Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - 1 Year Anniversary Q&A

Episode Date: September 11, 2022

It's a big one! To celebrate our 1 year anniversary and 5,000 downloads, we brought Nicole and Trevor back to talk authors, tropes, and a surprising amount about The Last Airbender. Thank you all so much for listening and sticking with us!patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. We have a special episode today as we warned you, this is our one year anniversary episode. And so we're doing something special we're doing a big friend bonus q amp a. We have some guests back, we're going to ask some questions.

You know, hopefully it's's fun we'll find out as i'm darius as always is my co-host katho how's it going katho howdy and returning with us we have our like two top tier most recorded guests i believe we have trevor How's it going, Trevor? Hey, how are you guys? Wonderful. And we have Nicole. How's it going, Nicole? Hello. For everyone interested, Nicole's currently tattooing herself while we record this. Yep, cute little T-Rex. Some of us are talented enough to do two things at once. Some of us are not.

Some of us aren't. Fuck this. Multitasking. I'd struggle with monotasking, all right? Let's not. Some of us aren't combos. Multitasking. I struggle with monotasking, all right? Let's not. Let's not get it twisted.

Half a task at a time, people. Half a task. Like I said, Tamers, I have written down some questions to ask our guests.

I'm also going to answer them because I didn't think of doing that in advance. So we're going to ask some questions, I'm also going to answer them because I didn't think of doing that in advance. So we're going to ask some questions, you know, related to books and themes and all that sort of stuff, just to, you know, get a feel for what people, you know, what people like, what are we about? I'm going to start off with what I, what I think is a softball question. Let's start off with who was your favorite author in childhood? Now, childhood, it can be a little expansive here.

It can go up to like, you know, your, you know, your tweens or your teens or whatever. I'm essentially thinking, you know, pre-high school graduation, more or less. Like when you were, when you were a young person, who was your favorite author? I'll warn you, the follow-up is going to be in adulthood who that favorite is. And so if that hasn't changed, you can just say that right away unless it's – if it's the same one from childhood to adulthood. And I'm going to open up the floor. Whoever – actually, you know what? No, Kathleen, you're the co-host.

I'm putting you on the spot. You go first. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. This answer is pretty quick. We recorded a lost episode due to Zencaster being new to us on His Dark Materials by Philip Paulman, which was my favorite book series as a kid. Throughout middle school, I would say, up into early high school. But despite being a big science fiction and fantasy nerd,

my actual favorite book in high school was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. So like a weird dichotomy of liking weird borderline just like atheist fan fiction um in the form of philip holman and i liked his ruby like his uh i forget sally is it sally lockhart like mystery books were kind of cool um but like it was it was philip polman and then truman capote uh which is just really strange that definitely changed later but like i really liked in cold blood and i was like for it being kind of a weird little realistic fiction book i i like breakfast at Tiffany's. So it's just really strange. That's one thing we've got.

But yeah, yeah, it was a weird combo, mostly because I had to read In Cold Blood for class and really, really loved it. As much as you can love a journalistic, slightly fabricated retelling of one of the worst um murders in american history uh so uh yeah yeah that was that was it that was really my my bizarre range philip polman and truman capote uh okay so to the surprise of absolutely no one because i'm 26 and study ancient history i loved rick riordan when i was a kid man like that's a good kick though and and you know read

the percy jackson novels i caught up to them when after the third book and read the fourth and fifth ones as they came out and then just kept reading all the other ancient god stuff he wrote until I was in college and there were like four concurrent series and I gave up like I can't and I was a little disappointed because they were getting more connected and I was like well but there's these are like 500 page books now and I've got other shit to do. He was doing like an MCU you have to watch all the shows to

understand what's happening in all the other shows. Yeah, and except there was no clear Avengers coming down at the end. So I was like like you just started getting characters from the other series popping up. Very fan service for the other series. Yeah, like I was for the other series yeah like i was in the

same boat i i like really enjoyed his books and then stopped reading them after the here like the the second like the roman gods series and then dropped off yeah i got through the greek gods the roman gods egyptian the egyptian ones and then i started the uh norse ones and then he did another thing with apollo at the same time and i was like i can't do that so i just stopped there um as an adult or do you want to do that after we've all gone if it's if it's different then we'll do that on the next round if it's the same author then we'll i said we could do it but otherwise we'll skip to the next round no he's gotten too overwhelming to still be my favorite author um it's weird i completely missed all the rick riordan books i mean he he started writing his stuff after you

were but i mean yeah i probably was a little too old to be the target demographic, I think. Yeah, because they were coming out while I was in like seventh and eighth grade. It was like when they first popped out. I read the first one in eighth grade. And so I don't know. I was probably I was probably already in college or something. You're like five years old. So listen, Trevor and I are literally like one year apart.

Look, it's the mileage not the year okay nicole oh um so that is a complex question for me um i would say for childhood the one that stands out the most is probably Redwall. So Brian Jacques and all like elementary school, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all because I read a lot as a fucking kid. And so, yeah, there's like a number of like different books I can even half remember like the names of and all that so like i got them through like scholastic book fair stuff because i was just reading all the fucking time um and but like no red wall stands out so probably that for like you know elementary and middle school and all um getting into high school is probably a toss-up between Neil Gaiman and H.P. Lovecraft. My problematic fave, probably from that time period.

Just because I was reading the Harry Potter books at that point and liked them, but was never like, oh, this is my favorite. Because I was like 14 when i started reading them and all um so it was like a little too young for me but it like you know enjoyable um but yeah no like i came across hp lovecraft uh in my catholic high school's library and all there was like a little paperback of like i think like some of the dream cycle stuff and all which is what i really fucking loved like i liked cthulhu like the cthulhu mythos stuff yada yada yada and all but i loved the dream cycle stuff it was just so fucking weird

um and like yeah no it was like just the whole like he he number one, the racism and the the problems with sexuality just across the board, not just homosexuality. But deeply repressed man, deeply repressed something or other. I don't know what the fuck was going on with him. I think there's like some like well-reasoned arguments that he may have been very closeted gay man and all with, I forget, I think was the writer of Rosemary's baby and all the original story and all not the movie. Yeah. I don't remember the author's name, but he had like a long maybe,

or maybe I'm, he just, he just strikes me as someone who you'd be able to like, He just strikes me as someone who you'd be able to, like, he's almost so extremely afraid of, like, everything, where it's the sort of, like, you almost feel more pity for him than you feel, like, outright anger. I remember, like, in the last couple of years, like Neil Gaiman, my other fave from that time period, who I still love, and i'll like definitely got

raked across the crows uh scrolls on um on social media for being like well he was very very anxious man and it's like well yes but he was also really bigoted even for the time period now his anxiety may have manifested as bigotry but it's still bigotry um but yeah like so between that and the fact that he's really honestly just not a great writer like his best known sort of description of his writing style is build up build up build up build up build up no payoff and yeah he's just not a great writer but i love the the the weirdness of the ideas and all the fact that like he was trying to move horror away from like either overtly christian sort of like the devil did it or you know it's a ghost story and all i'm trying to be like what what

if there's other dimensions where things are like lurking and they want to fucking eat us and shit like that. And it's like, Oh, that's kind of fucking cool. I mean, cosmic horror became after like into the, like post forties, like one of the most ubiquitous.

Yeah. Cause again, like he was, he was ahead of his time in that regard and good for him. I do remember seeing, I think back during summer 2020 someone posted a write-up and i think also actual pictures of the pages of like an out of print version of some of his like letters and all because he was a huge letter writer um and like from like the last year or so of his life he was writing a letter to someone, which I take him with as a giant mine's worth of salt and all that.

Apparently, during the last year or two of his life when he was basically dying from cancer, apparently he wrote to someone saying, yeah, no, I've been reading into the social sciences more in the last few years, and I'm a socialist now. if I could go back in time a decade to my 30s, when I was writing most of the stuff that he would be most known for, like the Cthulhu stuff, yada, yada, yada, he basically slapped the fascism out of that little bitch's mouth and shit. Because he was like, yeah, no, capitalism is going to die.

It's going to eat itself. Socialism is the only way forward. The Nazis are fucked up. Yeah, so it's like, take it with a grain of salt, but it seems like potentially towards the end of his life, he became less shitty. But I haven't been able to find this out of print. Yeah, and then he dies.

Yeah, and then he dies. So, okay, he wasn't a shitty human being. His still best known work is the shitty stuff. So it's a mixed bag. But yeah, Neil Gaiman, I loved American Gods. of shitty stuff so it's a mixed bag um but yeah you know neil gaiman i loved american gods i fucking loved american gods in high school i read that so many goddamn times um and then like into like late high school college you know the sandman um uh, Neverwhere on the flight back from London, which was a bad mistake on my part. Um, when I went to London in like 09 and stuff like that. And I was like, wait, I, I know, I know these places that he's making references to. They're, they're tube stops. Um, and yeah,

but yeah. So, so like the, the three of my like, you know, pre-adulthood and all would probably be like Jacques Lovecraft and Gaiman. I just want to set out and say thank you to H.P. Lovecraft for allowing the game Darkest Dungeon to exist. Yes. That game is so good. It's so hard. I love it.

is so good it's so hard i love it see i'm just trying to work out from his general milieu did he become a socialist because he looked at fascism and thought it was too italian that is fair that is a fair observation i mean that is it may have been the catalyst that is something that lovecraft was definitely that kind of racist who would have considered the italians not white yeah considering he was like a huge anglophile and shit towards the towards the end of his career his his writing was less like here's these dark outsiders that i don't like and it became more like here's these outsiders that i don't like and it became more like here's these poor people i don't like and you're like okay man you're moving away from one can we not like just transfer it to another yeah yeah like shadow over in smith is more like i'm

afraid of poor people and then i then i am afraid of black people yes look i lived a couple blocks away from his house for a couple for a few years and the one of the most racially diverse groups in the community is still the portuguese like it is a lily white community oh absolutely without a doubt those dark-skinned portuguese looking into he is like a great his his personal history i had to do like a report on a short story author once and i picked lovecraft um and his his personal past is fascinating in the most like like oh i kind of see why you i mean he turned out the way you did like oh yeah no his life is very complicated and fucked up and all which so it's it's it's extremely interesting to almost read his stuff purely as a character study of the man yeah i mean i'll be honest i only read

his works at first because when i first got into a job where i could listen to audiobooks and podcasts they were some of the first ones i could get for free and then i read a bunch of lovecraft because they were free like i own his complete works in a in a like one of those barnes and noble yeah yeah yeah like thick shiny books um and like i've i've read a decent number of them i just wanted to hear you're like dude if you just cut out this yeah like i just wanted to hear the narrator say gibbous a bunch of times it's like why is your why and and then you look at some of his like cosmic horrors are really um indicative of what he was afraid of in the most like straight up ways imaginable there's that one fertility goddess in there yes which already has kind of the word almost in it um but it's clear that she's a polemic for being afraid of overpopulation of undesirables

um because she like pumps out eternally without thinking or caring as many offspring as she can um and her name is what it is yes the black foot Black Widow of Southern Young. Yeah. So you're like, dude, you're not even like trying to hide it. This is just blatant. I mean, to be fair, I don't think he ever really tried to hide it. Yeah, no. But then you have people like, what's that? Like Azathoth or whatever.

That's really cool. You're like a representation of the uncaring void of the universe. It's like, this is so well thought out. We'll do a whole episode on Lovecraft at some point where even though horror isn't necessarily our thing, like we did learn from our episode with Elias that like horror, sci-fi and fantasy are all sort of inextricably tied together and sort of

come from the same roots. So even though that's not really our mainstay, we could an episode just about lovecraft and we are going to be yeah i mean considering like his circle of writers and all back then like fucking like you know he was like kind of bffs with um writer with what he wrote a lot to conan's to code yeah yeah um uh uh howard uh robert howard as they say yeah and so like you know the the and the fact that a lot of lovecraft's writing was just this weird mash of like what we now think of as like fantasy to a degree like with the dream cycle stuff uh horror like traditional horror uh what we would think of with sci-fi because a lot of his horror was very sci-fi influenced and even

though they were mostly it's like one of the things that i remember from that that that specious letter and all that i mentioned and all was him talking about like he'd been reading more into the social sciences whereas like in his 20s and 30s he'd been reading just focusing heavily on the physical sciences like and horrendously misunderstanding them and you know i mean it was like the 1910s 1920s so it's not like you know yeah but there's a lot science was science was still just like there's still stories that he wrote like the color out of space yeah where where you realize that he just did not understand what he was reading about science at the time where like he had read something essentially about how butterflies can

see in more colors than we can and then was like um what what if there's a color that is evil and he like writes this color and then he constantly says a color that you cannot imagine it can it has never seen before but it's like that's not how colors work um fundamentally it's not how colors work look hey hey hey this world has the same thing it it does it does it almost and color of magic is literally a color that you can't see unless you know magic. Even in that, it's almost a play on the color out of space because that color is associated with the chthonic entity in the first book. Just because that entity is magical, but the color still exists. It's like they don't even say the name of it because like it's like

the eighth color yeah um i suppose it's my turn now yeah i could be i could be really pat here and very boring and just give you this the one answer that would carry me from from birth to death or birth to current life so far for favorite author and i could just say tolkien like but i that's not insightful or interesting in any way because anyone who's talked to me for more than five minutes could have answered that question on their own without me telling you uh so instead what i'm going to do is you know we'll go like what i like next step, I guess, like a go for the ones that aren't him that I liked a lot. Brian Jackson, but what would have been a really good shot for me, like as a kid would have been a really good option.

But we've already said that once I'm going to i'm gonna do one more childhood it would be again kind of hard but if we go up into like my early teens uh something we were talking about off mic before we started i would i'd probably have to i might actually have to pick michael creighton because i devoured every single book he wrote like cover to cover every single one of them I loved his books that's why we're talking about Jurassic Park in the next episode because I wanted to talk about him

I'm not going to dig too much into him because we're going to again we're going to talk about him a lot coming up and we might even maybe a little bit more later this episode with another question I have I have lined up but during in my teens we could we could go with Michael Crichton. Once I mean, once I'm out of the Redwall age, like reading I mean, I never regret reading the Redwall books.

Those are our first two episodes on this podcast. But if I'm picking someone that's not Brian Jack, I'd probably have to. Yeah, I'd probably go with michael crichton i mean it makes a lot of sense too that because like his just from reading jurassic park so far he it's he's fun and easy to read like he's like just a very solid very smooth writer um and it would be super easy to just consume all of his stuff and I was old school I would I would take I would get on my bicycle and go the like couple two miles to my public library and I would check out one of his books

from my local library and pedal back home I'm gonna tell you I've gotten more use out of my library card in the past year than i have in the past 10 so thanks libby yeah but between libby and just my local library if libby is like you can't borrow it because drm and stupid nonsense i'm i'll just go to my local library which apparently no one uses and get the book because there's never holds on them no one uses and get the book because there's never holds on them well so let's do um we can do a let's let's do another round again the quicker one let's switch to as an adult kethel uh leguin that's absolutely no contest uh at this point but everyone in the universe kind of knows that if they've listened to this podcast before, um,

that that's, it's not a surprise to anyone. Um, and the more I think about it, I don't really even have a, a, a decent backup. That's fair.

I don't have a decent backup for like second best favorite author or something like being in college. I've read, I think two books the whole time for pleasure because I was reading so much for class as it was um mostly psychology so like for a couple years I was just reading a lot of like textbooks and and for one of my psychology classes it was like a psychology of religion course which was one of the best classes i ever took we read a lot of like like i read some freud and like did they provide the cocaine for you i really wish they had but no like uh understand what freud was talking about oh yeah it was one

of his easy ones it was like uh the i can't remember the name of the book it's like the reality of an illusion or something like that where he's essentially saying that religion is stupid um for like uh 40 pages it's not very long um i still have it on my shelf back here somewhere but it has nothing on the spine. So, but yeah, so like the only book I read in college was a young adult novel that I read. That was really good by the way.

So if anyone is, anyone wants to read a YA novel, that's pretty good. Jandy Nelson's I'll give you the sun is pretty good. YA novel. But I was taking a YA writing class. Cause I was a creative writing minor um yeah you don't forget everyone kathel has a degree in this and i and and i like read he's

the educated one here i read it because our professor used her book as a um like an example of a subversion within the first line of text like the intro to something being a subversion where this kid is running away from a bully but at the same like it's a kind of like gay novel and and he's running away from his bully and is, is simultaneously like, I kind of don't care if he catches me. Cause he's kind of hot sort of scenario. And it was really funny. So I was like, I was like, I'm going to pick up this book because it sounds incredibly funny.

And I, and I read it and it was both funny and endearing and depressing and a little bit supernatural bizarrely enough i wouldn't even be able to classify it as totally realistic because there's like almost clearly an explicit like this ghost exists in it but no the hot boy is chasing me kind of of. Where he's simultaneously like, oh my God. Scared and turned on? Yes, at the same time. Wouldn't know anybody who enjoys that. Extremely confused about it.

But no, it's a really good book. Listeners did not see the look Nicole just gave the camera. So it's like, but that was the only book I'd read until I got out of college and then was able to like start reading again for fun. And, and then I found the Gwyn and everything kind of changed because she was a massive reason as to why I feel the way I do now politically too.

So it's. You're a pacifist now, I forgot. Oh no, no. I'm not one-to-one copy. But she, you know, it's like, rarely in one's life do you encounter an author that changes

you so much or that leaves as much of an impact as the way I feel like i was impacted by le guin so i just i just think fundamentally i can't i can't come up with any better answer than le guin it's fair trevor okay um i guess if i'm gonna to pick an author as an adult, George R.R. Martin takes it by default. Because, a fiction author at least. Because I haven't read, like I started getting into fiction for pleasure again

when I started the podcast because i got audible but i think you know game of thrones and then the accompanying or you know the song of ice and fire for the purists and then the accompanying coffee table book-sized lore stuff. The Adventures of Dunk and Egg? All of it. Adventures of Dunk and Egg, Fire and Blood that they're basing the new TV show on, the World of Ice and Fire that's literally like a two-foot-by-one-foot book.

Because my favorite type of fiction is world building and that's what george rr martin really wants to be doing he doesn't want to be telling a story that was just a way to get his world building published i mean that's why he spent more time doing things like advising on elden ring exactly i i was talking about this with friend of the podcast roberto last night and said that uh i think he if george rr martin could live the rest of his life writing the explanations on magic cards that he would be perfectly happy he probably would that man's never gonna finish like just give him give him the flavor let him be the flavor text guy on every magic card on every card yeah i'm sure he would be great at

it for yugioh too yeah good good bigimon card game i i i now desperately want ge R. R. Martin to explain Yu-Gi-Oh! Like, Yu-Gi-Oh! lore. Damn it. If Yu-Gi-Oh! had remained the way it was when it was initially first proposed as an almost semi-role-playing card game, like, imagining him writing the descriptions for these like, pre-Monster

Card Monster Cards, where there was like, no real description for what they did and you just kind of made it up as you went along like that'd be so good be so good um let the man world build and that's it yeah i look hbo gave him a giant mountain of money and that's basically the only thing he's done since so i think it's fine i mean you can tell because by the end of the the end of the show there wasn't any plot left well it's fair to george rr martin from what i've read and all in the years since the that last season and all apparently weiss and benioff were basically just like fuck it we want to do star wars and apparently martin would like would argue with them at times be like the fuck are you doing and they're just like yeah whatever George we don't care

Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars and we all I think know how that turned out for them I feel like fundamentally Martin's in a really difficult position the same way that in a strange way that the writers of the show were in a really difficult position

where like everyone kind of knew how the show were in a really difficult position where like everyone kind of knew how the show was supposed to end like like all the plot threads had because it was eight seasons long and all this stuff had been built up over at least six seasons that were extremely consistent it's like because they were following a very well plotted out series of novels it's like you end up with these very obvious plot threads that people will be able to predict purely out of narrative satisfaction and what the story seems to be pointing at um and it's like but i think both the writers of the show and even martin to a degree

didn't want people to be able to predict how it was going to end. Martin is a contrarian bastard. He has admitted that when he was on fan forums, if he saw someone had correctly predicted an event or a twist in his novels, he would rewrite it. I'm going to be honest. Because he got annoyed if anybody knew the answer before he wrote it. I feel like that is less just being a contrarian

and more like being a little bit narcissistic where it's like people are going to be able to predict what's going to happen that's always going to happen there's always going to be somebody especially if your series is being read by millions of people it's like someone's gonna guess it it's like and he's a good author So there's foreshadowing. You're doing it on purpose. It's interesting you're telling us what's going on. People should be able to predict what's going to happen. And then they should be rewarded for feeling like they figured it out when it happens. That's a good thing when someone figures it out. It's like, especially like, like, just give people narratively satisfying conclusions, and they'll be happy with it. If the show had ended the way that people thought it was going to end, and they had just made it a well-filmed show, it's like people would have loved it, and it would have ended well. Instead, the entire cultural mark that that show has left on the culture is like zero. It's like instead you had six and seven girls named daenerys it's it's like

you had six to arguably seven good seasons and then just in order to subvert expectations and to be a surprise you completely shit on everything that came before just because you didn't want people predicting the ending and it's like it doesn't need to be a surprise it doesn't need to be a surprise it just needs to be narratively satisfying so here's my thing with the way the show ends i really do think that they basically got an outline from martin yeah and it wasn't what they had set up because they had cut out two of his most important late in the series plot lines. Yes. And then we're told that they had to put all of the characters in the right place at the end.

So you get stuff like, who has a better story? Because Bran is supposed to become a supernatural god king but he's supposed to work to get there yeah there is is supposed to snap and go crazy but it's probably more because she is going to meet a crazy magical pirate like like doing blood magic like there's a lot of plots that are missing in there like if we're gonna if i can have my one my one thing my major like my me like being plot things and characters i liked being cut that i thought again were intrinsic to the plot was the gray joy in charge of the iron fleet that was set in the end of like the last book is like sailing to go fetch

Daenerys. I can't remember which Greyjoy it is. It's like, it's Euron who they turned into Mick Jagger for the show. Yeah. It's the one. Well, no,

it's not the one that gets elected King. It's like the brother that doesn't become the new leader of the iron aisles. Right. And in the show, they just kind of mash people together, mash people together. But it was the one that's just in leader of the Iron Isles. Right, and in the show, they just kind of mash people together. Mash people together, but it's the one that's just in charge of the Iron Fleet

who like the last time you see him has like captured a boat full of people, taken an arm injury, and then like as a sacrifice to both the, you know, the fire god that saved his arm and to the drowned god, he puts captured people on a raft pushes them out and then sets the raft on fire so they burn and drowned at the same time and i'm like it's like i just feel

like even if they'd gotten a an outline from george they should have just like it's obvious that in some instances they're completely willing to ignore him so it's like why why wouldn't they have just ignored him and just been like okay daenerys is gonna be uh on the iron throne jon snow's gonna maybe die maybe not fighting the the what's his name and then cersei's gonna get fucking stabbed by her brother like why can't we just like make that be the ending and it would just have been more narratively satisfying in the long run than them trying to jam in a bunch of stuff that wasn't there before and then get everybody into the right place and subvert expectations and kill people i'm letting this conversation i'd like this conversation yeah here i'll get us in a different

i was saying i was letting this one go on because it'll be a long time before i actually do a mainline episode about game of thrones because then they'd have i don't want to have i don't want to have like i'm not going to make you read the book so we can talk about it now because i'm not going to do a mainline about this just read like one of the lore books and talk about that instead you can do that yeah the lore books are pretty cool because i've already consumed enough lore about the show and the and the westeros in general just for my own like personal world building process let the man world build. He'll be happy.

Let him design video games where he goes, what if there was a big tree? I like, I'm going to be honest with you. Like. What if there's a big tree? The least important additions to Elden Ring. I feel like so much of that was just Miyazaki.

And then the names were George R.R. Martin, which just made the names incredibly confusing. My favorite thing about Elden Ring is the memes about calling stuff maidenless behavior, which I do enjoy. The thing is, every single main demigod or character that he came up with, their name starts with a G, an R, or an M. Because he just used his initials and and then it's like he i understand he's i understand that he's like trying to kind of he was kind of trying to follow the like this very old tradition of naming your children something very close to yourself that like fit into the mythology of the setting but at the same time it's not a rule but generally one of the things i was always told um in college about

writing was it's like just for the sake of clarity please don't name your character something that start with the same letter like like people will just not be able to remember who's who but it's like he'd already done that with game of thrones and needed to throw a whole ass appendix in the back so you could remember who's who what i'm done with this call i'm recording a podcast episode with three characters named austin is so deal with it yeah i understand the reality is facing facing that it's like like someone once um mentioned i i don't know who it was like what video i had watched but like when coming up with names for places in like world building it's like remember that in the real world uh alexander the great

named like 20 cities alexandria yeah so it's like king shit so it's like when you when you but if you make it in a world building way people are like this is confusing and makes no sense but then you can point at the real world and be like the real world is way more confusing and makes way less sense um for i know if i don't know you talked about having names like in the pit that sounded the same it reminded me of a specific example a specific example i always remember because tolkien also did that when he was doing like the like names that are supposed to remind you of like you know the anglo-saxons or whatever the old english specifically the line of kings of rohan again this is my brain so i remember this if you if i if i read them off in order this is a series of the line of kings of rohan folka folkwine fangle fangle theoden well the thing is so like theoden and folka aren't the same but every step

in between is them keeping something the same from the previous name and going on to the next one the same linguistic tradition that martin was using when he came up with the stuff for elden ring was it was anglo-saxon celtic um naming traditions and then theodon's theodon's son was of course the entire setting is like a very mishmashy british isles early history mythology look monarchies get less creative about names over time just look at the french um yeah which louis are you uh and when george r martin started running out of names for tully's he started naming them after muppets so you just get to a chapter where they're listing off like catalan stark's cousins and it's like grover kermit and elmo or something like that honestly why in that in that vein one of my favorite favorite pieces of writing was i

think john hodgman's first book and all where like there's a section there that's like a complete non-sequitur that's like 30 some hobo names and like the vast majority of the middle is just like the skeksis from the dark crystal i feel like like that's a perfect reason why martin was a great choice for doing elden ring stuff because it fits into the exact same aesthetic that miyazaki does where like the the lore and world building is so unique and and and like well thought out and like mysterious and and then there's a character named big hat logan because he has a big hat um and and it's like that's the whole thing about like elden ring where it's like here's this very consistent very almost bleak and sometimes serious world but also here's and then here's a boss named like named like gruja the grunger

who lays in a trash pile and is going to hit you with a hammer it's like it's like you're one second you're going to be fighting lich dragon fortisax and his music is going to be incredibly awesome. And this fight is going to be so cool. And then the next second you're going to be flicking someone with a giant pinky finger. Just because it's cool and funny. It's like this serious world that embraces the absurd nature of human creativity. Where it's like this world is so serious and austere and it takes itself so seriously but then it has like fucking random ass nonsense in it um

that just makes you laugh like there's it's and it's the same thing with martin like i feel like he's the same way okay uh to drag us out of whatever rabbit hole this is i do want to shout out that as an adult um yeah it's not really a favorite author because i think he's written like two books but uh world war z by max brooks is a good book just a fascinating book to me. I read it in college for like an intro to writing class on zombie literature because they needed something to make that class interesting to students. And it was the peak of Walking Dead. But so, you know, the first time we were really focusing on like, how do they use zombies in this setting? And then in like 2018 or 2019, did a full cast audiobook with a bunch of big name actors like mark hamill plays one of the characters so i listened to it at the beginning of lockdown

and i was like oh oh my god because he nailed it he nailed every single thing about america's response to a dangerous outbreak of disease and like how a disease would likely spread because he starts it in china because when you just have two billion fucking people like you're just going to mutate more diseases yeah so like the the path that it follows that in the book was also bizarre and then i listened to it again a couple months ago and i was you know not thinking about anything else i was able to like think about the politics it was like okay so we start in the mostly real world and we world war ii our way through the zombies

and the final shakedown is this weird neoib utopia where, like, the United States has gone through the crisis and is at the top of its game and Russia is no longer desp now and india and pakistan or pakistan and iran those brutal countries went to nuclear war over a border dispute and i was like now wait a minute like yeah it's his politics are extreme oh and and Israel saves the fucking day. That's the other one. Yeah, yeah. God's perfect country. The biggest red flag is that he's an extreme Zionist. They save all the Palestinians. But up until then, it isn't very well written. So wait, you're telling me this book is fiction? Yeah.

The zombies didn't give it away, but the saving all the Palestinians.inians so it's really that's what breaks my immersion i'm gonna be honest with you so israel saved palestine because i read that book in in high school and therefore wasn't really up engaged in a lot of politics so it was like easy to like kind of ignore um and if you can ignore it it's a great book i have only seen the movie for world war z horrendous it wasn't good yeah no it has nothing to do with i remember reading uh world war z when i was like in college and all like late college just before ending because a girl that i had a massive crush on uh really liked it and fair uh yeah i mean it's one of the reasons why i started reading sandman

girl uh another girl that i had a massive crush on was like oh the sandman is great i'm going to read this and oh yeah hey it's fucking great um uh but yeah no this is the only piece of zombie literature that has moved me to tears and all just because there's so much of that the book itself is like really well written and all and there's a couple of places in there where it's just really moving and stirring and all like uh especially with like the uh i think one or two japanese characters and all like the the blind zen monk and his uh little apprentice and all that like fight their way through japan where they're like uh there may be a million monsters but we have the gods on our side and all and just yeah i don't know i just found it like really really really good i he i watched the movie and

saw brad pitt and i was like this isn't very very exciting. It would make an excellent TV show. Yes. It's written for that. It's sort of like, God, who's this face that did baseball and the Civil War and all that jazz, documentaries. Oh.

But in that style. He's also a Brooks, isn't he? Are you talking like Ken Burns? Yes. Yeah, like a ken burn style like miniseries done you know faux documentary that would be the perfect meeting for translating the story at audiobook you really have to listen to you know because it feels to me like it would be a good tv show or radio drama yeah it's the if you get the full cast audiobook it is excellent just incredibly well done and you know absolute credit to mel brooks he's really good

at you know writing a character's perspective how they would react to max brooks yet mel brooks is done i mean he is his son so uh yeah explains things um he what the fuck my mind has exploded yes he's what oh yes yeah like there's no there's not much more to it than that. He is Mel Brooks' son. That's all there is. Oh, I mean, no wonder he's, I guess, okay. I see why. He's good at writing characters in a perspective and understanding their emotions and their reactions and how people in the current situation, aside from Israel, would react to things. It's just that some of the political scenarios that he applies to those characters don't make a ton of sense.

Robust liberalism. Beautiful. Nicole. Truly a... Well, first off, I finished the tattoo. I shared a photo in the group chat, so... I saw that. You guys can feel free to have that as a little... Put us the cover art. I shared a photo in the group chat so you guys

can feel free to have that as like a little put us the cover art for the episode yeah the easter egg or whatever on twitter so I would say it's split between Jim Butcher and

James S.A. Corey as my favorites for adulthood and all. I started reading like the Dresden Files, like mid to late college and all, like maybe just like late college, just afterwards and all, and started just like voluminously like just consuming those books because they're pulpy, they're fantasy, they're urban fantasy and all and started just like voluminously like just consuming those books because they're pulpy they're fantasy they're urban fantasy and all they're they're fun and you know you know somewhat well written stuff like that and all and just yeah like i really liked them they they were they were done well um they're one of the few like genre things that no matter what else is going on when a new one drops and on there was like a bit of a pause

like for for most of the last decade like every year he was publishing one every year and all just because like he had started the the series in like a writing class and all and basically outlined like a i think like 20 book series plus like a capstone trilogy or whatever and all. And his teacher at the time was like, okay, you try that. See if you can get that published. And to his credit, he was able to. But yeah, like, I think there's like 16, 17 books in something like that. And then like, you know, like a couple of books have gone beyond that 20 book outline, but yeah, no, they're, they're they're fun they're you know

well written for what they are which is kind of pulpy urban fantasy and all uh that's not like overly like paranormal romance um but yeah and then uh just the expanse expanse like it like i think a lot of people point out that it's it's not like hard sci-fi in the true sense of hard sci-fi. They're in space. It takes a little bit of liberties, but it's actually really fucking good in that regard. They're in space and they justify pretty much everything they do.

Yeah, exactly. And also it does do what I would call the quality of sci-fi, which is it does propose a thought experiment, essentially. Like, what if capitalism made its way into space um which probably will unfortunately i mean even from like the first book the idea of talking about the like how that would affect the development of people that lived in different areas how the economic conditions of the of the system would would give rise to

different political factions and all that other sort of stuff is to me is sci-fi. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And just, yeah. I just remember like listening to, I think, I can't remember which, which one of the books it was because like my ex-wife and I, and some of our friends started watching like the first season on TV and then got into the books and all. And. Is the show good? I haven't seen the show. The show's not bad.

The show's not bad. You think it might be better if you hadn't read the books? Uh, no. No. Like, I think it's an adaptation and all. And, um, like, obviously, there's

some stuff that needs to be, like, be like you know uh cut or remolded just because of the the differing natures of like a book series versus a television series which is like the same sort of thing that you know you you see in like game of thrones adaptation and all is that like some of those plot lines and some of those like hundreds of characters do need to be winnowed away because you literally cannot pay for the number of actors that you need to do this properly on a tv series um but they they all considering like james s.a. cory like the two authors who are using that one pen name are like two like executive producers on the series and worked with like the the writing room a lot and all like they obviously came at

it as like oh this is like almost a second draft of the books that we've done so we have a chance to learn from what we did the first time around and make things tighter make things better which they they seem to have done and all, um, like some of the pacing in the series, especially like into the last season that aired, uh, really laid the, um, laid the tracks for like the back third of the series in a much better way than they did in the actual writing of the books and all, because they were able to like, look back and go, Oh oh we should drop these hints earlier and introduce some of these characters earlier on

these plot lines so that they seem more organic and stuff like that and yeah no like it the the books are really fucking good like i remember finishing the last book last year i think at some point uh i think after I came back to, to work after my bottom surgery and all, and was almost in tears listening to it as I was working and all, just because it was, I was that well of a, a wrap up of like the series, the characters, the themes, stuff like that and all. Um, yeah, yeah. Like the, the the the epilogue for the last book is was just stirring and made me so happy and all like it's been a long while since i've come across a series that i liked consistently so much and felt ended in a way that i think did everything else justice. So yeah. My biggest problem

for getting into that series was that in the first book, they make you want to sympathize with cops. Or at least any cops. Which, you know what?

Oh, well. I get it, but it's also just like, it's a fucking story. It's a joke, you know what? Oh, well. No, I get it. But it's also just like, it's a fucking story. It's a joke. I know. The one, I don't know. The thing about. To its credit with the TV series and all, it took me a long while to realize that it was the actual actor

playing the cop and all. Because I mentioned to my friends when we were watching the first season, I was like, man, this guy's, this actor seems like the poor man's Thomas Jane. And they're like, that's actually Thomas Jane. I was like, oh, fuck. That's him.

And I've not lived that down amongst that group of friends. So anytime that like, you know, something even tangentially comes up with that, they're like, oh, yes, the poor man's Thomas Jane. I'm like, yeah, shut the fuck up. I'm sort of like uh like well like number of us i as an adult barely read anything for fun well to be fair i barely read anything once i got to college they were like you need to read these textbooks and i was like i'm not doing that um but i also wasn't reading for fun either so i wasn't just wasn't reading anything fun either. So I wasn't just, wasn't reading anything. Um,

you know, somewhere along the way after that, I completely forgot how to read obviously. And so I couldn't even make up for it. Um, I honestly didn't really start like, you know, consuming books for fun. Um, until I got a job where I got, I could listen to audio books all day while I was at work. Like I just, that was when I got back to actually like listening to novels again. And this is going to be a rehash, but I will say that in my adulthood, my favorite author is Le Guin. Like I don't have like a cool, like off brand choice. Like I read, I read the Earthsea series when I was a kid and enjoyed it a lot,

but I didn't read any of the Hainish cycle when I was young. I didn't read any of the Hainish cycle books until I was an adult. And then I essentially read them all like in order over the course of like a couple of months. I just listened to them all in a row and it was amazing. It was fantastic. I love her. her it's i don't like all the other books i've read for fun as an adult have essentially been the ones we've read for this podcast yeah yeah me too did uh okay so so we got through we got questions yeah we hey look two questions we're doing good i will jump jump right in to the next one.

I'll do whatever editing I have to do to make it work. No big deal. You have the time. I've got time right now. I was searching around for a thing to wave as a red flag when you were talking about Crichton. Oh. But then I realized one of my favorite – no, I couldn't find it. But then I realized one of my favorite authors around that point in my life was Orson Scott Card.

Okay. So hold on to that. I have a question that I think we can talk about. Okay, awesome. Problematic faves. Yes, that's what it is. I have thoughts. Yeah.

I'm going to get – we'll get to that one. So the next question I have coming up, these aren't in any order of any kind. They're the order I thought of them in. So the next one is, of all the fantasy sci-fi books you've read, if you had to pick one of their worlds to live in as generally the same type of person

and same type of station, like you don't have to go live in the world and be the protagonist. Which one would you pick? Of all the, like the fantasy sci-fi worlds, you've got to go basically be you still, or the same sort of book. I mean,

we are a book podcast. Yeah, we are a book podcast. There's a couple. Okay. This isn't a bonus. I can't say legacy. This isn't couple okay this isn't a bonus i can't say legacy this isn't the this isn't a bonus episode we don't get to talk about the move we don't get to pick a movie um there are books set in this universe i guess so i could

i could still call sure all right if you've got an answer go for it uh i mean i don't really have an answer here is the thing so i'm kind of trying to pull something out of my booty because i'm gonna be honest with you most fantasy and sci-fi universes suck balls like i know our own universe really is like dystopic but there are some that are like even more dystopic somehow so you you're not picking Starship Troopers? Absolutely not. That is bottom of the barrel. That is absolutely bottom rung.

But even like, honestly, even living in some of like Le Guin settings are like, that would be hard. It's like Earthsea. That would be hard to live in earth sea like it's it's like it would be hard to live on anaris um it's like i mean that being said anaris is it's at least ethically less concerning than the current world um but based on the fact that we never hear an artist mentioned at any other time throughout the heinous cycle other than in that book i think we can maybe make a sad conclusion about what might have happened to it um

i have always thought that the avatar the last airbender setting would be pretty okay to live in um okay post post fire nation conflict now here's the trick the books are pre-fire nation conflict yeah so does it count have to saddle you with kiyoshi okay well that's not good then because that that's that time period is awful that time period is the worst um so like the more i haven't read the yang chen one yet so yeah and i don't i i honestly was surprised that like i only recently realized that it was existing um but i mean just to be basic i'd have to say, even though life in a Norris kind of sucks. At least there's like solidarity. Yeah.

Which is something dramatically lacking in current world existence. Sure. So if I could be a if I could be a landowning hobbit. I said roughly the same class of Pearson you are right now. Dang nabbit. I mean, being a renting hobbit doesn't actually seem like it would suck as a day-to-day life. That's true. No, it's still not that bad.

Like, there's problems, but it's not that bad. The one hobbit i wouldn't want to be is like ted sandyman it's like you could running the mill sounds annoying you could coin toss me on anaris or living in the shire sure as a hobbit this is the order we went in before so i'm just going to go to trevor next Okay. So on one hand, I contemplated picking like a low fantasy or near future sci-fi setting where I could just cop out and just continue living in the real world.

It's just me, but in the future. But, huh. I'm going to be honest, most sci-fi is really where stuff is really sucky. So that's kind of the thing I was weighing is because like on one hand all pre-modern settings suck because living before electricity and plumbing sucked um on the other hand sci-fi exists to talk about horrible fascist dictatorships.

And terrifying capitalist machinations that make your life worse. And honestly, you know, and I feel like this is slightly less of a technically there are books than avatar because there's just so many books i kind of feel like the star wars universe because sure like depending on the time period you hop in there's a giant fascist empire or a crumb there's always a giant fascist empire well yeah because apparently we only have stormtroopers now and it just gets reborn and recycled forever um like in the in the the real version empire and stuff real version before you get disney involved there's like this wonderful golden age that's where all of the books take place after the empire like yeah after you got you gotta live very quickly before the use on vong show up you gotta like okay that show up. You gotta live in that incredibly tiny

you have to live in that incredibly small golden age before trillions of people die. You could live in the good period that is like the High Republic. So that's the thing, which is what the books are doing now. Just be a Jedi during the High Republic and you're fine.

Like, there's hundreds and thousands of inhabited planets in that universe. Yeah. And, like, the books and the movies and the games and everything, they take you to the people and the places who are, like, doing cool and interesting shit and where all the violence is. But, like, you know, for every time Alderaan explodes or... Telos gets turned to glass.

Yeah. Living on Alderaan before it gets blown up. That's the thing. Like, can I go to just like late Republican Alderaan? That seems great. Like, sure, they have like an elective monarchy or something. Or Naboo at really any point. Yeah, Naboo seems like a perfectly fine place to live the only the only disaster in their entire

documented lore is like there was a battle in one field near the capital once like that seems fine i'll have i will go be i don't know a holocaster on naboo and that seems like it would be great being being a holocaster on naboo and like the only piece of real notoriety your planet gets is that palpatine was born there and then like mostly covers it up like yeah and then like people just kind of really don't think about it yeah like too hard i can as long as i live on the far side of theed from where the battle droids land like I like shit I like to think I like to think that that the reason that Palpatine tried so hard to like cover up his background isn't not to give people more power over him but just because his first name is so embarrassing like everyone else on Naboo it's like I really don't want people to

know my first name is Sheev I but I really want that like like like like like how it's like uh like kenobi a star war like a star wars story i want to be sheave a star wars story so i'd say that's a good bet traffic's like you said statistically being dropped anywhere in the star wars universe is probably fine yeah like i don't really it'd be uncomfortable but like if you get dropped in karelia you're just screwed well yeah or if you get dropped on like you know like one of the hut planets or something yeah there were even like also seem pretty okay with slavery existing so yeah sure i mean sure but like in the same way that the you i mean we now. I mean, technically, better than the U.S. is. Like, we have caveats to have slavery in our own country,

and we kind of ignore it in the places we don't control. But like, Padme seems to imply that the Republic is really fucking harsh on it in the places they've got access to. Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the reason that groups like the trade federations no there were some separatists that separated because they were culturally slave owners they did a confederacy they're like it's important to our culture to have slaves we need to break away from the republic that gets talked about during the clone war series like there's like most overhanded metaphor ever the the grand army of the republic and the confederacy yeah all right nicole nicole your turn oh um where you going

part of me wants to say to follow the uh follow the lead of technically or there are books um star trek and all that seems like the most utopian of the potential like you know sci-fi future ones and all i mean at the very least as long as you like live at the heart of the federation and all like on earth um just because like the further you get out you know it was like what they especially like exploring like ds9 and all is like on the borders not that great well it's kind of like star wars that way the closer to the to the heart of the government of the imperial core you live even if you're living on coruscant if you're living way deep in the bowels of coruscant your life sucks oh god yeah yeah no yeah yeah no uh star wars is way more dystopic

just across the board than star trek i mean that's fair um but um if we're going pure books i'm also gonna puss out uh as trevor uh brought up and say like american gods just because yeah no like it's modern day america and all which could be worse could be a lot fucking worse um especially as a trans person and all like any other like fuck fucking you know like the shire or gondor or whatever um i would not have tits or a pussy so this is that's true that's true like i might be a cross dresser and all that jazz but um yeah no um so yeah i'm just gonna say like american gods just because it's it's a it's a urban fantasy setting and uh kind of cool. A little heightened reality. But also I'd have access to HRT and shit.

Alright, fair enough. I'm gonna go the choice we've talked about but I think everyone overlooked for this answer. I'm going to Redwall, baby. That's exactly what I assume is I'm going to Redwall. As a human or as one of the creatures what I assume is. I'm going to Redwall. Trevor would stop talking.

As a human or as one of the creatures. Whatever is necessary. I don't care. Just if I need to be. Cyclopean Lovecraftian monster of Redwall. Look, if I need, I'm like, whatever would make me fit in universe. Like if I need to be transmogrified into a squirrel or a dormouse or something, whatever. But like, I'm living a Redwall, baby.

I get to farm. I get to feast. I get to hang out. That is a good question, especially for the anniversary episode of this podcast, considering what kind of race in Redwall. What creature would you be in Redwall? I'm going to

interject that one and just cut off Darius talking about where he would be. And well, I mean, it's, it's easy. Redwell's easy because like for me as a choice, because if you're like live in the Abbey or near the Abbey,

aside from occasional attacks from vermin hordes, you basically just get to like hang out and farm and like feast. Like everything's fine. Most of the time. I feel like I'd end up being a squirrel. I was going to, if you, I was, if you asked and like feast, like everything's fine. Most of the time. I feel like I'd end up being a squirrel. I was going to, if you, I was,

if you asked me in my, like when I was like a teenager into my twenties, I would definitely would have probably said like a squirrel or an otter, you know, one of the ones that are like really athletic. An otter really. Well, that's just true either way.

But like, um, the dorkiest red wall race no but like i would have picked something you know that was like sort of athletic and you know outgoing and martial and really active and stuff now i'm older and my joints hurt all the time like i feel like i would end up i don't know being like a hedgehog or something. Like one of the ones that just like hangs out. What do you do all day? And I'm like, I'm just here. Like, you know, being like a door mouse, not a door mouse.

I'm not that like sleepy. I feel like I'd be boring. I'd probably just end up being like a mouse or like something like really generic. But if I had a choice, I'd pick like otter or squirrel. Cause that would, those, they seem to be like they're outgoing and athletic and Marshall and seem to have a bunch of fun. So yeah,

let me just be like a, you know, just like one of the forest dwelling squirrels in moss flower that kind of lives near the Abbey that shows up for the feasts. That sounds dope as hell. We should transform. Uh, uh,

what is that? Humblewood into a, a red wall campaign. Oh my my god it'd be so good i could you can play as a hedge you're so cute little hedgehogs dude they got um i mean even in dnd now you've got heroin gone you could be a hair you could easily do one of the other things any of the rest you're gonna answer what you would be in Redwall. Is that just me because I wanted to live there? Probably a hedgehog because that sounds legit. I would be sleepy.

I'd sit around. I wouldn't have much to do, but I would curl into a ball whenever danger approached. Be a cellar keeper. Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, was there like a librarian? Oh, they had. Yeah. Well, it's the like they there like like like a librarian in the book?

Yeah, you have like well, it's it's the like they call it like the record keeper, the recorder. What was he? Well, the recorder was many races. The recorder across the series, the recorder was basically whoever felt like it sometimes was a hedgehog or a mouse or a squirrel or. OK, I would be a hedgehog recorder. Yeah, there was definitely a hedgehog recorder in one of the books. Yeah, you basically just keep the scrolls and take notes and write down what happens at the abbey every day i could do that that'd be a debbie an okay job trevor uh well one i feel like because of the people we are we'd all end up being recorders um that's exactly that's well i don't i

think i might be the exception maybe to being a recorder i might be the otter who just like what do you do i just lift the heavy stuff the other creatures can't pick up but and play with the kids yeah um probably a mouse just real yeah sleepy i i will participate but i'm also gonna to take a nap. Yeah, which is regular mouse. Or sometimes they have door mice, like field mice, like the slight variations of mice in Redwall that are even like sleepier than normal.

Again, Wedgwood has tiny mice people. They're called Jarbean. They're really cute. Nicole? I would go with Bull, because if I remember correctly, they are the only one of them that's actually unionized uh that's the shrews oh the shrews the shrews yes the gorilla union of shrews and moss flower the actual the and in the first book they literally have a union vote in the middle of like a dangerous situation to decide what they're

going to do and they have like a speaking rock that they have to exchange for who gets to take that's right. Oh my goodness. I'm remembering this. Like they're straight up. They're definitely, you can tell that was definitely written by a guy from Liverpool who, who like grew up in the seventies. Like he knows what a union vote looks like. But yeah, I'm picking Redwall. I want to like just be one of the otters or squirrels, just like hang out in the woods and then occasionally show up at Redwall

for a feast it sounds amazing I wouldn't want to be one of the hares though because then you're like by birth essentially drafted into a military where you're ruled over by like an authoritarian badger who might just have a rampage at any point because they feel like it

so no thank you um okay rampage at any point because they feel like it. So no, thank you. Um, okay. Go on to, you can answer both parts of this. I want either one or both a favorite slash least favorite trope, like a trope that recurs in your, in or sci-fi it could honestly just be in your story writing because some of them are greater than the genre excuse me but like what's a favorite or a least favorite trope that you see come up a lot i guess that's a trope by definition but you know what i mean um a favorite or a least favorite like one that every time you see it you're like yes i love this like someone on twitter was recently saying that they just no matter what always love the like

like the wise old mentor character like they're just like i just love an old guy who knows stuff like i've been watching a lot of overly sarcastic productions recently. They do a lot of like trope talk videos where they bring up a trope and we'll chit chat about what the tropes are, what they mean, like how they've been used, how they've been used poorly, how they've been used well. Hmm. I don't know if i've ever if you guys need a second i can i can start this one because i can this one i know the answer to i don't have to think about it i know my favorite like trope i think i know my least favorite trope what is it uh the chosen one i at this point i think i'm just a little wary of it and it's like sometimes i think there are stories like all things there are stories that do it well there's stories that that pull it off fine i like brandon sanderson's work a lot of his stuff has chosen one

esque stuff in it um but i mean somebody has to be joseph smith yeah um but at the same time a lot of times i feel like it gets interjected randomly into something with absolutely no reason to be there you know it's like this could just be a conflict between x and y there doesn't have to be like a prophesized encounter for this to happen it's like the story's already pushing like harry potter like star wars like they they didn't they didn't need it for the story to be interesting he didn't have to be the chosen one he could just have been really powerful and people knew he was really powerful and it went to his head like he didn't have to be the chosen one to do it now of course like the clone wars in the case of star wars does its best to try and co-opt it and make it not suck as much.

But there's only so much you can do once the words have been uttered. Non-movie Star Wars continuing to be the best version of Star Wars in most cases. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it has the ability to be what Star Wars was being an homage to, which was serials. Yes. So your least favorite,

the chosen one. I definitely agree with that. Again, there's cases where I think it's justified where like, I would agree with like the wheel of time. Like that's clearly they're chosen, right? Like the three slash one of them,

but it's also like written into like the functioning of the world that there must be a chosen one and so like that that's that's fine that's cool with me that they're because the whole point of the book it's it's the whole point kind of it's like that i'm cool with but you're right a lot of times it doesn't it's overdone and not necessary. And I think it also gets really tiring if you read a lot of YA. Yeah. Because YA is thick with it. Especially in the last like decade, 15 years or so.

I mean, ever since Harry Potter. Pretty much. YA has been overrun. I mean, whether you're talking about. Hunger Games. Hunger Games or Maze Runner or whatever.

I mean, the Hunger games at least doesn't have an explicit url a prophesized chosen one or anything true true but that one's almost a subversion of it because she's kind of forced into being this i mean you're right that's actually fair she kind of gets forced into it and at the end the really only choice she gets to make is the one at the end so she that shoots coin which is that is actually part of the book yeah that is actually my favorite part of that entire series is that you know they take that chosen one concept and flip it to be one who is chosen but is not for listeners at home trevor's camera just slowly gently just fell off his desk so i got to watch it just this is related to why it was late um but i i agree with you that's now that i think about it

the hunger games is more like you were chosen for this position, not by nature or fate, but by the powers around you who need you to perform this for us. Unironically, I do think that a lot of the core ideas of the Hunger Games are pretty legitimate. I honestly think the biggest problem with the Hunger Games is the second two books.

She was under a time crunch. Well, yeah, that's the problem with almost every ya or almost every series that gets really popular on the first book before the other two come out it's like if you if you have one book that's really really popular the author's gonna get a lot of money for it and then they're gonna get asked by their publisher to do the next one within a year so it's like like this book that took five six seven years for someone to write um they're now asked to write something

of similar quality within a year and essentially george robert martin or patrick rothfuss yeah so yeah unless you can just like fundraise for his charity and then pay his rent off of his charity let's not we're not gonna get into that that's oh i didn't know about that yeah he's doing some iffy stuff with his fan raised money um but no i i yeah i think actually side note my most annoying thing honestly with the hunger games trilogy is that all important events happen while she's unconscious and that's like the author's way of not explaining things is being like i can't it's got knocked out and then when she wakes up someone just explains to her what happened as opposed to showing us what happened and i find i found that kind of annoying by the end of my god katniss is unconscious again cool plot's gonna happen

plot's gonna happen while she's knocked out so we don't get to see it um so that's a a trope you don't like anyone else have a favorite or least favorite trope if no one else has one right away i know my favorite and i think i can give a favorite but it's you guys can go yeah if we want to i'm still working on favorite but if we want to cycle through least favorites first um yeah this is more of a fiction in general thing than any particular genre but the every character has to be paired off by the end especially when it's like a ya novel and they meet when they're 12 and then the story keeps going and they have to stay together because you know one fans are invested in it and two it's for kids so we don't want to portray breakups for some reason like harry potter yeah harry potter uh you know the avatar tv series like you're 13 you don't need to marry that person now i say this as somebody who has been in one relationship since I was 14 years old.

But, like, I recognize that that's not normal. You're the exception that proves the rule. And I recognize that, like, we set bad examples for people around us who looked at us as, like, this, oh, they're successful. That's how I want to make it work and i'm like no we're weird this is not what you want like i think this isn't how it's supposed to happen yeah it's like i feel like especially with avatar i feel like quora does this a little worse than the first one in that like the only pairing that makes it is ang and katara and then everyone else like no i love troubled relationships throughout the rest i i love the idea that because it's very

in character that toff grew up and was like no i'm not gonna hold down a steady relationship but i'll sleep with these people um or or that or that we will like like that zuko like never really mentions who is who he had his kids with yeah that's that's like weird but like he broke up with may and you kind of expected that because may is like really depressing and zuko did not need that in his life anymore oh right and but you know like also yeah he was he was a king yeah and like 17 like that's for your government to function you got to get that moving yeah um the i like honestly i think you know the pairing that you know pairing off the main character at all too like yeah just kind of requiring it almost you know there's i can think of like single digit numbers of stories

that have gotten popular big or successful where the main character doesn't get paired off kind of arbitrarily lord of the rings frodo right like frodo frodo becomes frodo becomes asexual through trauma store stories that are asexual definitely homoromantic either heavily either heavily queer coded or unintentionally queer coded in a way that like there are still relationships or, you know, things that are completely asexual children's media. Yeah. But like, I don't know. One thing that a weird wrench in the works here is the wheel of time where the main character ends up in a, like essentially being polygamous with like three women who all agree to do it with each other.

Like they, the three women sit down and have a meeting essentially. And they're like, we all want to be with this guy. Are we all cool with that? Extremely bizarre. Each, each,

each one of us provides him with something different. Are we all cool with that's extremely bizarre each each one each one of us provides him with something different are we all good with this and they all basically go yeah and they essentially tell him this is what's happening you're marrying her because she's the one that needs to be queen but i'm i'm also dating you still because you need this and she's also dating you still and he ends up just like him and three women and it's kind of not even his choice to do that. They sort of make it happen to him, which is a little weird, I think, for the genre. It's still a weird male fantasy of having multiple wives,

but also at the same time, the wives sat down and were like, we're striking a deal. The only thing that's coming to my mind in just in fiction in general of a storyline with set relationship you know that does have relationships but the main character doesn't just get paired off with somebody is uh horizon zero dawn and its sequel um yeah i don't know if any of you she's too goddamn busy she's too goddamn busy to be but like you know they i was you know intrigued by the people they introduced and then worried because i didn't really like any of them as romantic partners

and i was really relieved at the end of the first game when the only person she seemed to have any real attachment to was that one woman, Petra, who's had the big giant fucking cannon. Aloy does strike me as just being somewhere on the queer spectrum. Oh, she's not straight she i mean she doesn't show any attraction to men through like yeah lots of every dude she meets is like are you into me and she's like no i have to go somewhere i'm just like busy she's like i i'm too busy to be interested in it but i like she she also i just appreciate that zero dawn just keeps the the weird sexualization to like a minimum for the most part for a game

well that's why they didn't make her hot enough for the second game obviously that's why i have to that's why i have to hire fans the ossifier you know what the uh the compromise to not making her hot enough was? They did build an entire nude model underneath of the outfits. And it's funny because I still think that like

because they used a real life model for her. It's like she's still an attractive person yeah did you see the close-up there was hair on her face women don't have oh my god women don't have hair on their face especially not post-apocalyptic women who live in the woods again like that's one of those like things that pops up at all genres of like sci-fi or fantasy where it's like some dystopian nonsense and everyone is like perfectly clean shaven at all times like no one wants to address the fact that that people in a medieval or dystopian setting would be kind of disgusting they're like every every woman in a

in like a dystopian sci-fi has perfectly shaved armpits at all times and you're like yeah the absurd lack of body hair on people in these settings is kind of times and you're like yeah the absurd lack of body hair on people in these settings is kind of terrifying where you're like how do they have razors are they like talking are they like cleaning themselves up every day like obsidian razors man obsidian people are extremely hairy the only fantasy that that only fantasy that like addresses this directly that I can remember offhand is Aragon. The Inherited series talks about him. It talks about him learning to shave with magic because when he first gets the powers, he's not old enough to need to shave. But eventually he is.

And there's a whole scene of him learning to use his magic to shave with. So like it's explicitly said that people take care of that stuff either physically or through magic and it's like all the elves all the elves are hairless because they use magic to get rid of it yeah so like they actually way to go christopher paulini for addressing that explicitly which is which is a weird little twist on the very classic Elven feature of not being able to grow facial hair. Yeah. Which, I mean, Tolkien just says that they usually don't because Círdan has a long beard. Yeah.

So it's like, but that's more like a Forgotten Realms later thing with the hairlessness. Kind of jumping back to K kethos least favorite trope the after they introduced the chosen one concept you kind of have to keep making more skywalkers yeah because which sucks which the whole thing in theory they have to bring balance eventually sucks which the whole thing about theory they have to bring balance eventually it's like i get why you can't do if you want to keep telling stories yeah so they don't and they just keep fucking it up i get why um they didn't they couldn't do the thrawn trilogy as the sec as like the sequel trilogy because all the people that we required to play those people are way too old now um or dead in the case of a few um which is a shame um but it's like it's like there's there's so much there ahsoka tano series it's coming

and like like that's going to be the best freaking thing that's come out since and it's all because and and this is my issue with the sequel trilogy and it's like it's all reacting to something whereas dave filoni showed with like the clone wars that if you embrace something being what it is and then build off of that you can make it better yep yes um i'm trying to think of my least a least favorite trope for me honestly that one i hadn't thought of yet was the thing that least favorite i mean i maybe i went off on it talking about the like i was thinking about it because i was thinking about The Witcher before is I really, really don't like sexual trauma as like a motivating, like an instigating force. I feel like that's almost more of a theme.

It is more of a theme, but they're like – but it's the like, oh, this is a badass woman now. Why is she badass? Well, it's because she got assaulted before in her life. And so now she's strong now and i'm like like i just that i mean in some ways if it's done right and if it's written by someone who knows what they're talking about again it can come it can come out more of like a success out of like adversity out of adversity and like moving above and beyond it. But that would only really come out good if it was written by someone who knew and experienced these things.

So it's like it, when it, when it's written by someone like Sapkowski, like you're like, you've never experienced this before. Like, why are you writing about this so flippantly? Again,

it's what all of these tropes can be good when used properly. That's why they exist. Yeah. Again, exceptions that prove rules. Yeah. Exceptions that prove rules. Like, I would say that, like, the whole, like, so this, you know, this woman got assaulted and now she's strong and icy is like a cheap. Like, there's other ways to have people,

characters. And it mostly exists in fantasy and fiction written by men. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's true. Let's flip it around. Let's talk about favorite tropes. Now I know you guys were thinking about it a little bit.

Since I answered last, I'm going to go ahead and tell you my favorite. I want to call it a trope. It's more of like a, a scene, I guess that happens a lot in movies or movies or stories. I am a sucker, an absolute sucker for like, like a, like a, like a death and glory final stand scene. You know what I mean? You know, like the, the, you know, the, the, the old, you know,

it's some, a lot of times it's an older guy, you know, or like, you know, some old retired warrior or something, you know what I mean? The, like, there's no hope for my survival, but I'm doing this as someone else has time to escape, or I'm doing this to like a macro level. That's kind of like the last charge of the Rohirrim. Yeah. I mean, that's it explicitly like, like, like they, they, Odin does it twice.

He does it out of Helm's deep. Yeah. The out of Helm's deep. I actually like the out of Helm's deep one more. Cause it's like more specific to Theoden. Yeah. It's like the out of Helm's deep in the last ride of the, in the ride of the Rohirrim. Like it's like,

dude, you have to be a King again because you've been kind of sleeping on it. Yeah. But that, like that sort of like death and glory final stand like this this is going to kill me but it's the right thing to do so i'm doing it anyway even though it will like almost necessarily result in my death i don't know why it just gets me every time ironically that does happen in the rise of skywalker yes sort of sort of well yeah like everything else in that film it's like a

botched version of it the botched version of it but like i don't know what it is i know it's like you know it's it is a trope but that trope gets me every time i don't care like they do it it happens multiple times in like the red wall books. Like a character will sacrifice themselves to like let their friends escape. It's almost like a core theme of the book as like loyalty to one's friends. Like loyalty to one's friends. And like you're being more important than like your life. Yeah. Like there are things that are more important than you personally.

And it's like the – not the mission but like the safety of the community and your friends. And that just gets me every time. I don't care what book it is. That always gets me. And anytime like, you know, I'm inventing stories. I'm always like thinking of a way to fit that in somewhere. Like my long running IRL D and D campaign, I managed to get in an NPC doing it to save the party at one point. And in my head I was like, yes made it work i did it it was an

npc they liked yeah i had them sacrifice themselves so they could escape and i felt so good about making that one work but that is my last dnd session a cab driver died because i fucked up so you know things go good, things go bad. But yeah, that sort of like sacrificing yourself for your friends to escape in time or for, you know, the necessary good. Like, I don't know. It always gets me. Someone else.

Favorite. Favorite. Things we love to see. Hard into the trope category here with a specific character trope that I never knew how to put a word to but again recently been watching a lot of overly sarcastic productions videos on youtube which you should all definitely check out they're really really good if you haven't watched any um

but they just did they did a video a while ago but i just watched it called uh crouching moron hidden badass um where where it's like either a character that is really not very smart but actually is kind of a badass or someone who's pretending to not be very smart and is kind of a badass where you could talk you could even mention someone like iroh um where you could mention someone like iroh pretending to be like an old man when in reality he's like gonna pull out some crazy ass the entirety of Kung Fu Hustle it's like I actually like

the more I thought about it after watching this video the more I thought about it after watching this video I was like that is actually really funny and really great it's almost like the Shonen protagonist thing but I like it when it's actually really funny and really great it's it's almost like the shonen protagonist thing but yeah i like it when it's less annoying than that but um but it's like my one of my favorite anime is mob psycho and mob's kind of an idiot he's kind of an idiot

but he's the most powerful psychic in the world like period i mean that also kind of applies so good that kind of also applies to uh one punch man it well it was same guy oh is that the same creator yeah he wrote both of those i can't remember the character's name from one punch man um i might say i like mob like actually more by a pretty significant margin but um it's still it's still good saitama that's his name yeah saitama where he's just saitama's just a dude he's just a dude but he can totally kick ass um and it it's either it's either that or controversially um the queer coded villain um i know that it's kind of a harmful trope like it's a problematic fave but but like no one's gonna be able to keep me from liking like hades from disney's animated hades or or uh frankenfurter from like, you know, Rocky Horror Picture Show or like all these other like I.

I love them. I love them so much. That's one of my favorites, like the Hades from the Disney animated Hercules. It's such a good character. He's so much fun. It's just fun. It's like, I don't even really like my favorite tropes are just things that make

things fun. And like, I don't know. I, I like, I like both of these tropes a lot. I say crouching more on hidden bad-ass because it's a little less problematic at points.

Yeah. But it is a good one i mean technically you could put most like himbo protagonists in there it's like that could be goku yeah exactly goku is goku is goku is dumber than a bag of rocks dumber than a brick like goku got like tricked into getting married because he didn't he didn't understand the concept yeah yeah that's that's exactly one of the examples they use where they were like your main character can be the most powerful person in the universe but not really know what marriage is um and it's it's just but I like it more when it's done kind of like Iroh yeah it's

like it like an almost intentional so you mean Master Roshi yeah it's like it's like a wall of i'm senile i'm stupid yoda in the like at the beginning yeah so in the beginning he's acting like a senile old man and then you find out actually he's one of the most powerful jedi way better yeah like seriously like this man could fuck you up um but he chooses not to because he's a good person all right trevor nicole good tropes if you don't like any of us if you can't think of one that's fine we won't judge you too much i can say that i appreciate when people don't kill kill off their queers when that when that happens the rare times that have it occurs um yeah i mean like

i like the the the trips of like acceptance and stuff like that and blah blah blah like i i really can't think of anything specifically off the top of my head that that jandy nelson book doesn't kill off its queers that that jandy nelson book gets this close to killing off its queers and then doesn't. Hey, wait. So the book about queers, there's a lot of edging in it? Weird. Oh, no. No, it just has trigger warning, you know, suicidal thoughts.

We just have the feedback loop. This is a feedback loop. Trevor, you got one? I don't know if it's a trope so much as kind of its own sub-genre. I just love a good revenge quest. I keep thinking

more of Avatar, and I just think of the Southern Raiders as soon as I hear revenge quest. Yeah. Yeah. Just I'm good, but I let, here's the difference between,

and like avatars, a kid show. So there's some reasons there. Yeah. You can't really, but like, I like when they get the, they get to do the revenge quest.

Like when they, you know, you, you know, John wick, you killed my dog and I am just going to kill all of you like i it's just you know it's a fantasy of this thing that you can't do because it would be psychotic but like it's almost entertaining storytelling and you know like i love like mob and pirate stories and stuff like that too so like you know it's all like you stab me in the back i'm gonna fucking hunt you down like it's just extremely satisfying i love i love someone posted on twitter a while ago they were

like john wick is just um uh can he kill all the guy can he kill the guy and it turns out yes he kills all the guys that's john wick formula and keanu reeves keeps turning down offers for more expensive more value like more financially lucrative films just so he could do more john wick because he loves doing it i mean he's done so much gunplay training at this point, it would be a shame to not get to use it. It would be, and it's still so badass. Oh, yeah, I mean, I do love them, because it's kind of got that feel of just, like, just 80s action film,

but with better production and better, like, politics, to a degree. Like, it's not as, like, nearly as... Neolib. What? Neolib. And, like, you know, just, like, toxic masculinity. 80s, extremely Reaganite, that's right. Yeah. And just, like, knowing the fact that, like, the director of the John Wick films is...

Was, like, I think, either the assistant stunt coordinator or some shit like that. Yeah, he was the stunt coordinator. On The Crow. And with... Well, I mean, he wasn't the guy in charge. But he worked on that production as stunt coordinator and all. And that's

one of the reasons why the John Wick films, they never have a loaded gun on set. And all. Yeah, because that's trauma. It's why like the john wick films they never have a loaded gun on set and all yeah because that's all added in production yeah and they're just like yeah no we're we're not gonna run that risk and all alec baldwin yeah i was gonna say ring ring take some notes alec yeah um but just yeah no it's the simple fact that like it's all done really well and ken reeves is a fucking badass i love and just like an from everything I've ever seen about him, just an awesome human being and all just like apparently the nicest dude and all.

No, I was thinking about what you were saying, Trevor, about these like revenge quests. And I admit that I do, it does feel a little cheap sometimes that there's like a revenge quest where at the end, the protagonist like gets there, like kills a bunch of people like goons or whoever to get to the final boss.

And at the end is like, I'm a good guy. I won't kill you. I'm like, you killed all of his underlings. My entire problem with most video games, uh, like just kill it.

Like you murdered every nameless goon all the way up through this, like, you know, skyscraper of doom. And now you're going to get the person who's actually most deserving of it. You're going to kill the guy who set the whole doom skyscraper up. Like I, from,

from Ketho re bringing up avatar and talking about this, like kind of feeding into a second least favorite just let just let your characters fucking kill people let them kill people yeah i tried to save that they're they're killed like they're killing people because you know you watched you know even like the 90s children's cartoons where like they're not allowed to say die on screen but like they're still throwing people in trucks off of mountains it's like well that guy's dead and you'd like batman arkham batman arkham games where it's like you don't kill anybody but you grab a guy you slam him into

like a 10 000 volt freaking yeah power break his spine and you're like this person is dead yeah yeah batman being the whole like we don't use the weapon of the enemy. We don't need this. And yet, literally everyone he lays his hands on is at the very least got traumatic brain injury, if not just completely dead. Yeah, it's the idea of a pacifist superhero doesn't work if your superhero is not a pacifist. Yeah. It doesn't work. Oh, no, you don't use guns, but you fucking snap necks.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing like i love the watching the playstation spider-man games because the first one they they didn't implement these sticking people to walls when you throw them off of buildings very well so unless you were watching they just plummeted to their deaths but also like you wrap a web around somebody's neck and just yank them back i'm like well you decapitated that man and in the second one you get the younger teenage protagonist with miles morales running around electrocuting everybody yeah it's they're all dead you're killing all of these people yes they're all dead yeah it's like that's that's one of the few like instances where i really appreciate leguin's pacifism because her characters are actually if they're pacifists

they're actually not going to hurt anyone yeah just if you're gonna have a uh i i don't do violence character don't make them someone you can't have a like i'm gonna non-violently beat the shit out of you in reality you can't have a a character who doesn't want to kill people and thinks killing people is wrong but uses violence continuously to achieve their goals because if they're beating up a lot of people even if you're just thinking of batman in the like basis sense where maybe he'll just punch people it's like you're still gonna accidentally one day give one of these people something terrible that will probably kill them yep so it's like

there's like that happens not infrequent there was like was a story from a little while back in the uk where a pounce a bouncer punched a kid and the kid just died yeah yeah i mean that kid deserves like all violence comes with a chance of death. Yeah, no. Like, I remember it was like in the last month or so because, like, the kid who died was like this douchey little fucking, like, upper class, you know, shithead. Like, the bouncer wouldn't let him into the club or something

and then he's like, you'll work for me. It was basically, from what I remember reading, like a case of talk shit get hit and he got hit. Yeah, and he died. It's like even in fiction, even if we're talking like fictional martial arts systems, like an avatar, like chi blocking,

which is like you can see it almost as like a purely defensive thing. Yeah. Like even when it's used offensively, it's purely like hitting pressure points if someone falls and smacks their face on the ground the right way they might just be dead yeah so it's like it's like people are extremely fragile so even in the instance of i'm just going to stop you from being able to do violence you might accidentally cause them to die so i mean this goes down a bit of like a thematic rabbit hole but in the avatar series and i don't think they came they had this idea by the time they

when they introduced chi bach chi blocking originally but they kept using it afterwards so like taking away somebody's bending ability is kind of their substitute for killing characters until you get to core and like you have a double or you have a murder suicide on screen and you suffocate a woman to death on screen in an air bubble the suffocation one is pretty close to it is the most violent one but when plea dies later in that season i was about to say there's a woman who blows up her own head in that season yeah like like like one of the beifong twins like sisters runs out metal bends things around her head right as she's about to combustion bend and it's like it cuts away and you just see a smoldering like pile like and

you're like jesus christ i love i've actually i was actually watching it while cleaning the house last night and season three of that show is fucking nuts. It's nuts. And it's easily, it's the only season of Korra where I'm like, this is as good or better than the original show. Like, it's just so absurd. My only problem with it is that the bad guys are just anarchists. Yeah.

Yes, they are. The bad guys are just shitty anarchists. Well, they're, you know, they're 19th century Russian bomb-throwing anarchists who were like, if we just kill all the presidents, then the world will be better. I'm like, well, no. No, but I mean. The power structure is still the same. You killed the queen. She has a son.

Like, it just. To be fair, they do spend a decent chunk of that trying to find the son to kill him. True. All I'm saying is, it's not that we shouldn't do that. Just there's other things you also have to be doing. Okay, like, you get the opportunity for the people to, like, loot some of the stolen money back. But, like, okay, now the government just reconstitutes itself and moves on. You need a more complex plan.

Yeah, it's like everything. The upsetting thing is that Zaheer is so smart otherwise that you're like, you would have thought of a better plan than this, dude. You are way too smart for this. I mean, I'm on. Sorry, I was going to say, in a lot of shows, whenever they do like anarchist, like villains, they like have to go out of their way to make them,

to make them either cruel or stupid. Oh yeah. Like the Captain America. Like Flag Smasher. Yeah. Like Flag Smasher is explicitly like an anarchist. It's like in the comics is like, I don't like the USSR or the US. That's the whole point. But like, they't like the ussr or the us that's the whole point but like they have to go out of their way to make them like evil because otherwise

they're like and make them do heinous evil things just like it's it's like the kick the dog trope like you have to make them kill a puppy because otherwise you don't know how to make them look like bad people because you can't really it's their motives breaking institutionalized oh yeah no like this person's entire like stance and motivation is hey things are fucked up and if you go down that route and follow it to its logical extent it's like, oh, wait. Maybe they have a good point. Yeah, they have to. The thing is, is that they always have a good point, but they have to make them extremely evil in order for someone

to justify returning to the status quo because it has to be returned to. That was... In the Captain America show, like, I didn't even particularly dislike or disagree with them after they blew up a building with people still in it. I was like, okay, that's not good,

but that's the only crime they really, that's the only violence to innocence they really commit throughout the whole show? I'm like, it happened one time. They're way worse revolutionary movement kind of part of actually like kind of like the first spider-man the vulture i kind of think he was like kind of he's fine he just steals shit from the u.s government because they stole from him because tony Stark quite literally stole his potential livelihood from him. Also,

it's like fine. You can just, and he, and the only person he kills, he kills entirely on accident. I want to do just a few questions left. We'll do them. Should I do them a little faster with less diversion?

We'll do them a little, just more of a quick fire round. I don't believe you. Yeah. Shut up. You're going to have to shut me up. This first one we've already touched on it, but up. You're going to have to shut me up. This first one, we've already touched on it,

but because we referenced it, I want to get it done. Problematic fave. Author slash series. I think for Unicode, we might just go ahead and say Lovecraft. Yeah, pretty much.

We already pretty much covered that. For me, I already covered it. It's Michael Crichton. Like, I love his books. Even in the books that don't talk about it. He's really racist against the Japanese.

He's was, he was a climate change denier. He testified before Congress saying that climate change wasn't a thing that we, that the science behind it was bad and fake. He's a bad person. And I'm glad he's dead, but I'm still going to read his books. All right. Ketho or Trevor?

Problematic fans. Ketho, do you want me to go while you're thinking about it? Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to have a good answer for this, but keep going. It's Le Guin because she was a pacifist. I'm just kidding. Okay.

Mine's Orson Scott Card, author of, amongst other things, enders game series um which is the thing i've read by him i haven't read what is his other uh foundation no foundations he was um what eaters of the speaker for the dead well that's that's more oh that's part of it he's got got another more space epic sci-fi series. And actually a pair of books that are more in line with his actual political views that I've read. But the Ender's Game series specifically is the thing that I like from him. And he's a massive homophobic piece of shit like donates to conversion therapy camps with all the money he makes off his books piece of shit um and that's rooted in mormonism i guess

and there's hints of that in the enders's Game series. Like there's some weird religious baggage that he includes. Because like one of the most evil things the government does is limit the number of children you can have. Which, yeah, also bad. But not for those reasons. And like bans religion. Which, also bad, but not for those reasons. Again, it's my problem with Michael Crichton and his voice characters.

You've identified correct problems, but your solutions are stupid. Because I don't even think, like in the presentation of that point in his books, I don't think they banned religion. They just, as part of the population thing, banned Catholics and Mormons from having ludicrous numbers of kids. Like, that's the real beef that he has with the government that he invents for his books. and that's not but like none of those views about homophobia and like bigotry are really expressed in the books they're actually kind of the opposite they're about building kind of a more before like the interconnected world the the mormon church didn't explicitly make a statement

on gay marriage until like the 80s or 90s like explicitly because it hadn't been like a thought yet really like it wasn't a big enough thought and most of his books came out after that though and so not so so yeah exactly that's what i that's what i mean is that beforehand he had never expressed any and in fact hadn't even when in fan interviews and in conversation had never expressed any expressed ill will towards the gay community until the mormon church made an official declaration on it after which he was very hardcore about it so i don't know if he never was or or it's just kind of like quiet about it. And then once the church said something, he doubled down.

Or if when the church said something, he felt like he was obligated to, to feel that way. I mean, um, I'm sure there's a bit of a combination, but you don't go from, Oh yeah, no, you don't go from like, From not having an, from not having an opinion to donating millions to conversion therapy just because your religion has an official stance. Yeah, I know. That is a leap. That's just something he wasn't open about until the church essentially gave him permission to be open about it. Yeah.

Honestly, I think the books following Ender after Ender's Game get a little ridiculous and esoteric, like progressively more from Speaker for the Dead to, what is it, Children of the Mind is just nonsense. Like it's impossible to follow what, there's a sentient race of bacteria coming to destroy the universe that they have to stop and they go into ender's mind and by doing that they create younger clones of his siblings like it's the tail end of that part of the series is very weird it's like getting it's not like

getting for that's like getting like three books into the dune series where eventually you're like i don't even know what's less well written yeah less well written but like you know what i mean eventually get to the point you're like i don't even know what's happening anymore there there are cat people and i say i must say frank herbert's a little less problematic than what's this oh yeah yeah i just meant i was talking more like plot wise where eventually story progresses to the point where you're like, what's, who? He turned himself into a worm? I mean, to be fair, one of the series I'm going to make you finish, one of the series I'm going to make you finish, Ket, though,

is the series from A Wrinkle in Time, where they do eventually enter Charles Wallace's mitochondria to like talk to his cells to get because all the parts of his cell aren't acting in in harmony anymore and they have to get his cellular bits to work in harmony so they can heal the sickness that is killing charles wallace which is a micro version of the macro darkness that they fought in the first book. Also, there's the book where they go and get horny for angels. That one's in the middle. Being out of frame.

I'm going to... In the realm of Orson Scott Card, have any of you read the Shadow series? No. Oh, Under Shadow? Like, I know of it, but I don't think I've... So it starts with following the character Bean in Ender's Game, just like in parallel, what is his story

through the same events of the first book. But then it becomes the story of what happens on Earth between the final chapter of Ender's Game and the epilogue. Because that's like, that's like a five, five or seven year period or something like that. It skips there in which the political organization of the world gets rewritten and Ender's brother becomes the new president of earth.

The, and that's, you know, where you would think you'd get into some of his real life politics. And it's all about tearing down the military autocracy. governing them and preventing cultures from expressing their uniqueness because they needed it for military unity which you know that is something i can't imagine a global authoritarian power doing being like no no you can't express anything divergent because none of you get along when we let you do that which is which is a thing in the real world but like large parts of that

series involve like letting indigenous societies create their own countries and you know you know like it's good they're mostly good politics if you're gonna have states like it's it's a very weird series and very fun political drama this is the thing that i feel like about leguin and the reason that i want to read like more cock and like is i feel like only if if there is like a new status quo at the end of a series with world war z with orson scott card with like all these other authors it's just like here's beautiful perfect neoliberalism working fine and you're and it's like and it's like this is the problem in the first place um and i appreciate the fact that someone like say leguin has enough i don't know imagination to be like what could a better world look like at the end of this

um if not just better more robust neoliberalism yeah not just better more robust neoliberalism what could it look like that's not that um and we will actually execute on that whereas i feel like so many of these other things like as since becoming an anarchist is like actually really depressing when you get to the end of a book that you really love and their new status quo is just kinder neoliberalism and you're like what that's some people that's the extent of their imagination like that's all the further you could go um so do you have a problematic fave catho or all your or all your authors perfect uh i mean none of them are perfect but like the more i like think about it it's like i feel like my problematic faves are like not that problematic it's like it's fair um especially not next to like lovecraft or card um so it's it's like i don't even really have like a michael crichton level like

where his books are really well written and usually just enjoyable but he's kind of a libertarian um like i feel like i don't know somebody like i don't i. Somebody like, I don't, I haven't read enough Margaret Atwood to call her a problematic fave. She's not that problematic either. Um, well, she's only become more problematic in like the past, like two years because she's being pulled into like the gender critical orbit.

So it's like, it's like, like, like she's a British woman over the age of 27. Um, of course she's going to end up being a TERF I like I thought of like I really like a lot of Joyce Carol Oates short stories um she's not really that problematic she's just weird on social media pictures of her feet and her keyboard she's just really uncomfortable on social media but her short story is pretty fantastic

if you're on twitter you should follow her on twitter it's great you can see some really messed up stuff um ernest ernest hemingway yeah he's not he's it's not that problematic yeah product of his time product of his time he's fine all right we're gonna do harper lee harper lee was great until she wrote finally finally wrote a second book. Well, then everyone was like, because she was senile and someone tricked her into writing it. Yeah. Okay. Finishing it.

Final question. This is it. It's an author that you love, that you think not doesn't get as much love as they deserve. Like someone that you've read and you really like that. You think not that like you can easily find another fan of, but you know that like people might not originally think of like, you know,

it's like maybe underappreciated or someone that you feel like you haven't found anyone else who has also read their books or not many people. That's what I want to know, because this can be like a suggestion for any listeners, whether it's some, and for me for future episodes, because I'm shameless. I've got one that I've only read a couple books in, and it's really weird,

but the first book in the series is really good. The problem is, I think he's really, really popular in britain just not as popular in america that's okay we don't live in britain um uh peers anthony um on a pale horse is a really good book it's been a while since i've read it um like i was in high school so maybe if i go back and read it now, I wouldn't like it as much. It might, because I wasn't, again, very politically minded. He might be terribly political in a way that is really bad. And I just didn't notice.

But in high school, I really enjoyed the first couple books of that series. It's like the incarnations of immortality. Since starting to watch Sandman, it kind of reminds me of the same basic background premise where you have like these entities that govern aspects of humanity,

but instead of like the Sandman, where if one of them dies, they probably die and terrible things would happen. In the case of where if one of them dies, they probably die. And terrible things would happen in the case of the other one. If one of them dies, it become the person who killed them becomes them. Oh, it's like the Santa Claus.

So it is like the Santa Claus, but the first book is a man essentially killing death and then becoming death. Point of order. Something similar happens in Sandman, not to give spoilers. Better not be to death, because death is precious. No.

It needs to be protected. Yeah, no, like the endless are endless. Yeah. So if one aspect dies, yeah. A new aspect will emerge. Yeah. But it's like, it gets really freaking weird though, as far i know as the series goes on like war dies and is replaced um i'm like you

get into like really esoteric stuff like unlike the sandman where it's like desire and dream and and all these other it's like god like this is satan um you become like some mortal is them and or it's like you're reading an entire book from the perspective of this incredibly um disconnected creator thing and so this is, which series again? The Incarnations of Immortality. Again, I've only read the first two books, which I think is Death and War being the two, being the primary

beings of each one. But the first one is really, really good. On a Pale Horse is really fantastic. Again, read it in high school so do not blame me if it has bad politics in it i just didn't notice awesome trevor or nicole do you have one um i would say the only one that comes to mind not that I would necessarily be like

more people should read this just because it's not bad his books weren't bad by any means but I've definitely evolved past the politics and position that he espoused in them

but like Daniel Quinn Isinn uh ishmael story of b etc and all like when i was a early teen and all um i came across that man like it sort of like introduced me to basically the you know the ideas of basically that kind of like undergird anarchism to a degree and all of that sort of like social philosophy i mean he's kind of malthusian to a degree so yeah um but um yeah no just sort of like introducing me to ideas that were like oh yeah no the status quo not that great and there are better ways to do things and stuff like that and all um yeah yeah i've like felt i haven't met too many people and all like you know kind of yeah awesome trevor it came to mind uh isn't strictly in your genre wheelhouse um but then again i do need to coordinate with you darius about actually recording about this um is gorvidal uh the

historical fiction writer um and political fiction writer. His modern politics books, I mean, he was, are just written by somebody in the seventies and eighties and you, that's kind of what it is. But his historical fiction stuff is really, really, really good. And does a lot to explore like how ancient people interacted with their own philosophy and you know how people who would not be talked about in you know recorded history or you know the history that people in the ancient world bothered to write down interacted with the world around them and

they're extremely well researched so they're you know actually useful ways to interact with the topic yeah the big ones are creation which is about yeah starting with the persian empire and then traveling through china and india and the other one's Julian, which is about Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor who tried to go back and go back to paganism after Christianity. But to do it, he had to kind of invent a pagan church because Christianity had created organized religion in the empire for the first time.

And he recognized that was useful. just didn't like christian philosophy so he wanted to go back but kind of restructure things around a polytheistic canon which would have been really interesting if he had not been killed yeah well uh don't go riding into battle not wearing armor uh that's the lesson to take away they're also a good choice typically yes that's absurd look a lot of the roman emperors were absurd yeah this is the type of question where uh normally i would say people should listen to Robert Evans after the revolution and or read it because now it's in print but I'm sure with the audience of this show I'm kind of preaching to the choir on that one yeah you could listen to it you could read it it's good there's a sequel coming eventually the guy's got a lot on his plate uh jesus god the man runs like five podcasts it needs that's why he brought like four other people in

to be to be on there to like do episodes without him Um, for mine, uh, on other people. So there's this guy called the Jolkin Rolkin Rolkin. I'm kidding. It's not going to represent Tolkien. Um, so I'm going to say, I'm going to say two. One of them I think is really, I guess, overall really popular, but I've never talked to anyone else who's really ever read her books. And that's going to be Anne McCaffrey who, who did like the dragon riders of Pern.

I know that generally they're popular and sold well and well received and stuff, but it's not one I ever, a series I ever see people like talking about. Does that make sense? It's not one I hear a lot of discussion about. And I loved, I've read all whatever, like 11 of them that there are. I loved, I read the one Dragon Riders book for a class in school.

And it was one of the only books I ever read in school that I loved and then sought out the rest of. It was because in it, she has like sort of the mainline stories and then there are like little sing standalones or trilogies of like sub stories from within the greater arc and i read one of those in school and i was like i need to read everything this woman ever wrote um they're basically fantasy story they're basically like fantasy sci-fi stories despite what anne mcaaffrey herself might say about what genre they are.

They're all basically fantasy stories until you read the book that like explains how the world started. And then you like realize that it's actually sci-fi and not fantasy. But you don't know that until you read Dragon's Dawn. So like you think you're just reading a fantasy book until you read one of them and you're like, oh, it's actually sci-fi. So it's a little weird, but I love Anne McCaffrey. People should read all of her books. They're very good.

And there's a lot of them. The world building is great. The politics are interesting. I love them a lot. For one that's more for like kids, like this is more for really young people. Like I wouldn't recommend necessarily someone in the like 30s read it for the first time unless you just want like a fun easy read i love all the books by lloyd alexander um i don't know if a lot of people have read them he has a series

called the chronicles of pride and which includes the the book the black cauldron which got adapted into a poorly received disney movie uh, animated Disney movie at one point. Chronicles of Pride and are great. The chosen hero is just a pig farmer who has one pig who is like a famous pig that does prophecy when she feels like it. And his master is like a really old wizard. You've got other fun tropes in there.

Like one of his companions is the prince of a realm who just doesn't feel like being a prince. So he runs around like doing adventures, being a bard most of the time might sound familiar for people who have read other stories. You know, he's got like, there's a female companion who he sort of rescues at first,

but not really who ends up being a hero in her own right. The Chronicles of Pride and are great little fantasy stories for younger people. But if you've never read them, there'll be a fun, easy read for you. Lloyd Alexander also does, um, historical fiction, I guess you want to call it. He has a whole series set in like this fake what i would call like 1800s european kingdoms area where like you've got people with guns and riding horses and still using sabers and stuff but it's a whole series about the intrigue of one um fake european kingdom that's sort of what i'll call that like 17 1800s level. But it's all fiction.

It's in a fake fantasy world with fantasy places and stuff. But it's all very good. I read them all when I was younger. So people should check those out. Blade Alexander, lots of good books. I did just think of something that I do want to shout out. I assume nobody else here has read it, so there's not a ton for us to discuss about it. I assume nobody else here has read it, so there's not a ton for us to discuss about it, but a young new author named Jordan Ifueko has an ongoing series called Raybearer. pretty standard format ya chosen one story at its core but it is set in a world based on west

african history and mythology um from yeah and if you couldn't guess from the last name of hueco from a young female black author following a young female black protagonist um that's just extremely well written and a good way to expose people to a kind of historical setting and mythology that they're probably not already familiar with especially because you know with so many tolkien rooted things that we talk about here that it's a different take on that kind of fantasy world oh yeah we're actually um just recently where uh kathleen and i were talking looking at various lists of books and stuff and specifically attempting to branch out into a lot more non-western uh canon because that's obviously a blind spot for ourselves. I can speak for myself

saying it definitely is and that's something that we know we definitely need to do better at. And there's a lot of good options out there. So thank you for shouting that one out. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. I hope it was interesting. I know I had a lot of fun. We talked about Star Wars a lot more than I thought we would.

And Avatar. Avatar came up a lot. Well, here's the thing. Avatar is a great thing for exploring tropes because there are, there's every single trope under the sun you can find in Avatar. I swear to God. I just, it just clearly our touchstones for like the four of us as a group are like

Avatar Star Wars. I'm just like, those are like the touchstones that sort of co the four of us as a group are like avatar star Wars. I'm just like, those are like the touchstones that sort of coalesce this group as a whole. Um, so the final episode announcements, again, you can follow us on all of our social medias off the hand, uh,

Twitter handles for all of us in the description. You guys should listen to Trevor's podcast, the history of Persia. It's really good. It's actually well-researched unlike some other podcasts you may be listening to. Has actual facts sometimes. Sometimes it has historical things from sources who are like, I had a dream that told me how the battle went, and I wrote it down.

And now people assume that that's how the battle went, which I do enjoy, though. Trevor, you know, you your Greek historians who are like, I had a cousin who had a friend who was there and he told me this is how it went down. And you're like, this is completely made up, but I appreciate it. a financial plug but i'm about to launch into a a patreon series on fictional portrayals of the persians uh before modern times and i'm gonna try and cap that off with an episode with darius we're talking about we're gonna cap it off with an episode about uh snack ciders 300 i'm kidding i've got review i've got reviews of those on Patreon. They're available for free. I know.

My Patreon. I've listened to them. You can hear me rant about how terrible the second one is. Oh, God. Is it second 300? There's like three of them. They're all very good. 300 Rise of an Empire.

Extremely fascist. Oh, yeah. Oh, and, you know, to uh that trope darius mentioned of using rape as a plot point but instead of making did uh did what's his name make the those films no he's not involved and actually they're nominally adapted from a second Frank Miller comic, except Frank Miller actually incorporates the criticism of 300 into his writing for the second one. And it's much better.

And the movie does not. Please listen to Trevor's podcast. You can both, we and Trevor have Patreons. Trevor has a lot more on his but we're doing better we have more episodes up we actually just did a patreon episode recently about everything everywhere all at once which is all about existentialism and nihilism and the what the internet is doing to our brains it was a really good episode um i enjoyed that quite a bit for everyone yeah i liked the little clip that you put on teaser yeah that teaser was good because at the end of it i called ain't rand

a piece of shit yeah i cut it off at a good point um the other thing we're doing for anyone doesn't know yet if you follow our twitter i'm going to start regularly posting a new pin tweet that just says all of our upcoming episodes in roughly in order so if you want to read ahead and read them for books you haven't read before you can can do that, which means that upcoming, our next episode is going to be on Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. We are then going to do the second of the Earthsea books. We're going to do Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin. We are then going to be reading the essay by Michael Moorcock called Starship

Stormtroopers, which is an essay he wrote about the essential inherent fascism that creeps into fantasy and sci-fi. That was his critique of like, of, of, well, Tolkien and a number of other mainstream authors about how fascism creeps into our, into our fiction. So we're going to read that. So I hope you guys look forward to that. Thank you all for listening.

Have a good rest of your day. Uh, and you know, get ready for Jurassic park because boy, do I have a lot of things to say about Michael Crichton. Oh buddy. Spoiler alert. Every change that Steven Spielberg made was good. Goodbye. Bye. spoiler alert, every change that Steven Spielberg made was good. Goodbye. Bye. Bro. Are you fucking real man come on