Episode 104: Transcript
Episode 104: Action Princesses!
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that explores the farthest reaches of the universe and the stickiest pockets of the human heart. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer, I wrote a young adult trilogy. The first book, Victories Greater Than Death, is out now. And the second book, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, comes out April. Actually, by the time you listen to it, it will be out.
Annalee: [00:00:25] Yeah, and you should definitely be reading it. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:36] Yay! So today, we're going to be talking about action princesses! This is princesses who go on adventures, princesses who fight epic battles, work for justice, and outsmart evil monsters. And then later in the show, we'll talk about the aforementioned book, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, which has my own personal take on action princesses. And on our audio extra next week, we'll be kind of hashing out our feelings about the Borg Queen and why we have questions about her inclusion in the Star Trek mythos. So many questions.
[00:01:09] Oh, and by the way, did you know that our patrons get audio extras with every single episode?
Annalee: [00:01:14] What?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] They get essays, they get reviews, they get to hang out with us in our Discord channel. And honestly, you get to be like a major part of this podcast continuing to exist if you support us on Patreon, because we depend entirely on our listeners for support. We don't get any corporate money. We don't get any advertising money, we don't get any of that. We just live on your love and we really appreciate it.
Annalee: [00:01:38] And your money.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:38] And your money. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what I meant by love. I meant money. You know, all this stuff can be yours for just a few bucks a month. And anything you give us goes right back into give making our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Let's get Royal.
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Annalee: [00:02:25] So, Charlie Jane, why do you love princesses so much?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:33] Okay, so first of all, I have to kind of come clean about something. When I was first starting to transition, Annalee, you started to call me Princess as a nickname. And it made me feel seen and happy. And I had never even thought of being a princess as a cool thing before. But thanks to you, I feel like I'm very princess-identified now. And I still love it when you call me that.
Annalee: [00:02:54] Aw, Princess.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:56] Aww. Now, I’m all glowing.
Annalee: [00:02:57] You are the best.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:58] So obviously, in real life, the notion of princesses is not great. And we do not like monarchies and inherited privilege and royal families any more than we like any other kind of oligarchs. I don't think that it's like there's one kind of oligarchs that's awesome and every other kind is bad. They're all, it's all bad. We disdain these things. But you know, as a fantasy, there's just something kind of awesome about princesses that I think have a hold on the popular imagination. It's one of the few archetypes that's allowed in pop culture to be both super femme and heroic. Most of the time in American pop culture, powerful women have to become either androgynous or butch, in order to be really powerful. And the notion of being a total badass while wearing a big foofy dress is just kind of excellent.
Annalee: [00:03:52] So would you say it's femme power?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:54] I would, yes. And I think that part of the appeal of princess is meaning, in part, that you are sparkly and pretty and powerful. And that people are holding you up and seeing you as an icon. And when I think of it is more in terms of the other stuff, inherited privilege and membership in some kind of aristocracy. It kind of harshes my mellow.
Annalee: [00:04:16] Yeah, those details are kind of the dark heart of these stories. I mean, they are actually about monarchies. And there's usually peasants and servants and all the trappings of privilege in a world where most people are extremely not privileged.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] Yeah and you might notice that when you have fantasy stories about princesses, they kind of leave out a lot of that stuff or they push that stuff out of the frame as much as possible. We don't spend a lot of time with the servants. We don't really see that much of the peasants because we don't want to get stuck questioning the overall system of monarchy and castles and stuff any more than when you're watching Sex in the City, I'm guessing, you actually see who cleans Samantha's toilets. I guarantee Samantha does not clean her own toilets and there's someone who does that, and we don't ever meet that person. I'm just gonna guess.
So, you know, either the princess in one of these stories is off doing her own thing, and maybe she has a sidekick or something. And there's like one helper/friend who's maybe a servant, but we don't really inquire into that. Or there's some other thing that enables us to just not consider that. But at the same time, it is absolutely part of the fantasy that princesses are pampered. Like when you read a novel about a princess, you fully expect there to be a sumptuous description of like, taking a hot bath, or getting a makeover or whatever. And you know, a princess is someone who can hide away in her old wonderful gold lame bedchamber and eat pastries, but then she chooses, she makes the choice, to go out instead and fight evil.
Annalee: [00:05:50] Yeah, it's interesting that the princess has to have privilege for the fantasy to work, like she has to be able to make the choice, you know, to say, all right, I could be eating lollipops, with my six incredibly pampered dogs in the tub. But instead I'm gonna go out and kick interstellar butt. Which, I mean, compare that with Luke Skywalker, who's your classic chosen one, but he's this subsistence farmer and then his family is murdered and he literally has no choice at all.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:25] Yeah, and of course, there are male chosen one characters like, say, Paul Atreides, who starts from privilege and then is… kind of often then there's the thing where they get cast down and they have to kind of build themselves back up again, or something. But often the trope with a lot of these male chosen one figures, and they tend to be white guys, is that they start from humble roots and then turn out to be special like the assistant pig keeper in the Lloyd Alexander books or The Once and Future King, or whatever. And the fantasy is usually that the chosen one is singled out because of some innate quality of wonderfulness.
Annalee: [00:07:04] Or inherited quality.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:05] Right or inherited, like, secretly your father was actually totally awesome and so you're totally awesome too. Whereas a princess, you know, she doesn't start out from humble roots, she inherits some kind of power and then she makes a choice to do something with it. And the focus is on her making a choice rather than her being chosen, which is one thing I love about that. When I think about the iconic, fictional sort of action princesses, like Wonder Woman, or Princess Leia from Star Wars, there's often a thing where they took the initiative and put themselves in danger instead of letting themselves be protected. And, for example, in the 2017 Wonder Woman movie, her mother is hesitant to just let her leave home and become a hero.
WW Clip: [00:07:46] Wonder Woman: I have to go.
WW Mom: I know. Or at least I know I cannot stop you.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:54] And in the comics, it's even there's even more of that Wonder Woman's backstory usually emphasizes that her mother forbade her from taking part in this contest to leave the island and go to the rest of the world to fight the god of war. But Diana sneakily found a way to do so anyway. Princess Leia’s backstory is, I think, super hazy, at least in the main canon, but I always get the sense that she chose to put herself in harm's way in transporting those stolen plans for the Death Star.
Annalee: [00:08:25] Yeah, I mean, I would contrast this with, say, Xena, the warrior princess, whose backstory really delved into how horrific it is to be a warlord. Or in her case, a warrior princess. I mean, the show is her redemption arc. She spent years basically just looting and pillaging and murdering, and then realized that she was a bad person. She was slaughtering people. And so she's decided to roam the countryside and help people kind of like Geralt from The Witcher. She even has like a bard sidekick, Gabrielle, and we never, ever forget that she was once a bloodthirsty dictator. Her nemesis, Callisto, is actually a woman whose family she slaughtered during one of her pillaging missions. So she has chosen to do this, but also, she really reminds us of the horror of monarchy.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:24] Yeah, and that is one way of getting at these questions about privilege and like, okay, great. You're now transporting the Death Star plans but you also come from this weird, unjust system, or at least a system that seems unjust. And I think there's definitely a subset of princess heroes who are on a redemption arc, the same as Xena, or who have a lot of blood on their hands directly, as opposed to just implicitly by part of being by being part of a system.
[00:09:52] A lot of princesses do end up getting drawn into politics one way or the other, because, no big surprise here, they're frequently part of monarchies or other political structures. I think this is another dimension to the idea of an action princess, you don't necessarily need to swing a sword, the way Xena does. A princess could also be fighting evil by trying to reform her realm and improve the lives of all the ordinary people or a princess could take part in court intrigue and find out about plots that are trying to make everything terrible or spy on the bad guys and root out some kind of evil scheme to impose a cruel new ruler. It really depends on what kind of story you're in and what kind of action we're talking about when we say action, kind of.
Annalee: [00:10:37] So how have princesses been changing? Do you see any trends in princess representation? Princess trends? That sounds like some sort of ad report, like, “Princess branding: What's been happening in 2022?”
Charlie Jane: [00:10:49] Yeah. I mean, actually, there are, I think things have been changing a lot, especially in the last decade or so. When I was growing up we had a ton of princess stories that were modeled on things like Sleeping Beauty, or Rapunzel where the princess is firmly in the quote unquote, “damsel in distress” role, and she's waiting for some dude to show up and save her. A lot of people point to the Little Mermaid movie where Ariel gives up her voice so she can belong to some dude.
[00:11:19] Pop culture portrayals of princesses used to emphasize passivity and princesses were definitely not supposed to pick up a sword and start stabbing people. You might notice when we did get an example of a fighting princess like Wonder Woman, we sell them with see her in a ballgown, or holding court or doing anything actually, princess-like. The way she got to be an action princess was by foregrounding the action and downplaying the princess part. She's a princess, but we don't really see that very much. But then, the past decade, things really start to change. And, first of all, Disney, which is like, the 9 billion pound kaiju of princess media.
Annalee: [00:11:58] Purveyor of princesses since like, what 1930? 1940?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:03] Yeah, like almost a decade of princesses…
Annalee: [00:12:05] No—
Charlie Jane: [00:12:07] Almost a century of princesses, I can do math. Yeah. And so you know, they've made a concerted effort to change their massively powerful princess brand. It's interesting, I look back and you see a ton of think pieces coming out right around 2016 that all say the same thing. All of a sudden, princesses are tough now. You see the same article in the Washington Post, The Guardian, a bunch of other places. And it was around the time that Disney was doing some movies like Moana, Frozen, Brave, and a handful of other films, and Disney actually sent their creatives kind of to do interviews, explaining that Disney was now making princesses tough.
Moana Clip: [00:12:45] “How Far I’ll Go”
Annalee: [00:12:49] And of course, there was also a live action, Snow White movie, Snow White and the Huntsman, where Kristen Stewart is like this kick ass Snow White who's wearing armor and giving kind of incoherent speeches to the soldiers, which nevertheless, whip them up into a battle frenzy.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:08] Right. And this actually was part of a huge trend of like fairytale reimaginings. We saw movies and TV and comics, there's just been a ton of like, kind of taking fairytales and rethinking them, reengineering them. And one of the ways that we do that is by taking these fairytale princesses and turning them into capable tough action heroes instead of passive damsels or whatever. And there always has to be at least a token effort, now, to give the princess character something cool to do.
Annalee: [00:13:37] Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the sort of chick lit trend, that then also oozed its way into Hollywood where it was like, okay, basically, this is the story of a chick who wants to hook up with the dude because they're always straight. But we'll give them a little job or like some kind of thing that they're doing that's an excuse for them to be like going around the city or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:58] Yeah. And then there's a second trend that's been transforming princesses, which is young adult fantasy novels. And this kind of comes into the thing I was saying before, about fairytale reimaginings. A lot of young adult fantasy novels of the past like decade or so have been kind of taking on classic tropes and putting a new spin on them. And this happens a lot with fairytale type stories and fantasy ideas in general. And so you have a character who is either coded as a princess or explicitly based on a fairytale character, who gets to be tough and resourceful. For example, there was a novel that came out last year by Sarah Henning that plays on this called The Princess Will Save You.
Annalee: [00:14:34] I was just curious when you said characters who were coded as princesses. When you say that, do you mean that they're rich and powerful? Or that they're like foofy and femme or just both? Or…?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:49] I would say more of the latter, but a little bit of both. I think that, I mean, when you look at, for example, when you look at Disney princesses, a lot of them don't actually have royal titles. Some of them do. Some of them don't.
Annalee: [00:15:01] That's true. That's true.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:01] They’re princesses because they're cute and femme-y. And sometimes they have prestige and power. They don't always even have prestige and power. Sometimes they're just, sometimes they're just cute girls / women who wear our cute outfits and are kind of like, they’re princesses because they're part of that brand.
[00:15:23] So I feel like, it's important to note that the term princess doesn't always actually mean that your father was a king or your mother was a queen, or that you have a royal title. It often is a little bit like, it's a little hazy, in terms of like… And I think by design.
Annalee: [00:15:38] That’s super interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:38] Because again we don't want to think about peasants toiling in the fields, necessarily. So a third trend that comes to mind is the ever increasing popularity in the west of anime, which, that’s a whole other topic that we could devote an episode to, but it has often featured princesses or princess-adjacent characters who get to slay demons and be awesome. And I think, it's impossible to understate how much creators in the United States have been influenced by these anime princesses.
Annalee: [00:16:10] Totally. Okay. Let's talk about She-Ra. This needs to happen.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:15] Yes.
Annalee: [00:16:15] She is the most important princess of the past few years.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:19] She's the princess of my heart.
Annalee: [00:16:21] She's—same. She's a fighter. She's a diplomat, and she has a complicated past.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:26] Yes. Oh my God, I love the Netflix She-Ra reboot and it really changed how I think about princesses in a lot of ways. So She-Ra is a classic chosen one who appears to be just a random soldier in this invading army until she gets singled out by a magic sword and turns out to be much more than she originally appeared. I love how this show features this whole world of magical princesses who are mostly pretty cute or silly or a little bit weird. There’s Mermista, the mermaid princess who's constantly just like, “Ugh, so annoying.”
Annalee: [00:17:01] She’s the snarky mermaid.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:03] And then there's a crunchy hippie princess named Perfuma. And there's like a nerd princess named Entrapta.
Annalee: [00:17:09] I love her so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:09] I love Entrapta. And that's an example of, they’re princesses, but the political system isn't... Luckily, we never really get a lot of details about like, who crowned them or why they're… what, exactly, political system underpins their their claim to be princesses.
[00:17:27] But each of the princesses has their own realm and their own magical powers that have to do with where they're from. And notably, we don't see what kind of taxes they impose. We don't see who does their laundry, we don't have to look at like, who's cleaning Mermista’s toilets any more than we do Samantha on Sex and the City. It's kind of a perfect example of how you can take the princess thing out of the realm of statecraft and hierarchies and government policies and just turn princess into something that means magical and sparkly and having cool stuff, kind of.
Annalee: [00:18:04] Yeah. So—
Charlie Jane: [00:18:06] And there's often an implication that these princesses are connected to the planet somehow. That there's some kind of there's some kind of planetary defense system that they're part of.
Annalee: [00:18:14] Right. Yeah. So She-Ra kind of sidesteps the unpleasant aspects of monarchy, except for the whole genocide thing that's going on.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:24] Right. Well, that’s you know.
Annalee: [00:18:25] An unpleasant aspect of statehood.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:26] That’s what they’re fighting against, though. Against genocide.
Annalee: [00:18:28] Yeah. But I'm just saying that they do bring that up in the show.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:33] There's bad stuff that happens, but it's not the princesses. They're not doing it.
Annalee: [00:18:37] No, they there's other bad kind of monarch-type people and emperor-type people.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:40] It’s Hordak and [crosstalk] People with horde in their names are doing bad things.
Annalee: [00:18:46] It's true. So how else do these stories separate what we love about princesses from all the terrible stuff about like privilege and aristocracy and fascism and stuff?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:57] I mean, we've kind of talked a lot about kind of sweeping the privilege and aristocracy stuff under the rug. But I think that a more kind of healthy or a more helpful way to do this would be questioning our assumptions about femininity. The notion that femme humans are weak or useless or passive or ineffectual. I think part of why we are so drawn to these princess stories is because it's kind of a get out of femmephobia free card. Princesses are allowed to be super femme because it's part of the princess deal and so we excuse them for it. You're allowed to be super femme, nobody else is allowed. And if you think about how much pop culture over the last few decades has kind of played on the idea of like, oh, she's femme, but surprisingly, she's not totally useless. Things like you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where that's kind of the original kind of germ of the idea. It’s like, she’s a cute blonde, but oh, she can kick ass and obviously it becomes more complicated later. And then Legally Blonde is another one that comes to mind. It's kind of a surprising reveal that a femme character is not useless because it flies in the face of this pervasive cultural assumption.
Annalee: [00:20:12] I hate it.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:14] Yeah. So if we didn't see femme as the opposite of serious or competent, then we might not need princesses as much as we do. There would still be the piece that I have a secret soft spot for about being pampered and being the most special and sparkly and having a tiara you're going to wrest the tiara out of my cold dead hands.
Annalee: [00:20:37] It's a nice tiara.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:38] Actually, I need to get it back, we learned it we loaned it to our nibling. Anyway, but there are other ways to do that in a story. A character can be pampered without intense luxury. And there are so many ways to be sparkly and special and cute and awesome without actually having an inherited title and a castle and stuff. I think that we will know that femmes have gained respect and appreciation in society when princesses become just another trope that we sometimes enjoy instead of this huge cultural force and the only way that ultra femmes get to save the universe.
Annalee: [00:21:14] All right, so when we come back from our break, we're going to talk about the princesses that Charlie invented for her new novel.
[00:21:21] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:21:27] Have you ever wondered what life would be like on a planet different from our own or how writers create your favorite fictional worlds? Well, wonder no more because we have the facts for you.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:41] Every other week, astrophysicist slash folklorist Moiya McTier explores fictional worlds by building them with a panel of expert guests, interviewing professional world builders or reviewing the merits of worlds that have already been built.
Annalee: [00:21:58] You'll learn. You'll laugh, and you'll get an appreciation for how special planet Earth really is.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:04] Subscribe today by searching Exolore in your podcast app or going to Exolorepod.com.
Annalee: [00:22:09] Whoo.
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Annalee: [00:22:17] So Charlie Jane, you have a new novel, the second in your trilogy, it's called Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. And let's talk about princesses in this book. I love the way that you bring princesses in. They are action princesses, but holy moly, are they femme, so tell us all about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:38] You know, it's so funny. In the first book, I had this organization called the Royal Fleet. And I was just like, I was trying to come up with my own kind of space Navy. And I liked the idea of like, kind of having something a little bit fancy and spiffy. And so I was like, oh, it's the Royal Fleet. And then I was like, okay, but who's the monarch? And then I was like, okay, the monarch is a queen, but she's actually kind of like a cyborg queen, who connects to these ancient, super powerful, all knowing super computers through brain implants. And so her crown is actually a cybernetic kind of implant thing. And then I was like, oh, but there's also princesses who are like, studying to be the next queen. And I have this hacker character in the trilogy named Elsa, who’s a travesti, trans femme, from Brazil.
Annalee: [00:23:21] I love Elsa.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:23] I love her too. And I was like, what's the thing that Elsa can aspire to do other than just joining the Royal Fleet and shooting guns or whatever is like, what if Elsa tries to become a princess and that kind of ate my brain. So that's a long way of saying that, basically, in the universe of my novel, princesses are all cyborgs. They all wear these crowns that are similar to the queen's crown. They're not quite as powerful as the queen's crown. And they use these crowns to communicate with these ancient artificial intelligences that have this really alien, weird perspective, of course, because that's how AIs are. And when they're not doing that they are off spying and doing spy missions and sneaking around and finding out stuff for the queen because the queen has to know everything. And sometimes, even these ancient super intelligences don't know everything. I wrote an email to my editor. I was like cyborg, princess spy. And my editor Miriam, was like, yes! So that was kind of like where I went with that.
Annalee: [00:24:25] I love that. It's funny because a princess character feels to me like they belong in fantasy, or maybe horror, rather than science fiction. I mean, in spite of the fact that we have like Princess Leia, and I want to say that Paul Atreides is like an honorary princess because Princess Paul has… there's a lot of things that are very princess trope-y.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:47] Oh my God. That is now my head canon. Paul Atreides is a princess, for sure. If the Dune movie was being put out by Disney instead of Warner Brothers? Warner Brothers. It would. Paul Atreides would be a Disney princess for sure.
Annalee: [00:25:00] Yes, and I think he would have a flowing golden gown and stuff. But anyway, so I need—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:07] I need to see the fan art right now.
Annalee: [00:25:09] Okay, so please supply us with that, dear listeners. But, to get to my question, I wonder if the princess subplot in this novel made you feel like you were bringing fantasy into the space opera?
Charlie Jane: [00:25:23] Yeah. And well, I mean, I was realizing that actually, exactly one year ago, we did an episode about space fantasy that coincided with the first novel. And I really do feel passionate about… you know I love to mash up genres, obviously. And I always feel like space opera is better if it's got like little bits of fantasy in it, because I feel like part of what makes space opera fun is that you have magical stuff, and you've got quests, and you've got prophecies, and you've got often things like AI and sufficiently ancient and weird aliens kind of start to become more like gods or like fairies or whatever. And so it's actually really easy and really natural to kind of introduce that stuff. And I just, I felt like it was a way of kind of getting some of those fun elements that especially are really big, in YA into a space opera novel, and having the palace intrigue and having the ancient gods and fairies, like I said, and kind of just playing around with this idea of being on a floating city in the middle of a nebula. But also there's a lot of like little… Like, for example, ordinary people can't really talk to the princesses or the queens or these ancient AIs, except that near the palace there's a maze called the Wishing Maze. And you go through the Wishing Maze and if you get to the center of the Wishing Maze, you can make a wish. And put a little thing in the mouth of this statue, and then the AIs will tell you or help you to find what you were looking for. And it's straight up a fantasy novel thing of, you go to the heart of the maze and give something to the statue and then you get given something by the fairies or whatever. And I'm just like, I eat that up. And I love being able to do stuff like that in between having starship battles or whatever. I think it's just really fun.
Annalee: [00:27:18] Yeah, it's like, pretty much literally Labyrinth going on there.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:21] Kind of, kind of.
Annalee: [00:27:23] There's a little a little Labyrinth.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:26] I love mazes. I mean, I’m gonna own it.
Annalee: [00:27:29] Mazes are like... anyway, whatever. So, sidenote about mazes, that'll be another episode. But okay, so let's go back to cyborg princess superhero spy, which you mentioned earlier and also femmes in space. How do you see these kinds of ideas fitting into… is it escapism? Is it commentary? Is it both? I'm sort of imagining this weird slider where it's like, on one end, it's like, political commentary and allegory, and on the other end is escapism, which is a really silly way to think about it, but nevertheless, is like programmed in my brain. So where do you see it on that slider?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:11] I 100% think about that slider all the time. I think that that's like a real thing. I think that there is like a spectrum. I mean, you can do both. And there's different concentrations of both in a lot of works. So for me, it's definitely escapism. And like, I have some scenes where I'm just like, yes, I want to like, kind of just luxuriate and how silly and beautiful and wish fulfillment-y this is. I feel like wish fulfillment is a thing that is a legitimate thing to deliver in a story, for sure.
Annalee: [00:28:40] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:40] But it is also commentary. And part of one of the themes that keeps coming up in this series, in this trilogy, is the theme of kind of knowing too much. And in the first book, you have Tina, who has been implanted with all the knowledge, but none of the experience of this alien that she was cloned from. And so she just knows a bunch of stuff and doesn't really know what to do with that knowledge. She doesn't have any context to put that knowledge in, she just knows things that are like really weird and upsetting sometimes. And so, you know, for me, when you have this connection to these ancient supercomputers, one of the main things that's going to happen is you're going to know way too much about terrible things that are happening everywhere. And that's partly because these supercomputers are watching everything everywhere. And they are trying to make sure that the princesses and the queen know about problems and know about like, people are suffering and we're going to show you the people who are suffering and so you're just going to be constantly bombarded with terrible stuff. Which, for me is 100% kind of a commentary on how we live because in our media saturated and social media saturated era that we live in, it's impossible to get away from refugee crises and wars and plagues and famines.
[00:29:57] I mean, unfortunately, it is actually very possible to get away those things and in some cases, especially if they're happening in certain parts of Africa, we tend to just not even be aware of them. But the larger point is, it does feel as though we're always marinating in awareness of terrible, terrible things that are happening all over the place, people who are suffering on the other side of the world, and not necessarily knowing what, concretely, we can do to help those people other than just mash the donate button, and hope that that money did some good.
[00:30:27] I feel like that is a big thing that eats up a lot of my brain, eats up a lot of other people's brains. And so just trying to imagine that on even grander scale of you're going to be attached to these computers that are going to show you every terrible thing happening in the galaxy, on hundreds and hundreds of worlds. And you're gonna see, oh, there's a riot and this kid is about to be trampled to death and I can't do anything about that. It's happening a million light years away from where I am, like, I can't save that kid. So that's the thing that I really wanted to kind of get into. And it's kind of a big thing of how do you keep going when you're aware of so much terribleness and suffering?
Annalee: [00:31:03] Yeah, it's like galactic doom scrolling.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:06] It really is, yeah.
Annalee: [00:31:06] I also was thinking as you were talking, I mean, this is a young adult novel. And I feel like that's also a really interesting metaphor for coming of age is that there's this moment when you really do know too much. You know too much before you can fully process it and figure out what to do with it. And when I say what to do with it, I don't mean like, you know, leave Alderaan and join the Senate, you might not have that choice. But even what to do with it, emotionally.
[00:31:36] So I think that's a really, I love that idea that there's this subplot, or subtheme, I should say, about knowing too much. But speaking of which, there's a lot of other characters besides princesses in these novels. And they're also coming of age and having to figure out what to do with what they're learning. So what are they up to? What can readers look forward to?
Charlie Jane: [00:31:56] Yeah, so in the second book. The first book is all from the POV of Tina, who, as I said before, is kind of struggling with this other way of having too much knowledge and not enough context to put it in. And in the second novel, we have Tina still a POV, still a major POV. But we also have Elsa and Rachel, who are two of the supporting characters from the first book. And Rachel's had some stuff happen to her like as a result of what happened in the first book. She's struggling with basically what her places in the universe and part of what's going on with her is that while Elsa is kind of learning to connect with these ancient supercomputers, Rachel keeps hearing from these ancient monsters that built this super weapon that we found in the first book, and she's just constantly like, kind of overwhelmed with this alien monstrous consciousness that's kind of demonic, in a way, that's like, kind of ancient elder gods, almost. Not that I want to fully delve into that weird trope. But I feel like it is this thing of, and in the case of Rachel, it's about like, how can she regain her ability to create art after encountering this ancient presence and connecting to these demonic forces?
[00:33:14] And I feel like, in a way, it's very obvious to anybody who reads, I think it'll be very obvious to anybody who reads Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, that it's kind of covering some of the same territory as my nonfiction book, Never Say You Can't Survive. In terms of like, when you're just marinating in the awfulness of everything, which is unfortunately a thing that we all become familiar with. How do you keep goin, but also, how do you create? How do you find ways to keep creating something beautiful when you're just constantly aware of ugliness? And I think that is a thing that I think about a lot. It's a thing that I think younger people have grown up thinking about, because they grew up with the internet, they grew up grew up with 24/7 cable news, and all that stuff that came along when you and I were already adults. Or at least came along in the form that they're in now. And so I think that that's the thing that I'm just, I'm kind of struck grappling with and yeah, how do you how do you stay whole, kind of?
Annalee: [00:34:09] Yeah. Well, I know that everyone is looking forward to this book, which is now out. Can you tell us what the third and final book in this trilogy is called and when that’s coming out?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:21] I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say the title because I think they're gonna probably try to do like a big reveal. But that comes out… the third book comes out April 2023. It's done. I'm just revising it now. I'm just kind of spackling and sanding and planing and doing all that stuff to it, but it's basically done. It's almost, like within a week or so of recording this, it'll be in a form that like you could print it and put it between covers, and nobody would like have their head explode. So, it's that close to be done. And it's kind of like, the third book is definitely very much… The second book is a little darker and more introspective, a little bit like the way Empire Strkes Back is and I actually tried not to do this, but I ended up doing it anyway because it just feels like such a satisfying format. And the third book is definitely the Return of the Jedi of the three. Ithe just hits the ground running. It's action, action, action. It's just super racing downhill, the entire book. It just doesn't. It pretty much doesn't quit.
Annalee: [00:35:22] But no Ewoks.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:22] But no Ewoks
Annalee: [00:35:24] Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:24] There’s definitely no Ewoks. There are creatures who are helping us to fight the bad guys, but they're not Ewoks.
Annalee: [00:35:30] Yeah, well, that's one of the many things I love about this trilogy is that whenever we do encounter creatures who remind us of non human animals, they just think that Homo sapiens, that any two-legged creature is awful. And they call a symmetrons because we are so obsessed with our symmetry. So, in fact, I frequently mutter under my breath, symmetrons when people are bugging me.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:51] Yeah, and we'll see if my editor lets me get away with this. But in the third book, currently, we have some sections from the POV of a non humanoid character, who is just like screw these gosh darn humanoids. Screw them.
Annalee: [00:36:05] Gosh darn symmetrons!
Charlie Jane: [00:36:06] Screw these fucking humanoids. Just screw them. God, they’re the worst.
Annalee: [00:36:10] I love it. I love it. All right, cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:13] Yay. Well, this has been Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for listening, it means like the universe to us, it means the multiverse to us. If you just randomly stumbled on this podcast, you can find it wherever podcasts are found. And if you like it, please leave a review, it makes a huge difference. And if you want to get even deeper into our universe, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and it makes a huge difference to us. And as we mentioned at the start, there's a lot of perks that go with that. Also, we're on Twitter at @OOACpod and we're just everywhere. We're all around you all the time.
Annalee: [00:36:51] We’re in the air that you breathe.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:53] We're in the food you eat, we're in you know the nanites that go up your nose. We're in everything.
Annalee: [00:36:59] We're in the like sewer runoff that's being tested right now for new COVID strains.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:04] We are, yes, unfortunately, we are in that as well. Anyway, thank you so much to our heroic valiant producer Veronica Simonetti, who is just the rock that sustains us. And thanks to Women’s Audio Mission where we recorded this episode. Thanks also to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks once again to you for listening. We'll see you in two weeks or next week if you listen to our audio extra and bye!
Annalee: [00:37:27] Bye!
[00:37:27] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.