places to find out what’s happening there, which implies it doesn’t know everything. So then I’m wondering, “How does it know about this other thing that happened?” And it’s all just a mess. And this, personally, it really annoyed me when the narration would suddenly go from normal Neema thoughts and it would be like, “Oh, it was really important to win the tournament and, you know, find out who killed this lady,” suddenly it shifts to, “Did you forget about us? We are magnificent.” It’s like you are clearly not narrating most of this story. You talk like Yoda. It would be like if every once in a while it just zoomed out and Yoda was telling the story. That’s just not what he sounds like. Chris: I have an article primer on omniscient narration where I actually cover pretty thoroughly how Distant Omniscient narration needs to be done so that it feels like an omniscient narrator, because if you don’t have that expectation, right? if you don’t make it clear, the reader can’t read your mind that this is supposed to be Distant narration. If it looks like Close narration, they’ll assume it’s Close narration, right? So you have to have narration that is clearly not coming from the character in order to maintain that omniscient flexibility, if that’s what you want. I have a post that kind of covers how to do that. And then I’ve seen people, you know, complaining, “Oh, people just don’t like or don’t understand omniscient narration.” It’s like, well, that’s possible, but it also could be that you’re just not doing omniscient narration, right? Because at this point, most books are not in… you know, we’re moving closer and closer, is what’s happening. And I think that’s a good thing. I think Close is a better default. It’s more immersive. It makes emotions stronger, makes the story tenser. So I think Close is a better default. But I do think it means… it might mean that, when storytellers want to write in a very distant Omniscient, they almost don’t know how to do it anymore. Oren: Also, a lot of previous stories that do use Omniscient might have been better in a different viewpoint. That’s the thing that’s always frustrating about these discussions, is that people will bring up like, “Oh, but in the olden days, the old masters did it.” And like, okay. But you think of that as being really good because you can’t imagine it any other way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that was actually the right choice for it. Chris: Well, if you look at some of these old masterpieces, a lot of them are just like a bunch of summary and exposition don’t even have real scenes. Oren: They’re actually not good! Chris: Told entirely in summary! Look, we have advanced. Storytelling has actually advanced. We are actually better than we used to be. Oren: Yeah. And I don’t expect them to be as good as modern stories. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation. It’s just that people sometimes hold them up as a reason why they don’t have to follow best practices. And that’s when it gets frustrating. Although here’s one: we’re talking about narrative distances, right? And we’ve got fairly recognized terms like Omniscient and even Limited. But have you ever heard of Deep PoV? Chris: So I have heard the term Deep PoV many times, and I’ve assumed it’s just a synonym for Close. Oren: Yeah, you would think that, but no, it’s way sillier. Chris: That would make sense. And people make sense, right? Oren: No, they… yeah, they definitely do. Okay, this is funny. I found several blog posts that split the distances into: Omniscient, okay, we know what that means, “Close Limited,” which is like if that’s the only kind of Limited, why did you put Close in front of it? Just call it Limited. And “Close Limited” seems to be more or less what we mean by Close Limited, but also sometimes can mean Distant Limited. And then you have Deep PoV, which at first it sounds like it means Close Limited. As I read further into these blog posts, I find out it actually means nothing. Because they say things like, “To be Deep PoV, you remove dialogue tags and action tags.” Do you know what an action tag is, Chris? Chris: I think that’s what I use for the statements that a character takes an action. It’s used as a replacement for a dialogue tag. That’s how I use that term, right? I don’t know if it’s the same way anybody else, but basically, if somebody says something, and then you say, “Such and such character smiled,” right? that’s not a dialogue tag, because they didn’t, you know, have… there’s no verb that indicates speech. It’s like an action, but it’s placed next to the dialogue line to indicate that that’s a character that spoke. Oren: Right, so you would think that that would make sense, that it would be like another way of indicating dialogue. But no, it basically means removing verbs, because in these blog posts, in the sentence “He pulled off his hat,” “pulled” is the action tag. So to get into Deep PoV, you shouldn’t use verbs. Chris: So wait, what would you say instead, though? Oren: I don’t know! The blog post didn’t say! Chris: You know, I had another situation where I was just talking about the conflation of personality with narrative distance and how I don’t think those should be considered the same thing, where I had a person very carefully put a whole scale of what she felt was Distant to Close. For most of them, she didn’t include any examples, and it’s really hard to evaluate without examples, and I just love me guessing what all of these like shades were supposed to be. I’ve had followers of us just be like, “Oh, you’re so great, ’cause you use examples.” And it’s like, yes, examples are very important. Why isn’t anybody else using examples? Why are we the only ones? Oren: The posts I was reading, they had examples of not having dialogue tags. Now, I still think this is a misunderstanding. This isn’t really about how close your PoV is; it’s just that it’s good to vary how you indicate dialogue, right? You’re going to need a mix of dialogue tags like “said,” or using an action like “he smiled,” and then some dialogue. Or occasionally you don’t need either of those; it’s just obvious who’s talking based on context. But the idea that that represents a special kind of PoV is to my mind just very silly. Chris: I don’t feel from your description that I even know what it… I mean, they must mean something, okay? Oren: Yeah, maybe. Chris: They must mean something. Oren: And so they could use examples of, “Here’s an example where there aren’t dialogue tags.” I’m like, “Yeah, that is an example,” because you can tell who’s talking from context, but I don’t see how the PoV is any deeper. And then it’s like, “Also take out action tags.” Is there an example for that? No. Because that’s not a thing. Nobody writes that way. How would you even do that? Chris: One thing that I do see is people talking about filter. Filter words or filter verbs. Which I would call, refer to as distancing words. So we’re generally in agreement here. Where basically, if you narrate internal actions that could otherwise be directly shown via the narration, right? it is distancing. If you say, “Oh, she wondered what it would be like to walk in the desert,” that’s distancing, because we’re telling that she’s wondering. We’re not putting in the narration, “She looked at the picture of the desert. What would it be like to, you know, feel the sand under her feet?” So that would be how you would do it in actual Close perspective. And if you use the word “wondered,” right? you’re now telling what she is thinking instead of showing it directly. And so it’s distancing. And that’s true also for perception, for “saw” or “heard.” Because, again, you know, you wouldn’t say, “She saw the bird take off” in Close. You would just say, “The bird took off.” Oren: That’s an action tag there, Chris. You can’t be saying “took.” You somehow have to communicate that the bird took off without using that verb, because that verb is distancing, I guess. Chris: Yeah, so I’ve heard those elsewhere, you know, being referred to as filter verbs, because they provide a filter between the character and the audience, and that’s fine. I like to call them distancing verbs, ’cause they add distance, but I can understand this other term. Nothing wrong with it. I think that what Deep PoV is may still be a mystery. I think I would need to see somebody, “Here’s an excerpt of narration that’s Deep. Here I’ve changed it to make it not Deep,” or vice versa. I don’t know. Dialogue tags? What? Oren: Dialogue tags? Don’t have ’em! What I figured out from looking at these few examples they did provide is basically what they were doing was they were just highlighting one portion of the text that happened to not have dialogue tags and saying, “There! There’s Deep PoV! and, like, how is that different from other parts of the text? Like, “Shut up. It is.” Chris: Yeah. You know, the problem with this field is that most people who have expertise in it mostly know things in the subconscious part of their brain, what we call the gut. They have some sort of sense for what they think something is, but they have a lot of trouble explaining it, and usually their mental models for the thing that they know in their gut level is just very bad. Or bad from my perspective, since I care about mental models a lot. Things just sound really weird and they’re not able to explain anything clearly because they don’t understand it at that higher intellectual level. But I mean, you could do a lot with a gut-level understanding. It’s just they can see whether something works or not. Oren: Yeah. I mean, you can write a book with that. It’s just hard to teach it to others. Chris: It’s hard to teach it to other people, yeah. Or just build a foundational knowledge base and a coherent philosophy. Oren: Right. Well, I’m glad that you let me talk about Deep PoV, because that was going to be my big contribution to this podcast. And now that that is out of the way, and you all know the stuff I had to read for this, we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you would like to close distance with us, consider supporting us on Patreon. You can take a close look at our behind-the-scenes rambles and ask us for advice on Discord. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Chris, we have to be careful telling people they can take a close look at our behind. That’s just not a thing I think we should be advertising on here without a higher rating. But anyway, 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. [closing song] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Can this drink be called champagne in a world without France? Can this weapon be called a sword if there’s no Proto-Germanic for the word to evolve from? Should your magic users be called wizards or wisendars? Deciding on names is an important part of any story, but especially if your story takes place somewhere other than Earth. You want the names to be distinct and memorable but not so outlandish that they’re hard to understand. Fortunately, we’ve got tips! Show Notes Critique of Moana  Continental  Raven Scholar  Anathema  Goblin Emperor  When the Moon Hatched  Time Crystal  The Abbess Rebellion  The Great Vowel Shift Conlang What Moves the Dead  Galicia (Spain) Galicia (Eastern Europe) Galatia The Tainted Cup Princeps  The Prince of Wales Transcript Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Opening Theme] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris … Oren: [Sickly, congested] And I am Oren, the Plague Bearer. Hopefully this will be the last one, ’cause we won’t record another set for three weeks, but I suppose we’ll see.  Chris:  I mean, considering how rarely you get colds, maybe it really is the plague. Oren: Could be. Chris:  And we’ll all have it.  Oren: Yeah. Who knows?  Chris:  So I was thinking the term podcast would just seem really anachronistic in my lower tech fantasy world. So I was thinking I would just call it like, a “herald’s call.” ‘Cause the heralds, they just sit in a tower and talk real loud— Oren: Yeah. Okay.  Chris:  To each other. And everybody listens to them. Oren: And their names are all “Harold,” so it all works out. Chris:  Yeah, yeah. Of course, this has to happen in a big city. So they have their, like, influencer audience. I’m gonna call the big city “London,” and in a kingdom called “France.” Oren: [Hoarse guffaw and coughing] Chris:  It’s, you know.  Oren: That’s a rude thing to pull on me at the beginning of the podcast, Chris. God dammit. Chris:  I mean, aren’t all European countries really the same? Oren: Yeah, they’re all basically the same. I mean, is England a European country? They’re gonna have to fight over that, I guess. Chris:  That is kind of funny because you wanna get a taste of what cultural appropriation is like from the other end. I mean, it’s still not because the dynamics of oppression aren’t there, but maybe that will give you an idea of why people from Polynesian cultures don’t like it when you just have one like, generic Polynesian island that takes stuff from like Samoa and Hawaii and everywhere and just mixes it together. Oren: Yeah. It’s also just really funny. You can see how Anglocentric our world and our language is, because we have whole groups of things that we call Continental, by which we mean they come from mainland Europe. Which is the fakest continent. Like, all continents are a little fake. But Europe is the most fake. There is no definition of continent that Europe fits. It’s just a thing we all decided ’cause it seems important.  Chris: [Chuckles] Any case, what we’re talking about is inventing terms for your world, because of course, anytime you’re worldbuilding. You’re gonna end up having to name a whole bunch of fictional things. Maybe less if it’s like an urban fantasy, so you’re worldbuilding in the real world. But even then, if you have magic, you’ll have to come up with names for that. Or if you have technology, you know, often that needs names. You might have special roles or titles or jobs. Places almost always need some names. Fictional creatures, special social conventions, or rituals. Usually there’s just lots of naming and coming up with new terms that comes with worldbuilding.  Oren: No, I refuse to name anything.  Chris: [Laughs] Well, Raven Scholar actually is really funny because it has these factions that are like, really important to the story and it just doesn’t name them. We just end up calling them “houses.” Oren: They should be called “sects,” but saying sects makes it sound like you’re saying sex. And so that is awkward.  Chris:  But they’re technically like religious orders, I guess. Oren: Yeah, I guess “orders” is probably the best thing to call them. The orders ’cause it’s “Order of the Raven.” Chris:  Yeah. But the book doesn’t ever call them that I don’t think. And even order isn’t really a great term because an order implies like a fairly exclusive group, whereas it feels like everyone in this setting is part of one of these religious animal factions. I do wish that that book had used more descriptive names for its monasteries. ‘Cause the monasteries are really important, but they all have names that start with “Anat” and then another word. Oren: So you’ve got Anat-Garra and Anat-ruar. Which one is that? I don’t know. They’re always talking about a not-something-something.  Chris:  But on the other hand, the animal names for the factions are very easy to remember.  Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Chris:  Terms, basically, when we’re inventing terms, there’s usually two concerns. Usually it’s A: basically about how easy it is for readers to learn and remember, and B: about atmosphere or the general impression you’re creating for the world. Oren: I mean, I think those are two important concerns. I guess other concerns I would add would be things like, should it have a different name in the first place? ‘Cause that’s not always easy to tell. Like should you call the “Emperor’s Special Protective Unit” the “Falcons Claw,” or should you call them the “Imperial Guard?” Chris: Sure. But what’s at stake when you make that choice? Usually it’s either a matter of the impression you’re creating for the world and how easy it is for the reader to get. Oren: Yeah, I’d say that’s fair. Chris: Like, that’s the two things to think about when you’re coming up with terms. But it is really funny to have a world where we have both “Anat-Garra” and like, “The Ravens.” ‘Cause that just sounds like two, you know, very different things. Although maybe one of them is “Anat-Garra Kraa” and it’s supposed to be a raven. The main character’s last name is “Kraa” ’cause people take last names after their like, magical house?  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Their sect? Chris & Oren: Their order? Oren: Their “magical clubhouse.” Chris: [Laughs] Yeah. That’s how all encompassing and important it is to this world. And we don’t have names. For these factions! Oren: I think that Raven Scholar should have called them something that isn’t a fake word, considering how the book doesn’t really use many fake words. I think something more descriptive would’ve been better. Like “Raven’s Reach” or “Raven’s Roost” or something for the Raven Monastery, or even just “The Roost.” You know, something that’s a little easier to remember that way. That’s something that is always interesting is when you are naming places: how descriptive should they be? And to what extent? Because in the real world, a lot of place names are very descriptive, even if the description is not necessarily accurate. Like Greenland. But at the same time, you don’t want everything to be named that way. ‘Cause then it starts to feel weird and fake.  Like you’ve got a lot of places, you’ve got “Hightown.” That’s a descriptive term. And you’ve got “Long Street.” That’s a descriptive term. But if they’re all named that way, it seems a little weird, right? You’re gonna wanna throw in a few things that are not obviously just a description of what the thing is. Chris: I would put that under the general strategy—that there’re some general strategies for coming up with these terms. This is the strategy of repurposing existing words. So you’re just using English language words to everybody knows to name things. Doing it, something that is descriptive of the place, that is very specific.  And I can see after a while that would start to sound kind of contrived. But I think that using other words like, okay, you have the town of “Yellow Leaf” or something, and it doesn’t necessarily have yellow leaves all the time. You can use “Northtown.” It starts to get a little more generic. Whereas something like “Long Street” is just like very, like literally there is a long street there, and I think that’s where some of the awkwardness comes in. But I think there is some disadvantage of repurposing existing words in that it doesn’t give you an opportunity to kind of set a stronger atmosphere. And sometimes it does feel a little simplistic. Not that your words that you choose can’t necessarily leave an impression, but it does tend to fade more in the background. And in a lot of ways that’s good. That means it’s easier to absorb and doesn’t call too much attention to itself.  But you know, sometimes that may not have the kind of feeling that you want for the world, or it may seem a little simplistic. If everything in our Raven Scholar story was like “the Roost.” And honestly, if we’re already naming the orders after animals, I think that would make sense. Oren: Right. I mean, especially because there are so many of them. There’s like eight monasteries that they talk about. Chris: I mean, that’s another thing to factor in. It’s like if you have that many, maybe you should prioritize making your labels easy to understand. Oren: Right. Whereas I don’t think they needed to give the city they were in a descriptive name. I honestly don’t remember what it was called. It didn’t come up that often, and I wasn’t trying to tell it apart from the other cities. I did sometimes forget the name of the city where the bad guy is from. Which was important ’cause they kept talking about new troops coming in from that area. And I was like, who? “Samran.” That’s what it’s called. Like they kept saying the “Samran Hounds.” And I was like, who are “The Samran?” What is that? But I don’t think that was a problem with the name. I think I was just a little checked out by then. Chris: So what you should do to break up your descriptive names is have a place called “Newtown” and it’s like, the oldest city. Oren: [Laughter] Chris: I mean that one, again, that’s always what I push people towards by default, just because it is so much easier for readers to understand. And it’s honestly less effort from the worldbuilder too, usually to just call your magic “weaving” or something. It’s a little easier for everyone. It’s the simple, usable, low effort strategy that generally works. One thing that I’ve seen lately that works significantly less well, even though it is more memorable, is slightly changing existing words or like, altering their spelling. Or doing words that are obviously based on real words in English but are not because they tend to look very silly and sometimes they seem funny. They’re more memorable than completely made up words, but often they just feel like they’re so on the nose that they actually ruin the atmosphere.  For instance, I recently did a critique on this book called Anathema. Probably by the time this episode comes out, probably my critique will be published. It has like this whole glossary up front that is hilarious. Because a lot of these terms are kind of creative. For instance, mages that become violent are called “Carnificans,” and if you look at that word, you can easily see the “carn” and how it’s based on the word “carnivore.” And it just adds something that to me comes off as very silly. Oren: Yeah, I agree. I am hard pressed to explain why I don’t like that. It feels very silly. I had a similar reaction to in The Goblin Emperor where the mages are called “mazas.” It seems silly to me. That name isn’t any less generic than just calling them mages. It just seemed odd, but I’m not sure why I felt that way. Chris: And in When the Moon Hatched, and this also—we can see this in character names too. The water goddess, her name is “Rain,” but rain is spelled R-A-Y-N-E. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And this is in a tidally locked setting. So there’s no like, regular days and nights. So instead there’s days, but days are spelled D-A-E-S. Oren: Oh no. Chris: There’s something about this, I think again, if you are writing a light children’s book that’s very playful. If you’re writing like, Cat in the Hat, then I’m sure that’s fine if it’s silly. But it just adds a sense of silliness. It’s almost like you’re putting puns in a story that’s supposed to be dark and serious. This kind of wordplay is not usually taken very seriously. And I think maybe that’s the issue, is that it comes off as wordplay. Oren: Yeah. To me, whenever I see a story that takes a normal word and spells it odd, I immediately take it less seriously. I’m immediately like, oh, what are you trying to sneak past me with this one. I have a very negative reaction to spelling magic with a “K” or spelling vampire with a “Y.” Something about it feels pretentious to me. It feels like you’re trying to tell rather than show that there’s something special here. But again, it’s hard for me to intellectualize why I feel that way. I can only report my feelings. Chris: So basing it off of existing words, but then changing the words somewhat can make it more memorable. But unless your story is like a comedy or for children, then I think there’s too much risk involved. I’m not gonna say there’s no way to make this work, but yeah, as opposed to like compound words usually work much better. So if you wanna take two existing words and just put them on top of each other, like the town of “Yellowleaf,” one word, that’s usually fine.But when we get into weird, uncanny valley words where we can obviously see it’s invented from a word we know but— Oren: It’s invented, but still sort of following English grammar rules. So I feel like it’s raising questions about what language this is in. ‘Cause normally we just accept that the narrative is translating from whatever language they’re speaking to English. But now it’s like, this word is obviously not an English word, but like it’s also clearly not a made up fantasy word entirely because it’s using a really obvious English root. So what is happening? Maybe. Maybe that’s the reason. I don’t know. Chris: And I don’t know perhaps what word you choose to adapt also matters. Like for instance, in Anathema the villain is called “Cadavros,” and it’s just only on the nose for the villain, the evil look at villain to basically be named “cadaver.” Oren: Yeah. He’s the corpse guy. Chris: It’s just too … whereas, I don’t know, maybe if we took a completely different word that is less just on the nose, it would not be quite so silly. Oren: Interestingly, I just wanted to check the pronunciation here. And I’m not trying to like gotcha. I just think it would be interesting. So the book we’ve been talking about is called Anathema. But it would’ve been interesting if it was called “Anthema.” That’s like— Chris: [Laughter] Look, you can’t tell me how to pronounce words, okay? Oren: [Laughing] I’m not trying to grammar police you. Chris: [Chuckling] I’ll pronounce them however I want. Oren: I just think it’s interesting. Chris: You can’t tell me how to say words. Oren: One thing I do find interesting is you wanna pay attention to theming as well, because sometimes—I have especially noticed in science fiction—giving something a descriptive name is more likely to sound kind of silly. Especially if it’s something very technical or scientifically weird. Like in, this was technically in Discovery, but it was sort of also the backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds over on Star Trek. They go to this Klingon moon where they need to find these special crystals that have odd time properties, and they’re called “time crystals.” And I don’t know. Something about that just made me roll my eyes and I’m still trying to find where they went. Like, really? We couldn’t come up with a more technical sounding term. Chris: Do we need, like—is it “tetryon particles?” Are those the time particles? Oren: “Chronitons,” I think.  Chris: Chronitons? Should we call them “chroniton crystals?” Oren: “Chroniton matrixes” or something like, you know, a “crystalline chroniton structure,” we’ll call it that. I don’t know. Something other than time crystals. Chris: That does make sense because there are specific types of words that we associate with scientific and technical things, and one of the issues with repurposing existing words is that sometimes it can feel a little simplistic in the atmosphere that it creates. So that makes sense that that would really clash with something that’s supposed to be super technical. And in that case Star Trek has so many made up technical terms, could probably just reuse some of those. Another strategy, though, of course, is because a lot of scientific terms are based in Latin or Greek. Another strategy that you can use in your world is to use an existing… I mean, if you write an English, non-English language, but you wanna pick one that’s dead or non-modern. Unless if you, for instance, are from France and you wanna name everything in French. But at that point you wanna use repurposing existing word strategy and make it sound natural to French speakers and not have it so that if you know French, then like, oh, this town is called “London, France” or something. Oren: [Chuckling] Chris: And I think there can be a problem if English speakers just start taking words from modern, in use languages they don’t know and counting on readers to not know those languages. Oren: Yeah. In general, you don’t want your story to get worse because some of your readers took a Duolingo class.  Chris: And it can feel a little disrespectful, right? Again, I’m not worried about oppression against— Oren: Against the French? [Laughter] Chris: Yeah. So if you piss them off, it’s not that it’s that big of a deal. But why mess with them if you—I mean, unless you want to mess with them. But in general, we’re not just trying to piss people off. We want them to enjoy the story. [Laughs] Oren: Look, as the inheritors of British hegemony over the globe, is it not our responsibility to mess with the French at all times? I would argue. Also, I need a moment to assure everyone that I’m not like other storytellers. ‘Cause I realized I talked about not liking it when words are spelled weird. But I also kind of did that in my book ’cause I called the ruler of this empire, an “empero” instead of emperor. Chris: But you were copying Scalzi, weren’t you? Oren: I was, but I did it different ’cause he spelled it with an “X,” which I hated ’cause it looked like “emper-rocks” even though it was pronounced “empero.” I hated it so much. And I’m not saying you have to like my choice there. You might find it goofy. But I do just wanna point out it was a little different than what I was talking about earlier, where you change the spelling but keep the same pronunciation. Chris: You know, I think the issue with ‘emperox’ is it doesn’t have enough ‘Ys.’ Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: I think you should add one or two “Y’s” in there. Oren: “Empyroy.” Chris: And start with a “Y” and then you could just say it’s pronounced “empero.” Oren: See now if I’d written that story a few years later, I would’ve just called them sovereigns. That’s my favorite term for like, the monarchical ruler of a realm that isn’t gendered. I love the term “sovereign” because that’s what it means, but we don’t really use the word that way very often, and it also sounds kind of grand and cool. So that’s my favorite. And if I didn’t believe that you shouldn’t edit a book after publication unless you absolutely have to I would just go through and change it to “sovereign.” Quickly. Ctrl F. [Laughs] Chris: Ctrl F. But yeah, beyond Latin somebody gave me a book about Old English words. Oren: [Sarcastically] Oh, who? Who could that have been? We may never know. Chris: So I might use Old English as my naming language at some point. ‘Cause that’s fun. It has enough similarities, but it also looks kind of different. It’s like, closer to German or Old Norse. It actually looks kinda a little bit Nordic. Oren: I mean, it is. It looks like German, ’cause it is German. Chris: Because it is German! Oren: It’s a Germanic language. It hasn’t been invaded by French yet. So, you know. Chris: Well if you really wanna get back at those Frenchies… [Laugher] Oren: Right. This is why it’s our responsibility to bully the French? ‘Cause they messed up our language. Which is also sort of the Norman’s fault and those are also vikings. So that’s also sort of our fault. Chris: Did they mess up the language or did the Great Vowel Shift mess up the— Oren: We don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift here, Chris. Chris: [Chuckling] We don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift? Oren: That’s the first rule of Language Club, is you don’t talk about the Great Vowel Shift. Chris: Okay. Anycase that’s a strategy and that basically gets you a consistent looking language with words that you can look up. Which again, is easier than the conlang option. Oren: Yeah, conlangs are rough. Chris: Which look, if that’s your passion and you really wanna do a conlang, go for it. They’re just, ah man! It takes a lot of work for the storyteller. They’re usually often hard for readers to remember because they’re completely made up and often pronounced. And then because you put so much work into them, storytellers are usually tempted to use them more than we really should. I’m sorry to say, there’s just only so much use for words that readers don’t understand in our books, which exists for the purpose of actually reading and understanding the words. Oren: I would write the whole book in words the readers couldn’t understand if that was an option. Chris: [Laughing] So they could assume it’s brilliant, whatever it is you can’t read here. Oren: Yeah. Then they can’t tell me it’s bad ’cause they don’t know. [Chuckles] Chris: But you know, when done in the right way it can add a lot more immersion and realism to the world. So it can be a really fun, great thing when used well. But it’s a lot of work and then you have to like, use super restraint when actually using it. And it’s not the easiest on the reader. So again, if you’re really serious about your worldbuilding that might be a way to go. But that’s not an easy one. It’s not an easy solution. Oren: Okay, so I do have to call out a specific story, which uses a really interesting made up word that, maybe nobody else would care about this, but it sent me like, running around on wiki searches, trying to figure out what was going on here: The first book of the series is What Moves The Dead. It’s a novella series by T. Kingfisher. And the main character is from a made up country that’s like somewhere in the Balkans. And that country is called “Gallacia” (guh-LAY-shee-ah). That’s how it’s pronounced. And I was like, that sounds familiar. I’ve heard that before somewhere. Is that a real place? And at first I thought I was misremembering Galicia (guh-LEE-see-ah), ’cause it’s spelled similarly. And I was like, no, okay. It’s not Galicia (guh-LEE-see-ah). That’s a different spelling and it’s different pronunciation. It just looks similar on the page. And then I was like, is a region of Spain also called “Galicia?” Maybe it’s pronounced differently. No? Okay. And then I was like, oh, it’s pronounced like Galitia (guh-LAY-shee-ah), the Roman province in Anatolia. But it’s spelled differently. What is happening?! Chris: It’s brilliant really, ’cause it sounds like a real country. Oren: It does. It sounds like a real place. But it’s not spelled like the real one. It’s not quite the same. Chris: I mean, that is kind of a brilliant strategy of your historical fiction. You want a fake country. Just look and find a bunch of words that are similar and be like, okay, this sounds a lot like several different real places, but is it quite the same as any of them? Sneaky, sneaky, Kingfisher. Very sneaky. Oren: It is sort of funny imagining adding another country to the Balkans, ’cause that area’s already pretty crowded. Chris: Well, that’s exactly why you just wouldn’t notice. You know, we could sneak another country in there. You wouldn’t notice a difference ’cause there’s already so many. Oren: That’s the thing you notice with your readership, your readers are more likely to think it’s weird if you add another country between like France and Belgium, ’cause we kind of know that area pretty well. But like, you know, your average reader doesn’t know as much about Eastern Europe or in this case, southeastern Europe or anywhere else. So it becomes easier to accept that there’s like a fake country in there somewhere. Chris: I have a question for you, Oren. Oren: Yeah? Chris: Do you know why The Tainted Cup uses titles that are Roman-like, but not actual Roman titles? Oren: I have no idea. I also only know one for sure that is a Roman title, which is princeps. But it uses princeps weird. In real life princep is a very high ranking Roman title. It’s where the word “prince” comes from. Whereas now we think of a prince as being subordinate to a king. That’s not how it used to be used. It used to mean a supreme ruler. So it was like higher ranking than a king, which is why it caused a lot of drama when the ruler of Wales called himself “the Prince of Wales,” which is a whole other story. That’s the one that I noticed. And it was a little weird ’cause in The Tainted Cup that’s like a fairly low ranking title and it was confusing me all to heck. Chris: One of the strange things about The Tainted Cup is I guess we’re going for a kind of Roman feel because there are Roman-like words that evoke the feeling of Roman, but they’re not actually the same. Oren: Yeah, and there are other Roman words too, right? Like we’ve got a senate, we’ve got legions. So it’s like, this seems kind of Roman. But then there are a bunch of non-Roman titles, but are also not real words. So that makes it hard to tell what the ranking system is. Chris: And there’s so many of those ranks too. Oren: Yeah, I couldn’t tell like, is that a rank or a name? Chris: Why can’t we just do like “junior princeps,” “senior princeps”… Oren: “Ultra mega princep.” Chris: [Amused] “Ultra mega princeps!” Oren: I would probably have just gone for real rank names like captain or governor or something. I think that would probably have worked better just because, if for no other reason I wouldn’t be struggling to tell the character’s rank and name apart. Chris: That’s part of the problem. It’s really hard. There’s so many names and every character has two names too, of course. Just to make it extra hard for us. Oren: I was like, is “Immunis” her name or her job? Chris: Is there something wrong with the original Roman titles? Oren: If it were me, I would probably not have used all the Roman titles. I think that would’ve made the setting feel a little too Roman and then it would be weird ’cause the setting is also different from Rome in a lot of ways. Chris: I guess there could be an issue of people thinking that it’s literally Rome when you’re just trying to give it a Roman feel. Oren: Yeah. Like I would probably not have used princeps. I think senate and legions are both fine ’cause those are like, associated with Rome. But not only Rome has those. Whereas like princeps is really specific. It’s like, are you also gonna call the leaders “consuls?” That’s again, very Roman specific. That just seems a little weird at that point. So that’s me personally. If I was creating that setting I would have kept the Roman associated, but not specifically Roman names, and then dropped the princeps. Chris: Because it has the wrong association to it. Oren: Yeah. And it’s being used wrong. It’s like, too Roman and also gives the wrong impression if you know what it means. Chris: That does sound tricky. We want it to be Roman-ish, but not directly Roman. Oren: Look, you just do what I did in my book. Okay. I stand by that. Alright. Well, now that we have figured out everything there is to know about naming, definitely, I’m gonna go ahead and give this podcast the name of “Done.” Chris: Did you know that you can be a Dire Wolf, Pegasus, or Sea Serpent? These may be our made up terms for our Patreon tiers, but they’re also cool titles that you can get if you become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our World Turtle level patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Closing Theme]

Here’s a surprise for ya: We’ve been ghosts this entire time. Ghosts in the machine, that is, because the true reveal is that you’re in a cyberpunk dystopia rather than a paranormal mystery! Is that a satisfying reveal? It’s impossible to say (but the answer is yes). Listen to this week’s episode and you’ll learn all kinds of tricks to make reveals that are just as good. Or perhaps the reveal is there was never any advice at all. You’ll just have to find out.  Show Notes Reveals  I Am Your Father  Foreshadowing  Hidden Plan The Mandarin Henry Creel Weapons Marta  Ableist Tropes  The Raven Scholar  I Know What You Did Last Summer  Amon Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m sick Oren. Chris: I am very well Chris. Oren: And we’re doing great. Just everything’s fine over here. Don’t pay any attention to how my voice sounds. Chris: [laughs] Oren: So, I have an exciting reveal for the Mythcreants podcast. We’ve actually been professional stunt pilots this whole time. Now we’re gonna record the whole podcast flying a plane! Chris: [plane noises] And also, we have to jump off the plane with parachutes. Oren: Yes, obviously. I thought that was assumed. Chris: Obviously. Oren: Wow. Chris, you really wanna spoon-feed the audience here, don’t you? [laughs] Chris: Here we go. [blowing noise] Oren: That’s the sound it makes. Chris: That’s the air whipping past us as we fall. Oren: So that’s a really surprising reveal, and it’s exciting, right? So therefore, it must be a good reveal. I’m sure everyone loved it. Chris: I’m sure no one expected it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Yep. That must make it good, right? Oren: That’s really all that matters. As long as nobody saw it coming, it’s automatically good. Chris: No one suspects the stunt pilot. Oren: [laughs] So, we’re talking about how to write a satisfying reveal and as much as we clown on authors for sacrificing everything else in the name of making the reveal a surprise, the reveal probably should be a surprise. Chris: Probably. There are some exceptions where if you’d really try hard enough to hide the reveal where the reader has to think things through to catch on, they can get to the point where they are so proud of guessing it, that they don’t care that they saw it coming. As long as you make an effort to hide it. Because again, some readers are always gonna be much, much savvier than others. But if you get it to the point where they can be proud of themselves and feel like they earned their correct guess, then you’re good. Oren: Yeah. The benchmark that I always use is: Does this seem like the characters should have figured it out? Partly just because nothing is ever as obvious to the reader as the author thinks. So often you’ll have reveals that the author is worried, are too obvious, but to the reader, it’s like, no, I didn’t see that coming. I wasn’t thinking about it. I’ve found that it generally becomes a problem if you have given the character enough clues that it’s like, why haven’t they figured it out yet? Chris: Yeah. Although, you know, there can be meta reasons why it’s obvious. If the villain is twirling their mustache, like literally, but the character technically has no reason to suspect them. Or the butler did it. Oren: Yeah, it wouldn’t be very satisfying if the villain comes in and starts talking like a JRPG villain, even if the main character would realize, like, why are they talking like a JRPG villain? That’s not actually a good reason to suspect someone of being a murderer. But it still probably wouldn’t be very satisfying. Chris: Right. So, there could also be obvious things that are observable, not by the protagonist, but by the audience. That would also make it unsatisfying. Can I go over some different types of reveals? Oren: Yeah. Why not? Chris: Because I do think this matters when we’re talking: Which ones are we talking about? Some places it doesn’t matter, but many places it does. So, one that I talk about a lot is the distinction between… I’m just gonna call it a mystery reveal versus a spontaneous reveal. I had an article recently on surprise villains, and I think we had a whole podcast episode on surprise villains, where I talked about this too. Where the mystery of reveal, basically you build up expectations because there is a known mystery or a curiosity hook. If you have a villain who’s wearing a mask, for instance, we’re asking a question and readers then start actively looking for answers in the story. We’re building up expectations and they expect a really big payoff. And it’s harder because they’re actively looking for foreshadowing, so you have to hide it a lot more. It gives you a good hook, but it’s also much trickier. Oren: There’s also a lot more pressure on the eventual reveal in that situation. And that’s the classic case of it can’t just be one of the options that you already knew about. If there are three suspects and you’re like, okay, who is it? It’s gotta be one of these three. You can’t just have it reveal be, oh, it was the first one, he did it. You gotta do something more than that. It’s gotta be more surprising than that. Chris: Probably something more surprising. Because expectations have been built up so much that they need a big payoff at that point. But the benefit of course is that you get that nice curiosity hook. And a lot of times audiences really like that. It really raises the difficulty level. Whereas a spontaneous reveal’s just a complete surprise. People don’t know that there’s a mystery. So, the hero’s best friend has been hanging around forever. Then we find out the best friend actually hates them and has been working against them. But we didn’t know that there was a villain around. You know, when I look back, I think a lot of the most famous reveals are actually in this category. Darth Vader’s I am Your father is definitely in this category where we didn’t know that there was a surprise to be had or a question to answer before Darth Vader says that. Oren: We weren’t wondering who is Luke’s father? If we had been, that would be a very different outcome. Chris: Yeah. Foreshadowing is much easier because readers are not actively looking for foreshadowing. They’re not actively trying to guess an answer. So they’re gonna overlook it a lot more. And especially if your character doesn’t need to solve, if Luke isn’t gonna figure this out, Darth Vader is just gonna tell him. You can go very light on foreshadowing, because Luke doesn’t actually need enough information to come to the conclusion that Darth Vader is his father. It just needs to be a little bit. You just need to be able to look back and think, oh yeah, I can see those points. Chris: At that point, you’re just going for plausibility. Oren: Yeah. Interestingly, the Darth Vader reveal is sort of plausible. I would give it a C+ in terms of plausibility, in that it sort of feels right. But it does create a lot of logistics problems that you run into the moment you start trying to figure out how we ended up in the scenario that we are in at the start of Star Wars. Chris: Unfortunately, a lot of reveals are that way, where, if you watch through the beginning of the story again, you’ll find a lot more contradictions than you thought with the reveal. We’re relying on audiences to not remember everything that happened with super clarity. Oren: In the beginning when Obi-Wan is just a Clone Wars veteran, living next to the son of another Clone Wars veteran that he fought with, it seems kind of believable that Luke would get pulled into this story, but then you’re like, wait, hang on… Vader is Luke’s dad and what the, how did this happen? And you have to come up with this whole elaborate baby theft storyline. It’s just very strange. It doesn’t make any sense. Hot take: the prequels are bad. But even if they weren’t bad, getting everyone into their starting positions for a new hope would be very challenging. Chris: And then we have the usually bad reveal, which is the meta reveal. Oren: [tired] yeah… Chris: We’ve talked before about meta mysteries. Meta mysteries are something that the viewpoint character or primary protagonist, that’s not a mystery for them. They already know the answer. It’s only a mystery for the audience. The thing that’s the problem with these is they’re bad, because they create a layer of separation between the audience and the main character that prevents the audience from feeling what the main character feels. So, they have a tendency to kill emotion in the story. Now granted if this information is not relevant to the story, then it’s fine. You don’t have to know the protagonist every moment in their life. But if it matters to the story, then it’s probably also gonna matter to feeling that emotional experience. Now there can be some situations where we have a meta reveal, but more like a spontaneous reveal, like the mystery reveal like we were talking about. And if it’s really brief… And so, we’ve talked about the hidden plan turning point probably before in this podcast a little bit. Some people really like this, mostly cause they want a candied protagonist, probably. It makes the protagonist look very clever where they go into a conflict and it looks like everything’s stacked against them. But then it turns out everything has been going according to their secret plan, and they’re already victorious, and they’re so clever. Oren: Hidden plans also work a lot better in visual media than they do in prose stories. Cause we’re not expecting to be inside the character’s head anyway. And by the same token, they are a lot easier to do in visual stories than a lot of clever deductions are. Because a clever deduction requires you to understand how the protagonist is coming up with this idea, which is harder to do when you don’t have a narrator. Chris: Yeah. But it’s really funny. What happens in a movie, of course, is all of the characters are also really good actors. Just because they all act exactly like they don’t have a hidden plan. Perfectly. Wow, every character is a fantastic actor. Oren: And even then I have seen filmed hidden plans where once it’s revealed, you’re like, oh, you had that the whole time? I guess you weren’t ever in any danger. That’s disappointing. And if you go and watch it again, you may find places where they would not have done that. Chris: If they really had this plan, they would’ve not have done that. It doesn’t make any sense. And I do think in books, even if we managed to get out of their head, we have to not witness their thoughts, cause they would be thinking about their hidden plan. Again, it tends to be distancing, it dims emotions, and it’s really hard to create the most tense kind of conflict you can when this is happening. So it still does deaden emotions somewhat. But if it’s not very long, if it’s really brief, I think doing it for some lesser conflicts is not necessarily a bad thing and some people like it. But I would just be wary. The longer you have this meta, you conceal all the things that the protagonist knows that are important to the story, the more damaging it becomes. Oren: You also really need to strike this balance where once the hidden plan is revealed, it still needs to feel like there wasn’t a guarantee of victory. Victory was still unlikely. Because otherwise you’re gonna end up in a situation where the character either acts totally confident because they know they have the secret victory, in which case that’s gonna be a boring scene. Or after you reveal the secret victory, it’s gonna be like, why were you acting so worried? You know, I was in your head. I heard those emotions. I know you weren’t acting. Chris: Look, you’re supposed to forget what happened before the reveal. Oren: I know the author would like me to, but stubbornly I refuse. [laughs] Chris: [laughs] So, the other thing I thought I’d mention is the distinction between a twist and a reveal. Often in my mind they become the same thing. But I would say that if it’s a twist but not a reveal—cause twists often are from reveals—that means that the protagonist wasn’t wrong about anything, but there was something surprising. Project Hail Mary, for instance, has a big twist, which is not actually something that anybody would’ve been expected to know about. There is foreshadowing to make it plausible and it works really well. That is not really a reveal because it’s a new discovery. But it’s a very surprising new discovery, and so that would be a twist. Oren: One aspect of reveals, which has big I-know-it-when-I-see-it energy, is that it should make the story more interesting, not less interesting. Chris: Or just better! It should make the story better and not worse in general. Oren: Yeah, I was trying to be a little more specific than that. Chris: Interesting could be one thing, but sometimes tension is the issue. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. For example, in Iron Man 3, there’s the big contentious reveal that the Mandarin is fake. Now, the issue with this reveal is not actually that the Mandarin is fake. That’s fine. The issue with this reveal is that the backup villain—the new guy that they bring in to be the actual bad guy is some guy that Tony Stark didn’t go to a business meeting with. That’s boring. At least before the Mandarin had, you know, pizzazz and an obsession with Tony Stark and was a larger-than-life figure. Now, obviously having the main villain of your story be the Mandarin is not ideal… Chris: Cringeworthy. Oren: …so I absolutely get why they went for that twist / reveal. That’s fine. It’s just that they needed something cooler to reveal. So it’s not like, oh, I guess we have to fight Tony’s disgruntled ex-business partner. That’s nice. Chris: It’s just like Stranger Things season four. Where we find out, oh, didn’t you know this guy named Henry created the huge spider thing and these other cosmic horror monsters of gigantic scale? We thought that this was big, but actually it’s just Henry. Oren: It’s just a guy named Henry. Chris: That’s less interesting, but more than that, it’s less scary. He’s less threatening than the huge spider thing in the sky. So that’s just kind of underwhelming, it’s making the story worse. Or again, if we have a reveal for the point of the reveal, and it does something like undermine the stakes; It’s like all this time you thought you were fighting to save the world, but really a character just lied to you and the world is not actually in danger after all. Or something like that. But we needed that for tension. Oren: Well, I guess I’ll just go home then. Chris: Let’s see, what else have we covered? We’ve covered basic plausibility. Oren: So, we covered surprising. Now let’s cover the other side of that, which is not feeling random. So spoilers for the movie Weapons The reveal: You’re wondering this whole time, oh, what happened? Why did all these kids leave their house in the middle of the night at exactly the same time and then disappear? What’s going on? And then the big reveal is a wizard did it—technically a witch. Chris: Wait, there are wizards in this? Oren: Yeah. You’re like, there are witches in this. What? And there’s nothing even remotely witchy in the movie before that happens. And so, it’s just kind of a, yeah. Okay. I guess. Could have been aliens, could have been Greek gods, could have been anything. Because there was nothing pointing in that direction before. Chris: That would definitely be, for me, in the category of plausibility. And basically the thing there is that anything that you reveal has to be using information that’s pre-established. This also happens with, oh, suddenly I need to explain why my characters do this weird thing. Well, first of all, there are wizards in this world and it’s like, no, no, no! You can’t add new elements to the world when you need to use them. When they become plot bearing or load bearing, you have to pre-establish those things, which is why you should always reuse elements that are already in the story whenever you can. Oren: And this is hilarious cause I like Weapons. I thought it was a pretty good movie. But its reveal is also simultaneously not surprising enough because before you know that she’s a witch, the villain shows up in a random scene and is acting really shady and wearing Batman villain makeup, and it’s like, is she the bad guy? Is it that one? The one who’s acting super shady and looks like the Joker? It turned out it was that lady! That she was the bad guy. It’s a good movie, but the big mystery is not its strength. Chris: Maybe we should cover some ways, because if you do have expectations built up because you have a mystery, it does get really hard to then come up with an answer—so you can just reveal it’s a person if you have convinced the audience that that person has definitely not done it. For instance, in Knives Out, Marta—basically the main character—we have, 20 minutes in, this is the reveal that makes the movie. We introduce all these suspects and it’s like, oh, Marta, the character we’re rooting for, she did it and now she has to keep the detective from finding out. It’s a nice twist because as the main sympathetic character, we would not suspect that. Another way again, that you should not do, that you’ll see a lot of stories have done. They’ll basically introduce a disabled character. And then they’ll rely on stereotypes about that disabled character being helpless and incapable of doing anything to avoid any suspicion on them, and then reveal it’s the disabled character. Because either they’re not really disabled, they were just, just faking it, or they’re just more capable than they’re pretending to be. So don’t do that. Don’t do that. That’s not a good trope to have in your story. But if you can for some reason get audiences to discount a current character from the suspect list, then you can reveal it’s that person. You can change the nature of the crime. Or what happened, like, oh, nobody died. Sometimes you can change the number of people who did it. Oren: Yeah. A very effective strategy is to suspect someone early and then find something that seems to clear them. Because that crosses them off the reader’s list of suspects. But then you can reveal later that that thing that you found that cleared them wasn’t real and it actually was them, which has the effect of being surprising, but also it being a guy who the readers already knew about, and had some reason to think was involved. Yeah, so that’s a reliable tried and true works. Not every time, but 60% of the time it works a 100% of the time. Chris: I would say that one works right now. I do wonder if in 5 to 10 years audiences will be onto that one. Oren: No, don’t take that away from me, Chris. That’s my favorite. I use that one all the time. Chris: [laughs] Sometimes they catch up with the tropes and we can’t trick them anymore. Oren: No, this one will always work. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Chris: But yes, basically think outside the box with that one. Another thing that a reveal needs is it’s gotta change the story going forward in some way. If nothing changes, then it just doesn’t matter. It’s like a so-what reveal. Oren: You know, you thought that you were after this villain because he killed your brother, but it turned out actually he killed your dad! Oh, okay. Chris: I’m still putting him away, I guess. Oren: Sure. I guess. Chris: Or he killed your brother. Did you know he also killed your dad? Well, I mean, I still hate him to the max. Oren: Or he killed 10 other people you don’t know. That doesn’t really change anything for me. Chris: So, yeah, it’s just, it should change the trajectory of the plot. Make things happen differently in some way. Oren: It should also matter to the main character. This is true of everything in your story. It should matter to what the main character is doing, because that’s theoretically the throughline. But I have noticed in a number of stories, there’ll be a big reveal that, in theory, matters to the world, it changes the plot. But it’s not a plot the main character is part of. This can happen with any kind of story element, but I’ve noticed it is particularly common in reveals just because authors are already so weird about reveals. They seem so cool and shiny [that] authors will often go out of their way and do weird stuff for the sake of getting them. Like for example, spoilers for the Raven Scholar. Actual spoilers this time, not like last time. At the end you get this big reveal that the bad guy, you thought that he was a different dude pretending to be the emperor, but then it turns out he was an even more different dude pretending to be the emperor. Does any of this matter to the protagonist? No. This doesn’t really change what’s happening with her. She already knew he was trying to kill her, and this is just part of a reveal that there was some other secret plot going on that she knew nothing about and wasn’t involved in. Chris: Going back to the mystery reveals where we have a lot of expectations set up. We talked about how there’s extra burden on those to be really surprising. But the other thing that makes them so tricky beyond being surprising, is that you’re supposed to play fair with the audience. They need an opportunity to guess. Which means you can’t just pull a random person they’ve never heard of. We call this the Some Guy Reveal. Oren: Yeah. Some guy. Chris: Some guy. I recently watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. That classic one. And after having this mystery person who’s sending them notes, we eventually find, oh, it’s this guy who is this father of this other girl. And we looked at, you know, some news events to see that some people had died in the past. But it’s like, well, did you know that this girl had a father and he was out there? And doing things? And it’s just some fishermen. Okay, this violates expectations a couple ways. One, he has not previously been introduced in the story, so at the very least, we need to introduce this fisherman as a character. And maybe we don’t know that he’s the father of the girl who died, but he needs to at least hang around and we need to see him as a recognizable character. He makes multiple appearances and we can remember him from last time. I feel like that’s the bare minimum. Now it would be even better if we knew that he was connected to this girl who died. But we had reasons to think, of course it’s not him or didn’t have enough reason to suspect him for the longest time. But if we just don’t meet him at all, even if he’s tangentially related to this news event, that is our justification for who this person is and why this person is threatening the protagonists, that’s not really enough because there’s no way to guess him because we don’t know him. We’ve never seen him. We have no way of predicting his existence. So for these kinds of mysteries, again, the assumption is that there is some way to figure it out. Cause it really just has to—beyond being surprising—really has to click into place because we just have higher expectations for that curiosity payoff. Oren: Probably the most famous example in our circles of this is Amon from Legend of Korra. It turns out he’s some guy. Chris: And again, we tend gently connect him to people we know. He turns out to be the brother of some other guy we’ve heard of, but we had no way to know. We didn’t really meet him. Outside of him wearing the mask as a villain, we didn’t have any reason to identify him as a person. So he’s really random. Oren: He just doesn’t mean anything. Yeah. I mean he could be that guy I guess, but it’s so tangential. Cause we have some flashbacks about how Aang fought his dad and at that level of connection, he could be basically anybody. There are a number of tangentially related characters to the previous avatar group that we hear about throughout the series. And it’s like, all right. So I guess it could be any of their kids. It’s just not very interesting. Chris: So in that case, if you wanna do something like that, I would just have some sort of bender guy. They’re going to the fishing dock and there’s a friendly guy there that they ask some questions of. And he answers their questions and it turns out, oh, they happen to know the same person. Or he tells them about a tragedy or whatever. But we don’t know that he’s connected to the main plot. For instance. Something like that would definitely be a step better. Unfortunately, at that point, somebody who’s really savvy can probably use process of elimination to find out who, but we don’t worry about those people. People like Oren. Oren: If someone is using process of elimination, it’s either because they’re a weird little story freak like me, or they are bored, at which point you have bigger problems. If they’re bored and they’re so bored that all they can stop to do is think, all right— Chris: Who are all the possible characters who it could be? So let’s go at them one at a time and figure out the person who is a bender who had a strange amount of screen time, but doesn’t seem to have a more important role. Somebody who’s savvy can pick up on that, but that’s generally… we don’t worry about those people. Oren: Yeah. And those are the kind of people who also will often feel very cool and clever if they figure it out. Generally, I think you’ll be okay with them. All right. With that I’m going to reveal that actually this episode has been over the whole time. Chris: [laughs] And now my reveal. If you become a patron at the $5-a-month level, then we will have five more dollars a month. Oren: A little less than that cause Patreon takes a cut. Chris: Shhh! You’re ruining my reveal! It was so perfect. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 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. And 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.

On the one hand, stories can be better or worse. This is a critical tenet of our philosophy. On the other hand, sometimes people like or dislike something for their own reasons, which has nothing to do with how good a story is. This is where we must differentiate between quality and taste. Both are important to understand, but getting them mixed up causes problems. Show Notes Pseudo-Structure Episode  Kpop Demon Hunters Episode  I Don’t Even See the Code  Pareto Improvement  Spiders Georg The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach The Raven Scholar  Masquerades  Agency Shield of Sparrows  A Sorceress Comes to Town The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches  Twilight Wheel of Time Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]  Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Or are you? Are you really Oren? Oren: [laughing] Anything’s possible. You don’t know. Chris: For listeners, Oren has a cold right now, and it makes his voice sound different. Oren: Is it better or worse, or is it just different? We don’t know. Someone I used to date back in the day thought this voice was very sexy, so maybe that’s just an improvement. Chris: [laughing] The cold voice is best voice? Oren: That’s what she thought. [laughing] That’s literally what she said. Chris: So I have to say, I think our best podcast episode yet is obviously 544 when we talk about pseudo-structures, because that’s where we get to make fun of all of the storytelling ideas that aren’t mine. [laughing] Oren: I’m a rationalist, and therefore things that I like are rational. And I like that episode. So it’s rational for that one to be the best. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s clearly an impartial judgment. That episode is just objectively the best. I suppose if I have to choose a second, I’ll go with the K-Pop Demon Hunters episode you just did with Ari, because that’s just the best movie. Oren: [laughing] I mean, the most people saw it. Therefore, it must also be the best. Chris: It’s popular, right? Doesn’t that mean it’s the best? Isn’t that what quality is – popularity? Oren: We had a lot of very enthusiastic commenters who have told us that over the years. [both laugh] Chris: Okay, this time we’re talking about taste versus quality. How do we tell them apart? Can we tell them apart? Is it just all our taste all the time? Is storytelling just subjective and there are no answers to anything? Oren: I can’t, and you just gotta trust me on that. Don’t ask questions. It’s fine. You don’t wanna know how this particular sausage is made. Chris: Yeah. [laughing] It is really tricky, but I wouldn’t get anywhere of course if I just threw my hands in the air and said it was subjective. I generally consider subjective to be kind of a cop-out. I think I’ve said that a number of times on this podcast. Or sometimes “it depends.” Well, it depends is usually true, but it depends on what. I really try to pin down the answer as much as I can. Oren: Something can be subjective, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get a grip on. Subjective just means that we can’t measure it in terms of story quantity particles. That’s not how stories work. Whether a story is good or not is determined entirely inside our own brain, but we all have more or less the same brain, so we can figure stuff out. It’s not just a question of like either hard science and/or wibbly, wobbly story-warmy whatever. [both laugh] There’s middle ground there. Chris: And one thing I find interesting is just both the absolutist idea of stories being perfect or terrible, and the like, oh, well, you know, stories are all subjective, what is quality even really, it doesn’t exist, are both kind of ways to stifle conversation about craft and not engage in critical analysis of media. They’re both conversation stoppers. Oren: Both of them would be very convenient for storytellers, because if it was either perfect or trash, then it kind of wouldn’t matter what you did because if there’s even a tiny thing wrong with it, then it’s trash. And if people like it, then it must be perfect. So do whatever you want. And if tastes are entirely subjective, and story quality is entirely subjective, then also do whatever you want, because everything’s the same. Nothing matters. The important thing is I get to do whatever I want, Chris. [laughter] Chris: And I guess I can’t really blame – there’s a lot of successful authors out there, they find their audience, they have fans who like their work, regardless of what they do. Maybe because the fans just love the way they sound, or just like their characters or some part of their writing, and we see sometimes that their quality, in our opinion, goes downhill because they don’t have to really try anymore. But they’re successful and they’re happy. And I’m grumpy about it, but I can’t say that that’s really a wrong thing for them to do. It’s their life, it’s their work. [Oren laughs] Oren: If you could sell your story doing whatever weird thing that you always wanted to do but that no one would read before you were famous, it’s like, okay, if you can do it. It’s good work if you can get it, I guess. Chris: If we took, for instance, the average fresh beginning writer who has everything to learn. If they don’t adhere to some level of quality craft principles, it’s unlikely that they will get anywhere. Because there is so much to learn. If you have not seen what beginning writing actually looks like, you have no idea. Oren: It is funny, every once in a while someone will find a self-published book that’s really bad and be like, wow, this is so awful. I’m like, yeah, that’s what reading an unpublished manuscript is like. They look at me with disbelief, like, how? How can you do that? I’m like, well, you get used to it. Chris: Yeah, you get used to it. I don’t even see the code anymore. It’s just blonde, brunette, redhead. [Oren laughs] To add some sexist analogies to this equation. Oren: And maybe he was really forward thinking, and that was gender-neutral blonde, brunette, redhead. Chris: Uh-huh. Sure. I’m sure that was men that he was talking about. Uh-huh. Oren: Yeah. He could have been. We don’t know. You can’t prove he wasn’t. [both laughing] Chris: Let’s just talk about what quality is in theory. I mean, we get to the practice, of course, everything gets messier. Everything we talk about in storytelling gets messier when you actually look at stories in practice. When I find the signal in the noise to kind of talk about what story structure is and other things like that, there’s a lot of noise, okay? But in theory, our guiding theory of quality is something called pareto improvement, which is from economics – I took it from economics. Which is basically when you have a situation that is where you can make a change and it’s either win-win or win-tie. As an example, we have somebody who has kind of a messy, convoluted sentence, and some people are like, yeah, I can read that sentence just fine. I enjoyed it. It sounded poetic. And other people are like, oh, that sentence, because of a misplaced modifier, it’s saying completely different things, and it just grates at me. The question is, okay, can you make a revision to that sentence where the person who originally liked the sentence is still perfectly happy, but the person who was bothered by the sentence is now happy too. We haven’t made it worse for anybody, and we’ve made it better for somebody. We would call that pareto improvement, or a quality improvement, because we just made more people happier. It’s kind of objectively better.  Sometimes we have to have discussions about people because people do not necessarily know – like when people get defensive over stories, and I’m thinking about a particular conversation I had with somebody recently, they may be like, no, you shouldn’t change that because I wouldn’t like that as well. It’s like, okay, but you don’t actually know that. That’s one of the things that’s really tricky about these conversations. People get really defensive about stories, but they can’t actually know. The average reader doesn’t know what their experience would be like if things were different. They just don’t have that expertise. And so if somebody gets defensive, they might assume no, the sentence is perfect the way it is, and if you were to change it, I would like it worse. But that’s not necessarily true. Oren: This is why it’s so hard to talk about classic stories that everyone loves and have been around for a long time. I could talk about how there are probably ways to improve The Lord of the Rings by not fracturing the story and going in a bunch of different places like he does in the later books, but it’s really hard to imagine what that would look like. And so like all readers can think when I say that is, “We wouldn’t get Helm’s Deep? Or we wouldn’t get the Ents?” And that just feels worse to them because they don’t know what this alternate version would’ve been. They don’t know if maybe they would’ve liked it better, but they grew up with Lord of the Rings as it is right now. So it’s just kind of a difficult conversation to have. Chris: Same goes for a lot of plot holes. There could be an easy fix, put in a different explanation that is more believable and easily some people who are bothered by the pothole will like it better, and other people who weren’t are not gonna like it worse. Oren: Plot holes are probably the simplest example of a pareto improvement, because unless you have to break something to fix the plot hole, in general, almost no one is going to like a story worse because it has fewer plot holes. But of course, people are diverse. It’s always possible there’s Plot Holes Georg out there who loves 10,000 plot holes a second just throwing off the calculations. That could always happen. But in general, I think that the vast majority of people will be perfectly fine if you fix the plot hole, even if a plot hole didn’t bother them. Whereas a lot of other people, the plot hole will bother them. So if you fix it, they’ll be having a better time. Chris: This one might be a little trickier because we’re starting to get closer to taste territory, but we talk about how we’re annoyed with stories that are too edgy. Part of that is my assumption that I’m going off of here is that people who like edgy stuff mostly are looking for dark stories. And if it felt like that darkness in the story was better justified, I would think that they are probably still gonna like it just as well. Whereas some people are bothered by the edginess. So we can have dark stories without edge, and we can have dark stories that are edgy. And I feel like the dark stories without edge are more universally liked by people. Oren: Of course, it depends on what you mean by edge. We’re saying edge in the context of an edgelord, aka a pejorative. Chris: I’m talking about situations where we have dark material that feels kind of tacked on and sloppy and over the top and kind of careless, where it’s like spontaneous baby killing. [both laugh] Oren: I am admittedly not a huge fan of dark stories. That is a taste thing. A dark story is not inherently any better or worse than a light story. But if it’s like a generally fairly light story, and then suddenly one of the NPCs gets barbecued alive, that’s, I would argue, a quality issue, because who is that for? The people who like that are probably not gonna like the rest of the story because it’s all light and happy, and the people who liked the light and happy part are gonna be disgusted by this super gross thing that happens two-thirds of the way in. Chris: We can talk about situations where we think the quality is low because it is not catering to the same tastes. Now there could be – but talking about like how are these dark elements applied? There could be somebody who really just wants moral dilemmas about baby killing versus letting a city die. And if you put more restrictions on that dark material so that it is all tasteful, shall we say – I would say – then they will like the story worse because it just has less super dark stuff in it because it’s under more constraints. There may be some audience out there who really just want to see rampant baby killing and burning villagers and everything everywhere. [laughing] But generally, my assumption is that the story is gonna go over better if dark elements are just used in a little bit more intentional, less kind of comical manner. Oren: It’s often gonna be a question of if you do want these really dark, really difficult moral dilemmas – at that point, often it’s a question of making them not seem contrived. We always joke like in this world, the magic system means that you have to punch a baby if you wanna stop the city from exploding. But that’s only kind of a joke. That happens sometimes in unpublished manuscripts and occasionally even in published ones. If you want a really difficult moral choice, you can make those. They just take a little more work as opposed to something like a recent Star Trek episode that was basically Those Who Walk Away From Omelas as an episode. And it was like, well, we have to torture this kid forever or our society won’t work. And I’m sorry. That’s silly. That’s too silly. I have to really be into this dilemma for that to not seem incredibly silly. And if you wanted to, you could create a situation where we had to inflict pain or suffering to keep our society going in a way that would be less silly. And I think the people who liked the Torture Kid plot would like that plot just as much. I don’t think they’re specifically here for a contrived kid torture story. [Chris laughs] Chris: I don’t know. Maybe there’s some people who like the shock factor, like the Tuvix episode. I honestly think the Tuvix episode, it became well known because the shock created buzz, the same way that if you make web visitors angry, you get more views. It’s like, is that really quality at that point? So some other factors in these kind of like fuzzy situations – is it quality, is it not quality – one thing that I do try to pay attention to is which people are we targeting, and is it supposed to be a niche audience or a broader audience? For instance, like when I’m talking about candy, we talk a lot about over-candied characters. There are characters that are so glorified that to me and many other people, they come off as obnoxious. However, I do try to be aware that there are some audiences that really like that. Specifically, if it is targeted towards them, and the candied character is like them, or to be perfectly honest, if it’s a white guy, it tends to go over better with everybody. People are used to white-male-centered stories. Try to be aware of that. At the same time when you have an author like Brandon Sanderson who is ridiculously popular, and he has super candied characters, I do start to doubt that that is a good strategy for him. Because he is like a name brand. He’s like a household name, and at that point, there’s gotta be other people who are finding this obnoxious. And I don’t think that’s really what makes his characters compelling. Oren: Even with something that’s a little more niche, people respond to this character who to me is annoying, but people like them because they do cool stuff. Is it possible to have them still be cool in that way, but not piled on quite so much? Chris: We go back to the pareto improvement, and I have a blog post talking about how do we make candied characters still have candy, but make them go over better with people who resent them or find them obnoxious. There still is a pareto improvement often to be had there, I think. That’s one of those tricky things. And by default, Mythcreants does tend to recommend the broader scenario that not having too much candy generally makes a character likable among a broader audience. And so generally that’s what we recommend. Even though with the right audience, maybe more candy would go over better. Oren: One of the biggest issues of taste versus quality that I run into a lot is with certain genre conventions and tropes that I don’t like them, and they drive me up the wall, but it’s undeniable that their target audience at least seems to like them. The most recent one that I’ve run into is this concept of let’s do a Hunger Games to decide who’s the king. That happens in The Raven Scholar, and it’s not quite a Hunger Games because they’re not actually killing each other, mostly – spoilers for The Raven Scholar. But they have a contest to decide who gets to be emperor, and they do a series of mini-games and whoever gets the most points at the end is emperor. And I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It’s just too silly. As I’m reading, I’m constantly like, how would this work? Where is their power base? Where is their source of legitimacy? None of this makes any sense. Chris: That must be one of the only spoiler warnings that is not actually followed by a spoiler.  Oren: Yeah well, I’m getting to that. [Chris laughs] That’s like a taste thing, at the end of the day. I thought about, I would do an article like How to Fix the Government System in Raven Scholar, but then as I thought about it, I was like, I can’t. I can’t fix this and have it still be the thing that people want, so that I would say is a taste difference. But there are some things within that that I think are quality differences. Like I think this would be a straight up improvement, is that a lot of the contests that the protagonist has to go through are extremely vague and at the end the people just kind of hand out points however they feel like, which bothered me a lot. And I think we could fix that, and nobody who likes this kind of contest to be emperor would be bothered that the contests themselves made more sense. So I think that’s the thing where there is a taste issue, but then there are quality issues within that. Chris: That is how it is with most books. There’s gonna be some quality issues in there. No book is perfectly optimized. Oren: Masquerades are the same thing. I used to hate masquerades because I just couldn’t get over how little sense they made, and how there was basically no way to explain them. But as I got older and I read more fiction, I was like, okay, I don’t like the masquerade, but I like urban fantasy, and often you need a masquerade for that to work, so I’ll just deal with it. But you can still have better or worse masquerades. Chris: I think one of the tropes that some audiences in the genre really like that bothers me the most is in romances when the heroine doesn’t have enough agency. That’s one where we know that a lot of people who read romance also don’t like that. At the same time, there is definitely a segment of romance writers and readers who want the heroine – this is of course in a heteromance, so we have the heroine is the female main character, and then we have a male love interest – who just kind of sits around like a little doll. [laughs] And the male character just does everything. Even at this point, really big romantasy bestsellers do not tend to do that, so I think that it’s a pretty large segment that does not like that. Oren: Or at the very least, what they’ll try to do is sort of have it both ways where the protagonist will declare, “I’m not a damsel in distress, I can do cool stuff!” and then not do it. So that we could show off the male character some more. But the fact that the author felt the need to declare that suggests to me they know that there are people in their audience who don’t want the main character to just be a passive damsel. And so they are hoping that they can sort of trick them by saying they’re not gonna be one, and then just don’t look too closely at what happens after that. [Chris laughs] It’s the same thing in romantasy with the question of is the abusive part actually important to people’s tastes, or is it that they like confident, aggressive male love interests, and a lot of authors don’t know how to write those in a way that isn’t abusive? Which one, I don’t know. Chris: Or do they have a humiliation fetish, is that what’s happening? I kind of wonder if that’s what’s happening with Shield of Sparrows, where the male love interest, he just makes mean, sexually degrading comments about the main character in the beginning, and it’s just like, ugh. This is the least attractive thing I have ever read, and I’m wondering if there’s just a humiliation kink happening right there. Oren: There could be, but it could also just be that these readers like the general concept of an enemies-to-lovers romance, and they aren’t really that fussed about the specifics. Chris: It could be that the storyteller’s just trying to create enemies to lovers and just doesn’t really know how to create proper animosity and antagonistic chemistry between them, and it’s just impossible to tell without asking a lot of these things what’s going on there. So it’s quite possible that almost everybody could be just as happy if we made a few changes to make the love interest less awful. Especially since once they actually start romancing each other, suddenly his personality changes, and strangely, he’s no longer like that anymore. Huh, I wonder what happened? Oren: Suddenly he’s really nice. It’s like, okay. That’s interesting. Chris: I think another thing for a lot of these questions of, “yeah, some people like this, but is it good?” is bringing back to the topic of like compatible tastes that you were talking about earlier. Yeah, some people may like edgy stories, but if the story is really light and then suddenly has an edgy twist in it, that would definitely be a quality problem because it does not please the same group of people. And I have a lot of questions about stories that are dark but dull. Oren: Yeah. Like they’re dark, but they don’t have any tension. Chris: Exactly. So I’ve always told people to add tension to their stories. Tension, tension, tension. Every time I talk about plot, I talk about tension. But I have always known that there is a group, there is an audience, for very low tension or even no tension stories that are very tension sensitive. I know these people personally, so I know they exist. But these people also tend to gravitate towards comedies and cozies. In my experience, they don’t want a story that’s super sad and people die or has like graphic violence, but also has no tension. The question I have about, for instance, a lot of T. Kingfisher’s works where she tends to write things that are dark. She doesn’t seem to manage tension very well, and so a lot of her things just, it’s kind of dark. Like Sorceress Comes to Call is an excellent example of this, where the beginning of Sorceress Comes to Call is very dark but very compelling, and quite tense. And then it just kind of drifts off into a bunch of protagonists just kind of hanging out, scene after scene. Oren: They talk about how they should make a plan. Chris: They should make a plan. Oren: Their plan is to make a plan, later. Chris: They have the concepts of a plan. That’s kind of what the book fades into and it’s like, I don’t think that’s a good strategy. Because I think there are readers who probably love just a group of friends hanging out and chatting with each other with not much tension happening. Those readers do exist, but I don’t think they would want that really dark opening on there. Oren: Or at the very least, they might not want the continual dark elements that are still in the book after that opening. They’re just not tense. They’re still dismal. My guess is that some people like really dark stories, and they like it enough to overlook the fact that it has no tension. Chris: In Kingfisher’s case, I know some people just love her characters. Once they get enough attached to the characters, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the plot, and that’s fine, but then she’s not succeeding because of this dark but dull factor, but in spite of it, at that point. Oren: Cozy fantasy in general is just a really interesting example of a taste difference more than a quality difference. Although again, within there, there can be quality issues. Some people just can’t stand cozy fantasies and find them dull or boring or frustrating. Some of them to the extent that they write weird think pieces about how cozy fantasies mean the death of literature. When in reality it’s just a different kind of story that maybe isn’t your thing. But within a cozy fantasy, you want it to be low tension, but if it’s zero tension, that becomes a quality issue. Almost no one wants zero tension. They just don’t want a lot. [Chris laughs] Chris:  I have a couple cozy fantasies that I like to compare because one of them is low tension, but is clearly accidentally low tension, and the other is quite low tension, but feels designed low tension. So the one that feels accidental to me is Very Secret Society of Witches, where the thing about this one is that the author deliberately sets up stakes. They just don’t work. The stakes – there’s a lot of questions, it just doesn’t feel like this is a real problem. And one of the reasons that happens is because there’s a reveal that we’re saving until later. Again, reveals can often sabotage the plot because sometimes they just motivate storytellers to keep things secret that the story really needs. Oren: A lot of stories have fumbled because of a reveal. Chris: Because of this reveal, we don’t really have the information present to set up a compelling problem that actually creates tension, but the author is clearly trying. So that’s a situation in which the tension is actually lower than intended. It’s not really supposed to be a story that is that light. Whereas Teller of Small Fortunes, I feel like that one is very low tension, but it feels like it does what it intended to do. The thing is that one has four different people that all have personal problems, but it doesn’t have community stakes, it doesn’t have world stakes, really. It’s just those people and there’s very low to no urgency. It gives the story something, but it’s definitely for people who are at least tolerant of almost no tension. The how it feels it sets up. There’s no attempt to create a larger plot. It’s those personal journeys that actually form all of the plot structure to that story. But it still is cohesive, though. It still has a notable start to their problems and a resolution. It’s just that we’ve got very low stakes and the way it’s set up, it just doesn’t create much tension. It’s more of a enjoy these characters hanging out with each other and enjoying the journey, that kind of thing. Before we go, a last thing I think is kind of important to cover when we’re covering things that are like taste versus quality is the extent to which people think there is a specific quality to a book, and that’s not actually real. People become very convinced that a book is good or bad, and you kind of have to go in there and be like, slow down. Or they get mad at us for praising a book, because don’t you know that book is bad? Or criticizing a book, because don’t you know, that book is good? Or whatever. Couple things that happen here is, I think a really big one is just the feedback loop. The more you enjoy specific elements of the book, the more leniently you look at all of the other elements of the book. So if you love the characters, you will look more leniently on the plot and notice less if there are plot errors. It’s a feedback loop where it creates an upward or downward spiral. So if you find a book really gripping, a lot of times people assume, oh man, that book was just so good, because it really gripped me and I stayed up all night and I finished it. Okay. It really was engaging for you, but that doesn’t actually mean that it’s objectively better. What it often means is that there was something that was really appealing to you. And it could be a quality thing, or it could be more of a taste thing, or something that’s kind of in between, like it did a really good job at writing a character that your demographic could identify with, for instance. And then you had enough – critical enjoyment mass happened and it took off from there. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a better book than the books that that didn’t happen for, like objectively better. And people don’t really understand usually what creates their experience, their enjoyment, or oftentimes they’re more likely to know what caused them less enjoyment, but sometimes they don’t know that either. The other thing is the community consensus where everybody then just takes it as gospel, that a book is bad or good, and we just assume that’s a fact. Oren: You also see community reinforcement. People make each other more extreme by sharing increasingly extreme views, and each one pushes the needle a little further. Stranger Things, spoiler for the penultimate episode, but it’s got Will’s coming out scene, which is a little long. It goes on a little longer than it probably should. I have watched in real time as people have convinced themselves that this is the worst scene that has ever happened. And obviously bigotry plays into that, because this is a gay character, and we’re in the middle of a conservative backlash right now. But beyond that even, I can see people who were like a little annoyed by it seeing meme upon meme of how terrible it is and being like, yeah, it was awful. And it’s like, yeah, it was a little long, maybe a minute or so longer than it should have been, right? So that sort of thing can also happen and it’s, you know, very frustrating to see in real life because there’s nothing I can do at that point. I can’t push that tide back. It’s just not gonna happen. Chris: Or more classically – folks, Twilight isn’t that bad. It’s not any worse than most bestselling books. But it’s like it seems to be the book that everybody beats up on because they know that there’s a community consensus that book is supposed to be bad, and therefore they can beat up on it without having tons of ignorant commenters or something. Oren: Yeah, come beat up on Wheel of Time like the rest of us! [both laugh] Chris: You cowards! We’re over here beating up on all the popular books and criticizing authors before there are terrible scandals about them, not after. Oren: That’s always a fun time. Chris: That’s a fun time. So yeah, it’s just the idea that people have about quality to certain books, or like all books nowadays are bad, or all bestsellers nowadays are bad. A lot of that is just an illusion. Oren: When you read more critically and pay more attention, you will realize that literature has always sucked about the same amount. Chris: All the books have bad parts and good parts, and there’s nothing – grade everything on a curve. So it could always get much worse, but it can always get better too. Oren: With that, I think I will make the objectively quality-driven choice to end the episode. Chris: If you agree with us that our tastes are in fact quality, and we are very objective about everything, then obviously you would also agree that you should support us on Patreon. Just 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 Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.