557 – Wishes in Fiction
Description
Normally, you can’t just wish for a story to be good. But if that actually works, then watch out, because you’re almost certainly in a morality play about how something you get without any work isn’t actually worth having. That’s just what wishes are usually used for in fiction, and it’s our topic for today. We’ll discuss earning a wish, the difficulties of wish contracts, plus the one time a wish-horror movie turned into a rom-com.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melaine. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So, right at the top here, I’m going to rub my magic lamp here, and I’m going to wish for a great episode. And that’s going to work, right? It’ll be very satisfying.
Chris: I don’t know. I think you should just wish for more wishes.
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: And then you can wish for a great episode.
Oren: But what if the wishes are granted to me in a way that fulfills the wording of what I said, but not what I wanted to happen? Ooh, I should probably write up a contract.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: So today we are talking about making a wish. Usually in fantasy, although I’m not opposed to a sci-fi wish granting thing, that’s always possible, too.
One thing I think is very funny about wishes, is that they basically work the same way that your character getting anything works, which is that if it doesn’t feel like it was earned, it will be contrived. The only difference is that wishes remove the requirement that the thing they get be logical, because a wish sort of by its concept can be anything, but in terms of how it’s satisfying it still has to be earned the same way anything else would be earned. Like if your character is going to win first prize at a baking contest and they just wish for it that will be really unsatisfying, but it would also be really unsatisfying if they just barely tried and their cake was the best cake. Even if there was no wish involved, either way, you would have a satisfaction problem.
Chris: I would say if a wish just doesn’t fit the setting, then it would feel very contrived that, oh wait, my character can just wish for something. But I think in a lot of stories where there are wishes, the story is about wishing because it’s such a big deal, and this is really a karma problem. Again, your character needs to get good karma and then pay off that karma to earn their victories. But what happens when a character gets something that they have not earned is they actively get bad karma except for Aladdin should have gotten bad karma. because the genie totally cheated him. I’m sticking to that.
Oren: Hot take. Hot Aladdin discourse 2025.
Chris: But in any case, however, there is an exception to this because it works karmically, selfless wishes totally negate this, or they need extra effort if you want them to do bad karma. Basically, what always happens is that the characters specifically wish for something for their own gain, personally. And if they actually wished for world peace or something that was fairly selfless, then there usually has to be another element if you want that to accumulate bad karma because basically the good karma of using a wish for a selfless purpose would negate any bad karma that getting that without earning it would bring. So, you can still have that be something that comes back to haunt them if there is a sign that that’s extremely careless. Like they’re just wishing for world peace on a monkey’s paw, right? And they’re told, no, don’t wish for things on the monkey’s paw. And they’re like, “No, I’m going to do it.”
Oren: I’m gonna!
Chris: Hey, monkey’s paw, gimme world peace. Okay, in that circumstance, you would still expect that to have a terrible outcome, but basically for this to work, and usually wishes are a set up for them to have something bad happen or take their wish back eventually, you need them to do something for their own sake.
Oren: Right, and this is another way in which you can see that wishes fundamentally don’t work any differently than any other way the character gets something, which is that they start at the beginning by getting something they didn’t deserve. And then the story is about the consequences of that. That’s how you make that satisfying. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Chris: Although you could have a story where they do something really great, earn lots of good karma, and then their payoff for that is that they get one wish.
Oren: Yeah, I mean that’s sort of what happens at the end of Aladdin, although he is wishing for the genie’s freedom, but like the genie is getting something out of it. And you could argue that that’s sort of the genie’s wish.
Chris: Right, so he makes a selfless wish to free the genie, and then that creates good karma for him and then he gets good things. That were not just the genie being free.
Oren: Yeah, because he gets to be in a relationship with his girlfriend, right? Which is what he wanted from the beginning, basically.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing that gets me about Aladdin’s wish is that he wishes to be a prince and then instead of that going wrong in some way, the whole problem is that he’s not a real prince. It’s like, what do you mean he is not a real prince? He wished to be a prince. This is an arbitrary social construct based on class suppression. I don’t see why he isn’t a real prince.
Oren: There’s just so many questions. Like, okay, is he a prince of something? Is there a country that he’s the prince of now? I have so many questions.
Chris: Yeah. Do we just like create millions of people for him to rule over that did not previously exist? Do they remember their previous existence? Do they know they just popped into existence?
Oren: Did the genie just like supplant him, find some other dynasty and send them to the cornfields, and now he is the prince of that area?
Chris: Or they suddenly remembered that they have an additional son?
Oren: One of my favorite tropes is the wish contract. This is a thing you mostly see online where people are like, “Well, I could defeat the monkey’s paw by clever wordcraft.” But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really work that way because the whole point of contracts is not to magically bind people into following an arbitrary set of instructions. The goal of contracts is to have a clearly laid out agreement where the responsibilities of both sides are enumerated so that there is less chance of there being a misunderstanding. And that’s why we need courts to interpret them sometimes because no contract is perfect. No contract can foresee all situations.
That’s why smart contracts don’t work, one reason they don’t work, it’s because you can’t do contracts by flowchart. Whereas these magical wishes kind of assume they work like smart contracts. So, a smart contract is a software concept. The idea is that you can program a piece of software to decide when a contract has been fulfilled and release the payment. It’s this idea primarily popular among libertarians so that you could have contracts without needing a state to enforce them. We see a lot of blockchain people talking about them, or at least you did.
Chris: And this software is just omniscient? Just magically?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Some person would still have to tell the software what’s happening and that could be messed with.
Oren: Right, and you are seeing the problem w
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