Show Notes

• I Wish the Ring Had Not Come to Me





• Workshops of Empire 





• Star Trek 





• Space Sweepers 





• Andor 





• The Acolyte 





• Superman





• Dune





• History of Voting Rights





• Curtis Yavin





• Nettle and Bone 





• Collective Action in Stories 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: So, I’m not gonna do any meta jokes this time. It doesn’t feel right for this topic that we’re gonna be covering this time.

Oren: Yeah, well sign of the times.

Chris: Sign of the times. I know.

So, yeah, just in case you’re not an American and you don’t follow American politics—which feels like everybody does, given that we’re a superpower. So yeah, we’re not in a good political situation right now. We’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian takeover. And when I say attempted, I just mean we don’t know whether or not it will succeed.

Oren: Yeah. I would like to live in less interesting times if I had that option.

Chris: Yep, yep.

Oren: [snickers]

Chris: I feel like that scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo was like, I wish Bilbo had never found the ring, and I wish I’d never had to take it. And Gandalf’s like, We don’t have that choice. We can only choose what to do with the time we have.

Oren: Yeah, I wish certain Lord of the Rings quotes were less relevant.

Chris: [laughs] Yep. But anyway, there is hope. There is! Cause we don’t know what’s gonna happen.

And our stories do matter. We may not have money, but we do have cultural influence, each one of us. And we know that our stories matter because there have been cultural forces and times in America’s history where people have aimed to stop storytellers from engaging in political expression. In particular the Cold War period when everybody was terrified that if writers talked about politics, we would all become communist. This was a real thing where apparently a lot of creative writing programs and universities were started to try to create writers that were American to counter Russian writers.

Oren: Well, Russia did have a bit of an early lead in the literary legacy department, so we needed to catch up.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So yeah, people think our stories matter because they do matter. But even with some of that resistance to adding politics to our stories, we have some great political stories.

I think Star Trek in particular is a notable beacon of political storytelling, especially since it was written for everyone. We also have some really heavy reads of dystopian literature, but I love it when stories that are really pulpy and engaging also talk about politics. Which is one of the cool things about Space Sweepers.

Oren: Before we get into the specifics of how you might write your story for a given effect, I do wanna say something that I think is the most important thing. If you’re trying to resist with your storytelling in any way, which is—if you don’t listen to anything else we say—is to not capitulate in advance.

If you were thinking of writing a gay character or a story where an evil dictator gets eaten by piranhas or something, and now you’re like, oh, I don’t know if I should do that in the current climate. The most valuable thing you can do is to do it anyway. And I’m not even saying you should do that, cause that’s not always safe for everybody. But if you’re trying to resist there is.

Chris: What we need the most right now is to normalize resistance and courage and to persist in using the freedoms that they want to take away from us. And then encourage everybody else to do the same.

So, we don’t even need to change minds. We just need to bolster the courage of those who already know and care about what is right.

Oren: Yeah, and that is the other thing, right? People are always wondering, what story can I tell that will convince people that fascism and bigotry are wrong? I’m not gonna say you can’t do that, but I will also say that it is just as if not more important for stories to energize people who already think those things are wrong.

Your story might not change anyone’s mind. It’s very hard to change people’s minds. But it might make people who already feel that way more likely to do something or normalize the idea that they might do something. Stuff like that.

Chris: Yeah. As they say: fear is contagious, but courage is contagious too.

So that said, let’s talk about, what can you do? There’s lots of different things you can do. And you can do whatever fits you, whatever fits your story, because there’s tons of ways to resist.

So, you don’t have to go immediately to writing about fascism. If you are really passionate about history, and knowledgeable about history, and that’s something that you’re really interested in doing, that’s fine. But that’s also something that is very intense. It takes more knowledge. It’s gonna be trickier. Don’t think that if you want to write something in resistance to fascism, then you have to depict fascism. You don’t need to.

And in many ways it’s better to start with the positive.

Oren: That’s the Star Trek way of doing it, right? It’s like, Hey, instead of having an episode where Uhura has to overcome racism to become an officer on the bridge, we’re just gonna show that she’s an officer on the bridge. No big deal. That’s just how it is.

That was a pretty powerful act in the sixties. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal that was at the time, and to a certain extent how big a deal that is now.

Because what’s the funniest thing to me about right-wing reactionaries is they get so much angrier about a visible black person than they do about a story straight up telling them they are evil. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

The amount of rage of something like the Acolyte, which to be fair did turn out to be bad, but there was rage about it way before that, right? Just because there was a trailer where there was a visible black woman that drove them into a froth compared to Andor which is a story about how they are the bad guys and how they’re evil. And they actually like Andor. Not universally, but in right-wing spaces, Andor is pretty popular. It’s wild to me that that’s how the dynamic seems to work.

Chris: Yeah. It is interesting that many people in the alt-right have sort of embraced this idea of evil trolls as part of their identity. It is weird, right? You would think that nobody would wanna identify as evil. And I’m not saying that all fascists think that they are evil, but at some level they’ve chosen to embrace that.

And this is why, when you do depict fascists, one of the tricks is, you don’t wanna make them look cool. A lot of times we like to have cool villains, but when it gets a little too close to home, then we just don’t want them to look cool anymore.

Oren: yeah

Chris: Which complicates this picture. But I mean, at least now we have an example since the fascists here are all a bunch of clowns.

Oren: They are really bad at everything.

Chris: [laughs] They’re rea