533 – Characters With Nothing to Do

The Mythcreant Podcast

Protagonists are the most important character of their story, and characters do stuff. That’s pretty much their whole thing. But what happens when important characters have nothing to do? Why are authors always making this mistake, and what can be done about it? Obviously, the first thing to do is record a podcast; maybe that will help.

Show Notes

• Agency
• Wolf Pack
• Name of the Wind
• Revenger
• Kochab
• Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
• Alien Clay
• The City in the Middle of the Night
• My Lady Jane
• Space Opera
• Amphibia
• The Ministry of Time

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Emma G. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: So, there’s a problem for the podcast that we have to solve. But if we did anything, the problem would just be immediately over. So, I guess we probably shouldn’t ’cause we don’t wanna resolve it too quickly.

Chris: Maybe we could just talk about resolving it and then not actually do it. Or maybe ask questions about what weird thing is going on here? We don’t know. Could be anything.

Oren: We could talk about how we need a plan.

Bunny: That’s true. We do. A plan is what we need.

Chris: Or we could just come up with really bad plans and then fail at them continually.

Bunny: I don’t know. I’m still stuck on the fact that we need one. A plan, I mean.

Oren: Yeah, do we need a plan? We could have a committee to make a plan.

Bunny: That always works.

Oren: Or occasionally, maybe we could just ask our super cool dark boyfriend to solve it for us. Thanks super cool dark boyfriend!

Bunny: Oh, that was easy.

Oren: Solved.

Chris: He’s such a killer, but with me he’s super gentle.

Bunny: You think you fixed him?

Oren: So, today we’re talking about characters with nothing to do, which is a thing that happens a lot and has also happened in a lot of the books I’ve been reading recently ’cause I’ve been reading books that we think might win a Hugo and… they trend in certain directions, I’ll say that much.

Bunny: All the thinking, none of the doing.

Oren: Not universally, it’s just I’ve noticed a pattern in books that tend to be nominated for and then sometimes win Hugos.

Chris: Look, it’s actually not hard to write a book where characters do nothing and just philosophize all the time. It’s just not very good and that’s why people don’t do that.

Bunny: Yeah, turns out that’s really boring. I don’t know. I can also make up a fake philosophy and then talk about it for chapters upon end.

Oren: All right, so the first thing is we should talk about why do we end up with books where the main character has nothing to do? Not just books, occasionally TV shows and movies too. We don’t discriminate here.

Bunny: I feel like it is less likely to happen in something like a movie, though.

Chris: A movie doesn’t have very much time, so if the character has nothing to do in a movie, it has really failed. I’m not saying that can’t happen. I think in TV shows where there’s usually more time pressure to come up with more material and there’s more constraints for how many characters they have to include and whether those characters come back or not and how many episodes they have to produce… I think that’s just easier to happen on a TV show than a movie. I’m not gonna say it couldn’t happen in a movie.

Oren: Yeah, I would say that just based on my experience, it is least likely to happen in a movie, more likely in a TV show, and quite likely in novels because the more time constraints you’re under, the less likely you are to have your character hanging around for long periods of time just musing about things.

Bunny: I think the one, the version of a character doing nothing or who has nothing to do that’s ubiquitous across these three mediums is the kind where the main character just runs after someone else who’s doing the things. In which case things are happening but this character has nothing to do.

Oren: Yeah. You know, there are things occurring. I mean Twilight’s a movie, right? Not just a book. So, it has the same problem that the book does. So, there’s something – this is just about the time commitment – but often the reason is that there’s just not really a plot. Or there’s not enough plot, like the plot is really thin. So, if the main character did anything, the plot would immediately be over, there’s only one thing to do.

Chris: Yeah. If the plot is it’s a mystery that’s too easy to solve, for instance, or it’s too easy to solve, period. I think the issue in Wolf Pack, which is a TV show where it’s got 14 wolves that just twiddle their thumbs until episode seven out of eight. Which is a really long time and there’s several reasons for that. But one of the reasons is if, again, miscommunication is not really a good obstacle when you have a high stakes story.

And if everybody who wanted to, again, there’s just one antagonistic werewolf that’s going around killing people. If everybody who are all the protagonists just got together, they just clearly outmatch that one wolf. So, they have to drag it out so that they just don’t do it so there isn’t any standoff because we don’t have anything else for them to do.

Bunny: Have fewer wolves, that’s our advice to storytellers.

Oren: Just not as many wolves, please.

Bunny: There are too many wolves.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, if they had more antagonists that could be one way of dealing with that. The other problem with this show is that there’s a little lesser, there’s supposed to be a lesser antagonist. I mean, she’s supposed to seem like it, but she’s not really an antagonist. And that’s part of their problem is that she’s not actually gonna do anything bad. She’s just gonna ask questions and we’re supposed to feel scared.

Oren: Yeah, well, she’s adult Buffy. She’s a little… she’s kinda menacing.

Bunny: I mean, the just-asking-questions crowd can be pretty frightening.

Oren: Oh my gosh. Oh no.

Chris: But yeah, adding another antagonist sometimes, right? If you’ve got a big bad, have a lesser antagonist that protagonists can interact with and overcome. If you have a mystery, you can add more red herrings. Or add some complications to the protagonist, divide their loyalties a little bit. Give them a dark secret they have to deal with.

Oren: Just make the plot a little meatier, you know?

Chris: Yeah, you have to make the situation harder and put in more obstacles and create more structure there. Which again, if you don’t have practice, it is a little tricky to figure out how you do that, right? You can’t just make the conflicts longer. You have to make them more complicated, too.

Oren: I also realize I’m doing this in the wrong order. I should have been establishing, ‘Why does this matter?’ ‘Cause it’s not like there’s a universal law that says characters have to do things. There’s reasons why it’s bad.

Bunny: Why can’t the character sit on their hands and do nothing?

Oren: Yeah, I realize that seems-

Chris: No, it’s a valid question. I mean, if we’re talking about how stories work, we really do have to explore those basic questions because they have the key to other, more advanced questions.

Bunny: Yeah, we’re just asking questions.

Chris: Oh no.

Oren: We’re also answering questions ’cause we know the answer to this one, which is that if the main character isn’t doing anything, the story’s boring. It has no movement and it probably has no tension because either the character’s not doing anything and nothing bad is happening, or we’ve just been assured that the bad thing is a hundred percent going to happen and there’s nothing the character can do about it. In which case, tension is still low because there’s no uncertainty.

And to be clear, when I say do something, I don’t necessarily mean run around with a missile launcher, okay? There are many different versions of doing something.

Chris: In Wolf Pack, there’s one episode where they all just spontaneously start running. The teen wolves. So, they can meet each other out in the park. And then they just have a conversation about what’s going on. And then they just all go home again. I mean, that’s technically something they did. They ran, their eyes glowed, you know, it was a thing.

Bunny: They had a little extra budget. Gotta make that money worth.

Chris: But we’re talking about, honestly, it’s all about trying to solve problems. It’s all about actually having a situation, a problem, that evokes tension, and then the protagonist’s job is to try to solve that problem. And they can succeed or fail. They may win some and lose some but that’s what creates that structure.

And even if you have a tense problem, if you spend long enough with a protagonist just sitting on their hands doing nothing… at that point, the problem should have some level of urgency. So that if they do nothing, then the bad guy wins. Right? Or the disaster happens. So, if we watch them do nothing and continually nothing bad happens, well then that must mean that the threat isn’t really threatening and it doesn’t matter. I think Name of the Wind is a great example of that.

Oren: Yeah, it is. Which is funny because Name of the Wind is not the kind of book you think of when you imagine a story where the character has nothing to do because it’s all about how amazing and great he is at everything. But he just hangs around the magic school forever and nothing happens. He is just there.

Chris: It’s one of the few books with a candid protagonist and not enough agency, I think.

Oren: Yeah, it’s real weird.

Chris: Real weird. But, even in the prologue – it’s 50 pages – the framing device. The putting up the framing device. We have a situation where these spider demons are threatening the town. We make it seem like a big deal. And then Kvothe just hangs out cleaning his inn and doesn’t really do anything. It’s like, okay, I guess..?

Bunny: Hey, that’s doing something. What if the inn was dirty?

Chris: It’s like, okay, I guess those spider demons aren’t a big deal after all. They haven’t come yet. We’re not doing anything, so…

Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it. And if you do create a compelling, tense problem and then your protagonist just hangs around not doing anything. That’s like, congratulations, I’m really frustrated with this character now. Did you want that? I don’t think most authors want that.

Chris: Right. So, yeah conversely, if a disaster happens because the character sat on their hands and did nothing it’s really frustrating and people will hate that character.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna read about that character anymore ’cause they seem like the worst. And even in the one that Bunny talked about, which is the possibility of the protagonist who is sort of following around people who are doing stuff, I’m then left with like, ‘Why isn’t one of them the main character? It feels like they are actually who the story is about, but for some reason you didn’t wanna focus on them? Why not?’

Chris: Yeah, I just did a critique of Revenger and that has, I know that there’s plot plans for them later. But it opens with two sisters and one of them is the viewpoint character but she’s just a bag of nothing. It’s like she’s not even there. And then there’s another sister who is completely driving the story. It’s decided, ‘No, we’re gonna ditch this lame party and we’re gonna go on an adventure’. And it’s just, why are there two of them? Why isn’t there one of them?

Oren: Yeah. I mean, in that case the reason why there’s two of them is because, so the one who actually does things can get captured a ways later and then the rest of the book is about trying to save her. So, I assume that’s supposed to be an arc, it’s just not a good arc.

Chris: I think what we could do instead is combine them and then when she goes on the pirate ship, we can introduce a likable character there that is a later damsel for her to rescue.

Oren: Yeah, I think that would work fine. That book in general just has long periods where the protagonist doesn’t do anything. In the first part it’s because on their initial space journey, they were hired to operate this magical skull that no one ever uses and it does nothing useful ’cause it’s like a communication device in a setting where no one ever talks to each other. So, that’s pretty worthless.

And then after the sister gets kidnapped, there’s a brief period where, now the main character’s doing stuff, but then she gets kidnapped by her dad and has to be like ‘flowers in the attic’ for a while. And then she eventually escapes and we kind of keep going as if that didn’t happen. It’s like, oh well, that was unpleasant. That was a deeply unpleasant few chapters. Moving on. It’s like, I guess she’s very resilient.

Chris: We’ve gotta go to torture town.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just really infantilizing. Like, no you can’t do anything. You’re gonna be a child forever. Literally, ’cause we have drugs that do that and it’s like, okay, well this sucks. I don’t like this. Where are we going with this? And the answer is, we’re eventually going to get back to the original plot.

Bunny: We’re going nowhere. We’re going to forget it ever happened.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s just kind of a mess.

Chris: Yeah, I mean that sounds partly like the issue of having a protagonist that just doesn’t have any way to contribute. Right? It’s like when you have a normie who’s surrounded by all these great heroes and you’re like, wait, how do they make a difference as a normie? And we talked about this a bit in our agency episode and it has a variety of solutions. You can give them a special power, is just one of the better ones. Get rid of some of the powerful allies or make them less powerful. Send the protagonist off on their own.

You can create problems that are uniquely tailored for the protagonist’s background or where they come from or other things, but you have to think about how big are those problems? How much of the story are they gonna take up? Because if you have one solution that lasts for multiple problems, that’s the best.

Bunny: I definitely had the character who’s supposedly the main character running around after another character problem with a graphic novel I read recently, which is also a web comic. I think you can read it all for free – called Kochab – which is a gorgeously illustrated, beautiful graphic novel. And man does it need that beautiful drawing because the plot is pretty thin.

Oren: It’s a good thing you’re pretty, web comic.

Bunny: Yeah, web comics should smile more. Again, great art style, I can’t recommend looking at the pretty drawings enough.

Oren: Yeah, it’s very pretty. I’m looking at it right now. It’s like, wow, looks gorgeous.

Bunny: It’s gorgeous, yes. I have a signed copy of the book. It’s very pretty.

Oren: Oh, now they’re kissing. Oh, wow.

Bunny: They do kiss. They do have a smooch. Spoilers! But the plot starts with Sonya, who’s the one in furs and stuff, skiing away from her village. And she goes too deep in the woods and her skis break and she stumbles upon this magical palace. And inside she accidentally awakens Kyra, who’s like a fire spirit. And then the book is mainly about Sonya following Kyra around as Kyra grumpily tidies up the palace. Sonya can’t even get too far from her because she needs to be nearby to stay warm because it’s the icy depths of winter and she can’t even help with the tidying. Kyra just kind of waves and magics the rooms into being nice and tidy.

Oren: That’s nice. That’s convenient.

Bunny: Yeah. I think the intention of the book is that Kyra is opening up after having experienced a tragedy with the last mortal she fell in love with. And I think the author thought that was enough – like their banter and stuff as this all is going on – to keep the plot moving, but it was just very ponderous.

Chris: Yeah. It’s hard to deal with those stories where the storyteller only wants to focus on the healing and doesn’t wanna focus on any actual problems, right? It’s like, you can have a story about healing, but if it’s only healing and we don’t have any way to create tension or structure, then it does become a very slow story.

Bunny: And then at the end, we have a very sudden, ‘Oh the ice spirits are now busting into Kochab’ and Kyra fights them. They don’t even notice Sonya, which, yeah, of course not, it’s a big spirit battle.

Oren: Sudden burst of violence at the end. Every frickin’ time.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. And I mean, okay, again, I see what the author is doing. We want Kyra to eventually leave the palace because she’s self-isolating or whatever. It’s a metaphor. But yeah, please, I like Sonya. Give her something to do.

Oren: It feels like the way you would do that is that there would be ice elementals, they’d be doing bad stuff and Kyra would be like, ‘Uh, what’s the point? I can’t do anything’. And Sonya would be like, ‘Well then I’ll stop them’ and go out and fight the ice elementals. And then the ice elementals are gonna do a murder on her. And then Kyra’s like, ‘Oh no, actually I do care about something’, and then uses her powers. Right. That feels like that’s how you would do that ending. I don’t know, maybe that’s basic.

Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know. In this case, the ice elementals, they bust in and they’re like, ‘Thanks Sonya for distracting Kyra, now we can wreak havoc’. And then they battle.

Oren: Yeah, I would not have done it that way.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: I do notice that this page has animated snow falling. So, for the print version, do they send you a new page every day to put in with the snow in a slightly different position?

Bunny: Oh, not every day. It’s every couple minutes. You flip through it like a flip book.

Oren: The one that I find interesting is when the author creates a problem that is too big for the characters to realistically do anything about. And then we just hang around until some late point in the story when something happens and now we can deal with it.

Chris: Like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms?

Oren: Um, is Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that way? It’s been a long time. I honestly don’t remember.

Chris: It’s pretty similar, although I would say it’s a manifestation of a different thing that causes this problem. But why don’t you give your other example and then we’ll talk about it.

Oren: All right, well. Spoilers! This is for Alien Clay. Which is a more recent book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think this one is on purpose because the main character is a scientist who gets sent off to a labor planet by an authoritarian government. Good thing we don’t know anything about that. And so he hangs out on this alien labor planet for a while and they talk about how much it sucks to be here and how much the government sucks. And it’s like, yeah, okay, I believe you, I know. And you’re just waiting! You’re going by and they’re like, yep, this is bad. And they’re hanging out.

And then eventually, near the end (big spoilers!), they become a hive mind because of the life forms on the planet. And then they defeat the bad guys. Super easy, barely an inconvenience, ’cause they’re a hive mind now. Which is good, I think. We’re supposed to think that this is good and that anyone who isn’t evil would love this.

Bunny: It’s boring propaganda!

Oren: Yeah. It’s like, no, sorry guys, I don’t want this.

Bunny: I think that’s a little spooky.

Oren: There’s a lot of people who aren’t evil who I don’t want be in a hive mind with. And the book claims they can’t actually read each other’s thoughts but they’re so good at reading body language, they might as well be able to. It’s just like, great, what you’re telling me is I basically have no privacy. This sounds bad, I don’t like this.

Chris: So, the characters are just waiting around for the alien consciousness to adopt them?

Oren: More or less. Yeah, I mean, bad things happen, right? At one point they get sent out on a dangerous mission into the wilderness, but the dangerous mission is just them being like, ‘Yep, we’re probably gonna die’. And then they start walking back and you might expect that this would be a tense survival scenario and then at the very end the planet would help them? But no, it just dryly describes how they walk back and how it kind of sucks, and then they become planet hive minded and we’re good. Good job everybody.

Bunny: How is it a hive mind if it’s just being good at reading body language? I thought the hive mind is meant to be the mind part?

Oren: So, the story is kind of vague about the terminology. I’m using the term hive mind. It doesn’t use that term. I’m using that term because that’s how they act. They act like they’re all in sync. They’re all perfectly coordinated. They can all tell what each other is going to do. To my mind that’s a hive mind. Whether or not they officially have telepathy or not, it’s ’cause they all have alien spores and stuff in them. And yeah, it’s a little weird.

At the end the message is bad ’cause the message is basically, ‘You can’t defeat authoritarianism without alien help’, which is a weird message for 2025, friendo. I don’t like it. And the story is also really boring, so what was even the point?

Bunny: Yeah, I feel like there’s something that could have been done there to build up to that a little bit.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, what you would theoretically do is the bad guys would have their own alien bullshit that they’re using. And then the heroes would try to do things to overcome it and fail until they get the help of the good alien stuff, right? That’s theoretically how you would do this, but that’s not what happens.

Chris: Or, at least in The City in the Middle of the Night they have some traveling to do.

Oren: Yeah, they do have to travel.

Chris: That one also doesn’t have enough agency but at least they have something to do in general. So, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has- I don’t remember the main character’s name but basically what happens is that she is the granddaughter of the emperor and her mother married somebody she was not supposed to, making her out of favor. And so, I think it’s after her mother dies, her grandfather calls her back to the capital to compete as a possible heir to the throne?

But the entire idea is that this is some kind of punishment and she doesn’t actually have any chance of winning. Right? So, at first it’s really tense. And usually if the author tells you, ‘Oh, she has no chance of winning’, you’re like, sure, she has no chance. Wink, wink. But no, Jemisin, that’s not what she has in mind.

Bunny: Would be shame if this plucky main character, underdog, upset the order of things.

Chris: So, she’s just out of her depth and doesn’t even really try and instead she dinks around. She does have a hot love interest she falls in love with and kind of pokes around ’cause she wants to know what happened to her mother but doesn’t really have any bearing, right? If she investigated her mother and it felt like it had some relevance to whether she won this contest. Because everybody who doesn’t win the contest dies, I might’ve forgotten to mention that.

Oren: Oops.

Chris: So, she just twiddles her thumbs, and I think that’s because – spoilers – Jemisin wanted her to fail at the contest. And now again, we know that that doesn’t mean that she can’t try and she can’t do things that later pay off even if they don’t cause her to win. But I’ve seen this pattern before where storytellers… and we had this in My Lady Jane too, which is not the only issue with My Lady Jane as a TV show.

But when a storyteller looks at a sequence of events and they’re like, ‘Okay, well Lady Jane has to get married, but she doesn’t wanna get married. Well, I guess I’ll just negate her will’. And she fails at everything, nothing she does matters, because they want an outcome that is a failure. That doesn’t have to be that way. You can still have the character do meaningful things, even if they fail at their one thing that they want, they can accomplish something smaller that matters later, for instance. Or, they could make the situation better. Maybe it was gonna be even worse before. Or they could do some other goal that then backfires and causes the problem. There’s a number of ways to still have the character do things if they fail.

Oren: Or if you want them to really fail, they can make things worse. That’s also acceptable. It’s just super weird when you watch that show and realize that most of the episodes would be the same if the main character was asleep the whole time. Not all of them, but most of them.

Chris: Just the definition of having no agency. You could just replace her with a sexy lamp.

Oren: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms that you mentioned reminded me of Space Opera with the music contest to save humanity. Where they’re like, ‘Okay, you guys have to win this music contest. And that’s gonna be impossible because you’re just two washed up musicians. You’re not even good musicians’. Because apparently in whatever year this takes place, Earth has no good musicians left. So, they just send these jokers. But everyone else is playing with super alien tech and psychic powers and it’s just impossible for you to do any of those things, so you can’t win.

But then there’s this funny part where they acknowledge they don’t have to win, they just have to not come in last. But then they just ignore that, they don’t mention it again for the entire rest of the book. And I was so confused if that was an artifact from a previous edit or something because they don’t act like that’s the case.

Chris: Yeah. This is similar, where they have this impossible contest and then they fail and then what happens in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms after she fails the contest- That is foreshadowed, that is set up, right? She should have been doing things before that, but I don’t object to the way that it ended. I think it ended just fine. Whereas in Space Opera, we just have three deus ex machinas all appear at once to keep them from coming in so they’re not the very last.

Oren: The triple ex machina.

Bunny: The rarely seen, rarely pulled off, Olympic level.

Oren: Slaps the roof of the story, ‘This baby can hold so many deus ex machinas’.

Chris: And if you have a light comedic low realism story, you can get away with things that are a bigger stretch, but there’s still a limit. I’ve been noticing that as we’ve been rewatching Amphibia, which is a really good show. But some episodes are just like, uh that is too far for me. That clearly is not how that would work. You got yourself in a situation. In particular, there’s one episode where all the protagonists get tied up except for Polly, the little tadpole character. And the way that she fights the big antagonists is just, yeah, I’m just not buying that. And we specifically set this up as a situation that it was important that she overcome them herself.

Oren: Right. The issue there was that in other episodes it’s established that Polly is actually very, very good at fighting. But part of this episode is that it’s supposed to be a quasi-horror episode, so we’re supposed to believe that this is a really hard situation and then she just defeats it by fighting good. There’s no turning point. It’s just like, ‘Oh, the turning point is that I’m good at fighting. I forgot’.

Bunny: But what if you had a light story without a lot going on that mostly relies on novelty related to comedy of manners and time travel. But then someone gets assassinated and the character promises you that maybe she could have prevented it if she had made a different decision, which she didn’t. She’s sorry about that.

Oren: It has been zero days since Oren and Bunny ragged on the Ministry of Time. Everyone change the signs. That’s a weird one. I don’t know what’s going on there, I’m gonna be honest. There is nothing happening and then, like many of these books, there is a sudden burst of extreme violence at the end. Okay, I guess?

Chris: Yeah. I would say, again, not having finished the book because it was boring-

Bunny: Chris, you have to join us.

Chris: That’s one that feels like it only marginally has a through line. I guess there are some very silly antagonists that show up later?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, sort of. It’s really hard for me to call that a through line. I guess what we’re supposed to think is that the through line is whether or not the love interest guy will be evil. But we didn’t even know that was a possibility until three fourths of the way through the book, when they suddenly make a huge deal about whether or not the love interest is going to join the evil British government.

I mean this is already weird ’cause the love interest is so nice and we’ve been working so hard to ignore the fact that he’s a mid 18th-century British naval officer in the way that he acts, that suddenly when the end is like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, he might join the evil government ’cause he’s an 18th century British naval officer’.

Bunny: They could have done so much more with that. It’s frustrating.

Oren: You’ve been telling me explicitly to ignore that aspect and now you’re hanging the plot on it.

Bunny: It makes a ton of sense that a guy from the height of the British Empire would be really pro-Empire.

Chris: Yeah. And also, I gotta say, feeling tension over a naval officer joining the current day military. We have lots of those?

Oren: Yeah. The book fails to explain why that’s especially bad. Does he do something that no one else could do?

Chris: But even when they establish that they might be able to evade detection from some devices, I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Bunny: Yeah. He’s able to go through metal detectors real good. And I think also be invisible on cameras or something. Technology doesn’t pick them up?

Oren: Which is hilarious because the thing that he ends up doing that’s really bad has nothing to do with any of that. The thing that he ends up doing that’s bad is that he’s in charge of the murder migrant patrol, which heckin’ sucks. But A: I didn’t even know this was a possibility until the book was nearly over. And B: if he doesn’t do it, is no one going to do it? Is he especially good at this aspect of the horrors? I have no idea. The book just doesn’t have anything to say about that.

Chris: Now if I think about what tension does the book have going on, right? It’s mostly just honestly slice of life of the main character and this guy being roommates as she works for this government program. But there’s the threat that maybe these people who are expats who have come through time might get sick and die, right? Because they can’t adjust to the time. But frankly, there’s nothing that anybody can do about that. So, that doesn’t seem to matter as much as far as the plot. It’s like it’ll happen or it won’t and as time passes it seems less and less likely anyway. And then there’s vague foreshadowing hints about how this program is menacing somehow?

Bunny: Of course it is. For the reader, there’s never any question. It’s a spooky government agency that’s creepy, bureaucratic. From the start it’s like there’s something up with this, something nefarious.

Chris: Right. But again, we don’t follow that up with any movement, for the most part. I mean, there’s little bits and tiny bits at a time. But that’s probably the closest there is to a through line in this book.

Oren: All right, well this book has once again gotten us way over time, which is probably ironic, but I think we are gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Bunny: We should have ministered our time a little better.

Chris: If we gave you something to do for a little while, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Yeah, see if you’re typing angry comments, you’re not doing nothing. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]