Show Notes

• Tension





• Agency





• Children of Blood and Bone 





• The Devils 





• Suicide Squad 





• Inverse Ninja Effect





• The Blade Itself 





• Fourth Wing





• The Ghoul





• A Fire Upon the Deep

Transcript

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

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

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So for this story, I’m gonna be talking about some really cool, dark, exciting things. Like there’s gonna be body parts and people burning to death… No one we care about, of course.

Chris: So does this story introduce new characters because it killed off all the old ones?

Oren: No, I just told you, it’s not gonna happen to anyone we care about.

Chris: Ohh, I see.

Oren: I’ve just gotta introduce a bunch of randos, and they’re all gonna die horribly. And that’ll be really exciting, right? That’s the same thing as tension.

Chris: Yeah, sure. Are we also gonna have our protagonists participate in a big tournament where they’re in a lake? And it’s full of slaves that are, like, drowning around them, but they’re just trying to win, and they don’t care about the slaves?

Oren: They wanna win. You know, winning the slave murder cup is important to them. [laughter] Don’t worry, we’ll say that there’s a thing they need that is in the cup, and there’s nothing else they could do to try to find another way to get it. It’s just not possible.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there’s just slaves dying everywhere, but they can’t do anything about it anyway, so…

Oren: Yeah. So enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading. It’s Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which is basically Suicide Squad, but in fantasy, is the premise. I did see some Redditors complaining that this book has Joss Whedon dialogue, which is just the perfect example of brain rot in literary discussion. Because now any book where the characters are irreverent and sarcastic is labeled as Joss Whedon dialogue.

Chris: That is giving Joss Whedon way too much credit, okay. He did not invent being witty and irreverent and self-aware.

Oren: Yeah, no. If characters make fun of the thing they’re doing, you have to pay Joss Whedon money. [Chris laughs] He invented that idea. No one else has ever done it. It’s just Joss Whedon. I just find that very funny.

But, an actual problem that this story has, with some minor spoilers, is it has a serious tension issue, which you wouldn’t expect from Abercrombie, because his stories are really dark and full of death and murder. So how could there be a tension problem? And it’s because of the thing I just mentioned, or that’s one reason. There are others. But for this podcast, the reason is that when we have these big fight scenes where there’s lots of blood and guts and death, it’s just happening to somebody else. It’s like we give them a bunch of disposable guards so the guards can all die badly. And I’m just sitting here being like, okay, when are we gonna get through the nameless guards to someone who actually matters? And it takes a while.

Chris: And again, there is also the inverse ninja effect.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right? It’s just, when you escalate everything so soon, and again, it does feel like the guards were added just so that they can all get killed, but that also just makes people more meaningless, and pretty soon you have to add more and more fighters in all of your scenes. Because we know that having fifty people around doesn’t mean anything.

Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s another problem with this story is that after the first fight, the actual suicide squad, not just their nameless guards, is basically invincible, we’ve established, because they’re so powerful. So later on, there’s problems where it’s like, “Oh no, some bandits attacking us!” It’s like, yeah, I think your invincible squad of fantasy superheroes can probably handle it. So that’s its own issue, but it is weird. It felt like they were given these guards and then we had to contrive a way for them to be ambushed, to get rid of the guards.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: But I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the other way around. The guards were put there so we could have a bunch of nameless mooks who could die horribly.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, knowing Abercrombie. [laughs]

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, I’m not familiar with this work, but I still remember in The Blade Itself, he has a whole POV from a torturer guy.

Oren: Yeah. Although, I’ll give him credit for this, at least in that POV, he was willing to have bad things happen to his POV characters.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: He wasn’t just inflicting it on nameless mooks. That torturer character has been himself horribly tortured, and is like all kinds of messed up from it in ways that you don’t normally see fantasy heroes get messed up.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: He doesn’t have, like, cool badass scars. He has ugly, seriously debilitating scars. You almost never see that. And I didn’t enjoy that book, but I did respect Abercrombie for being willing to do that.

Chris: I mean, if you go dark, then be dark.

Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel. If you want this level of darkness, you should be willing to inflict it on your main characters. Am I going to enjoy that? No. But I’d rather have that happen than just cooking a bunch of extras in the background. [laughing]

Chris: Yeah. You know, as opposed to Children of Blood and Bone, which is what I was talking about earlier with the tournament where the slaves are dying all around them.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: That was one of the books that inspired me to write by post on grimdark sauce,as I call it, where it’s weird because the scenery is extremely grimdark, but the story itself is not really dark, because nothing bad happens to the characters that you are actually following and actually care about.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That’s the one where when they need to escape, it feels like all of the soldiers attacking them just, like, pause so they can climb on the back of some giant cats and get away.

Oren: Yeah. And that one is weird too because it does things like assure both the characters and the reader that, like, her grandpa will be okay, don’t worry about it. Which is kind of at odds with how dark everything else is. And, spoilers for later, but it turns out that’s wrong. It turns out their grandpa is not okay. And also then the protagonist eventually does get captured and tortured, but – by this point we’re so late in the story that now this feels like a jarring change. Like the story is breaking its promise to me, but also she is remarkably unscathed from her bout of horrible torture. Like she has the standard cool fantasy hero scars from horrible torture. Not the, like, this person’s body will never be the same scars that the guy from The Blade Itself had.

Chris: Yeah, so in any case, let’s talk about the difference between darkness and tension.

Oren: Yeah. There is something