Episode 128 Transcript

Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct

Episode: 128: Dungeons & Dragons Gets Cozy

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, has a game ever inspired one of your books or stories? 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] You know, I feel like some of my short stories when I was starting out were heavily inspired by video games I was playing. But also, when I was in high school, some of my friends, we used to play Dungeons & Dragons and stuff, we also started our own interactive storytelling experiment where we would just write hundreds of pages of gibberish of like an ongoing kind of superhero story to each other every day.

[00:00:28] Like pretty much that's all we did at school on like some kind of online bulletin board.

Annalee: [00:00:31] Wow. What was it called? 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] It was called Notes War. And I'm very glad you can't find any of it anywhere because it's just been erased from the internet. But it was extremely weird. It was the weirdest stuff that we could come up with.

[00:00:47] Like there was a lot of like, soy meat coming to life and trying to eat people and alien pop stars and like—

Annalee: [00:00:54] Amazing. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:54] It was just, it got very strange and very bonkers. But yeah, I feel like this is a thing, right? A lot of writers of fantasy and science fiction are inspired by their experiences with role playing games and other kinds of strategy games, and there’s a gaming-to-writing pipeline.

Annalee: [00:01:11] Yeah, it's really common now, especially, I remember reading an interview with Ty Frank, who's part of the duo of people who write The Expanse novels and worked on The Expanse TV show, and he said that the world building for The Expanse started as a game that he was running. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:29] Yeah, and it's, so, it's actually super fascinating to hear about like how that happened because they did so much amazing world building and that is a thing that I think often happens when you take a game and turn it into a story.

[00:01:41] You have a ton of world building. Like I love it unless it feels too much like watching someone play a game, which only happens occasionally with some fantasy novels where it feels very kind of turn heavy and kind of like leveling up and like dungeon crawl-y, but that's definitely not the case with the Expanse novels.

[00:01:41] It's not the case with a lot of our other favorite authors who've come out of role playing games.

Annalee: [00:02:01] Yeah, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about games and world building. First, we're gonna talk about the transformation of Dungeons & Dragons from a Satanic pastime to a wholesome and cozy little world.

[00:02:17] And then we're gonna talk about world building in your epic series, Unstoppable, Charlie Jane. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:23] Yay. 

Annalee: [00:02:23] The third and final book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, is coming out this month. In fact, it's already out by the time you're listening to this. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:32] Yay. I'm still celebrating. And by the way, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and just everything else.

[00:02:42] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, and as Annalee just mentioned, I'm the author of the brand new novel, Promises Stronger Than Darkness. 

Annalee: [00:02:49] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I am a science journalist and a science fiction writer, and my latest novel is called The Terraformers. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:58] So also on our mini episode next week, we're gonna be talking about orcs and why it is that orcs are just so queer.

Annalee: [00:03:05] So queer. And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? If you wanna know where some of your money is going, it's actually going to pay for our amazing audio engineer, Veronica Simonetti. Hey Veronica, say hi. 

Veronica: [00:03:22] Hi everybody.

Annalee: [00:03:24] You never get to have your voice on this podcast, but every two weeks you're shaping all of us into sounding reasonable. So thank you so much for your work. 

Veronica: [00:03:34] I try. 

Annalee: [00:03:36] So she's been with us since the very beginning. Veronica started working with us on some of our very first episodes, and we watched her blossom from, you know, a Bulbasaur into like a Venusaur. And you know, she’s just amazing and keeps doing it and is now like a total pro with like lots of other jobs too. 

[00:03:55] So we're super lucky to have her working with us. And this is thanks to you, our listeners, that we have like an amazing engineer. 

[00:04:05] And if you support us on Patreon, you're helping to pay an audio engineer. You're helping to get the opinions on this podcast to be even more correct. You'll get special mini episodes every other week. You can join our Discord and it's just a couple bucks a month. If you wanna get an ad-free episode, it's about 10 bucks a month, and anything you give goes right back into making this podcast sound really good and make our opinions even better.

[00:04:34] So you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:38] Let's go to the tavern and start our campaign.

[00:04:45]OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:08] What we were talking about before is how Dungeons & Dragons has inspired a lot of authors and how does a rule-based game that’s kind of about military strategy, how does that affect the way kinds of stories that people tell and the way that they tell them? 

Annalee: [00:05:24] I am really glad that you mentioned the thing about military strategy because I think that at this point, Dungeons & Dragons has become so mainstream that we don't remember that its origins, when Gary Gygax was first writing the game, came out of military strategy games. And he and his friends had been playing all kinds of games where they were staging wars, reenacting historical wars, but also just staging new and inventive wars. And a lot of the rules from those paper and pencil games came into Dungeons & Dragons.

[00:05:54] So it started out really as this hyper strategy game where combat was centered, but over time it's really morphed into something where it's about exploration. It's about leveling up sometimes. It's about min-maxing sometimes, especially if you play with my nephew Kay, who loves to min-max, and sometimes it's about just getting stuff. Right? Like going somewhere and just getting the thing. If it's a gem or a sword or just a bunch of money. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:22] Loot!

Annalee: [00:06:24] Loot. And I think a really great example of a modern novel that to me feels like it really picks up on this structure and runs with it, is Tamsin Muir’s novel Gideon the Ninth. And this is the first novel in a very beloved bestselling series. And that structure in that first novel is gaming to a T, especially Dungeons & Dragons kind of gaming, where you have a character who goes into what is basically a dungeon. She's a necromancer, which is actually a character type that you can be in Dungeons & Dragons and with the kind of magical power, she's literally leveling up. She's getting items as she goes through different rooms and fights different kinds of monsters, and it really feels like a dungeon crawl. And I think that's part of what people loved about that book was it was just a super satisfying dungeon crawl with cool characters that you could identify with.

[00:07:19] Another great example of this, which I think is a little bit more attenuated, is the Shadow & Bone series, which has been made into a Netflix series. The second season just came out. It's really great, and most of the second season, and this is not a spoiler, is about getting three magical items. And the main thing that's motivating the characters is like, how do we get these three magical items, these amplifiers that will make the main character Alina, have even more power than she already had.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:47] Yeah. And part of what's interesting about Dungeons & Dragons in storytelling is that now we're seeing the representations of Dungeons & Dragons in media, like this new movie that just came out. It’s… it's sort of reminiscent of The Witcher or Xena: Warrior Princess. It's very kinda light and jokey and fun. And it's also kind of a small scale story, like The Verge referred to it as a heist with bards and thieves rather than like a grand epic about like saving the world and you know, how did we get there? 

Annalee: [00:08:19] It's so funny because the trajectory of D&D pop culture is its own thing, right? Like there's the history of what happened to D&D, the game, but then there's like how pop culture reflects it.

[00:08:31] And if you think about it, the earliest examples of D&D kind of making its way into the movies is in this incredibly cringey 1982 movie with Tom Hanks called Mazes & Monsters. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:42] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:08:42] Where like a group of teens start playing D&D and it quickly becomes like dark and satanic. And this was the era of Satanic panic.

Clip: [00:08:52] Could it be… SATAN?

Annalee: [00:08:55] Next, I'd say that D&D pop culture went in a different direction so that by the time you get the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie with Jeremy Irons—

Charlie Jane: [00:09:06] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:09:06] It’s really been accepted. So it's no longer like parents freaking out that kids are playing D&D. Instead, it's just like a straight up movie set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

[00:09:19] It's funny because that movie, the 2000 movie has a Black elf in it, but nobody gave a crap. It was sort of pre-Black elf discourse. So I think it’s… that movie is not great, but it is notable for having this Black elf character that nobody freaked out about as they shouldn't. And now I feel like the new movie feels like a kind of return to emphasizing the players and sort of hear me out on this, because I know it's not about players, it's not a Mazes & Monsters type story, but it’s about having fun. It's not about the epic scale of the story, like in the 2000 movie, which is about like kings and kingdoms and princesses. It's just about, I mean the new movie has some lords and ladies, but it's mostly about just regular people like rogues and thieves and bards. It's not about the politics of the kingdom.

[00:10:13] It's kind of, and it's often quite goofy, and I think that it's also reflective of this like larger arc where Dungeons & Dragons has gone from being this satanic scary thing to being wholesome and fun and gentle and sweet and funny, if that makes sense. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:30] Yeah. And I feel like we're remiss in not mentioning Gryphons & Gargoyles, which was that one season of Riverdale, where they're playing like a really scary version of Dungeons & Dragons, where like there's actual… people are actually disappearing and there's monsters and like, I have no idea what the heck was going on in that season, but you know, it’s Riverdale.

Annalee: [00:10:50] I think that was very retro because it's actually like they go back in time to the ‘80s I think, isn't it? They go back to the ‘80s or ‘90s.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:59] I don’t understand Riverdale.

Annalee: [00:11:00] They go back to the era of the satanic panic.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:00] Now they're in the ‘50s. I don't understand that show. Anyway, so, but you know, it's interesting that there is this kind of like… And I think it goes hand in hand with like how the portrayal and understanding of nerds in pop culture has also changed. 

Annalee: [00:11:14] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:14] But there has been this thing about D&D kind of becoming this kinda cute, sweet thing rather than something that's like dark and serious.

Annalee: [00:11:25] And dangerous.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:25] The change from the 2000 movie, which is campy, but also epic and like a huge grr, I’m going to take over the world. I'm Jeremy Irons, like that? Like the change from that to just, we're having a goofy little adventure. That feels like it goes head in hand with this change in how people think of Dungeons & Dragons and now it's just this kind of fun, cute thing that you do with your friends, which is what it always was for those of us who played it.

Annalee: [00:11:50] Yeah, and I think this fits in with the popularity of podcasts, like Critical Role, which is definitely all about just having fun playing D&D with like really awesome friends who are great voice actors and kind of know how to ham it up in a way that's delightful. That's a very wholesome pursuit.

I mean it’s like, from Mazes & Monsters to Critical Role is its own bizarre tale of how we've revalued this game. But also we're seeing. This shift in pop culture that's inspired by D&D too, like Travis Baldree’s, new novel Legends & Lattes, which I just finally read and fricking loved.

[00:12:32] It really is a cozy warm delight, and it's really a table flip on the usual kind of Dungeons & Dragons story where you expect there to be fights and like we were saying, dungeon crawls and a kind of Gideon the Ninth feel. But instead, Legends & Lattes is about an orc who has been somebody who did a lot of dungeon crawling and searching for loot and stuff, and now just wants to open a cafe and settle down and teach people about espresso, basically.

[00:13:05] And there is a magical item in the story. This is not a spoiler. Like she’s dealing, this orc character is dealing with the consequences of having taken this object. But it's not foregrounded like, fighting isn't centered in this story. It's much more about running a business and how do you do that.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:26] Yeah. And so Annalee, how does this, I know you've been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in recent years, and how does this fit in with your experience of playing the game?

Annalee: [00:13:34] I feel like it really has changed, like I feel like the game has changed to fit the kind of Legends & Lattes / Critical Role coziness model.

[00:13:46] I have been playing a game now for about four years with a group of friends where we just keep going on adventures and we change up our characters sometimes. But the current adventure that we're on, we had a long part of the adventure in Waterdeep, which is this coastal town that's part of the bigger D&D universe.

[00:14:07] And this is actually canon within the D&D story. We did this story where we buy a bar that is haunted by a ghost and we have to deal with that. I won't give you spoilers, but we dealt with it in our own way and we wound up spending several sessions just like setting up our bar, figuring out that we wanted to sell potatoes.

[00:14:30] My other nephew, Owen, plays a half orc character who really likes potatoes for some reason. I dunno, but anyway, he was like, yes, we're definitely gonna sell potatoes. And we had to figure out which trade associations to join and bribe. And like, we adopted a bunch of local orphans who live in the basement and kind of help us out.

[00:14:49] And it was very domestic. And the thing that's important about this is, well partly this is because of the kind of nerds we are, where we were like, yeah, let's like name our bar. It's called The Ankheg’s Claw, and like let's decorate it. And we wanted to do that, but that was also something that was written into the actual canon of the story. That was something that we didn't just make up on our own. Wizards of the Coast kind of provided us with the platform to have that story. And then of course we also go off and kill dragons and rescue people from enslavement and stuff like that. But—

Charlie Jane: [00:15:22] Like you do.

Annalee: [00:15:22] Like you do, but we also are selling really awesome potatoes.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:29] But, you know, and of course, while the popular imagination has been learning to love D&D as we always should have, we've also been kind of reckoning with, I don't know, the dark side of D&D, especially the issues with D&D around race. 

[00:15:45] And you know, here's a clip from last year's episode of Code Switch, where host Gene Demby talks to Jess Kung about racial stereotypes in Dungeons & Dragons.

Code Switch Clip: And for a long time there were races designed to be evil. Specifically orcs and Drow elves.

Like, just straight up inherently evil. 

Yeah. So, the classic example, it's been in contention for decades are Drow elves. 

Okay. 

They're this cruel, edgy culture who live underground and love, like torture and stuff.

Oh, okay. 

They're one of the only races who are by default dark-skinned. 

Hmm. 

Like literally black or dark gray or purple. 

So, like some real like biblical fundamentalist mark of Cain type colorism, yikes. 

And evil orcs were this like, you know, default disposable enemy. They're consistently described as savage, less civilized. Filled with an uncontrollable urge to destroy things. 

Oh man. It's like it's giving manifest destiny. It's giving the scramble for Africa. Ugh. 

Annalee: [00:16:46] That was such a great episode of Code Switch and it's absolutely real. And this is just one little piece of the kinds of racist stereotypes that would crop up all the time in D&D.

[00:17:00] And I think it's really good that they pointed out, both Jess and Gene point out that this is a way of creating characters that we don't feel bad about slaughtering. But of course they're characters who are coded as, in this case, Black. But there's other characters who are clearly supposed to be Asian or indigenous, and there's one character class that was at one point characterized as “alcoholic,” which seemed extremely specific as Gene Demby pointed out when they talk about it in that episode.

[00:17:29] But this is also something that is changing in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Partly that's because so many players are BIPOC and are demanding different kinds of roles. We no longer, in 5th Edition, have racial “characteristics” where someone has to be evil or they have to be smarter or stronger. There's some stuff like that, but a lot of it has been tossed out. 

[00:17:56] And also last year there was this fantastic new set of adventures released by Wizards of the Coast called Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel that has a whole bunch of different BIPOC authors writing adventures about their own cultures and it's amazing.

[00:18:14] Like it is so good and I can't wait to play some of them. One of them is about the Black experience in the south under Jim Crow. Some of them are about Asian culture, a bunch of different Asian cultures. 

Charlie Jane: [00:18:28] Yeah. And I feel like this is part of a whole project of BIPOC creators taking all sorts of things, including like HP Lovecraft’s mythos and classic epic fantasy and just everything and kind of re-imagining it and revitalizing it in the process of telling their versions of these stories and kind of making them, more reflective of the real diversity of our world to kind of address these longstanding biases that are encoded into them. And of course, Dungeons & Dragons comes out of a lot of sword and sorcery literature over the first half of the 20th century that sometimes had some not great racial stereotypes embedded in it. So this is really important work that people are doing.

Annalee: [00:19:13] Yeah. And I definitely think that players are aware of this. And again, this comes back to the fact that I feel like D&D is now, once again, something that belongs to the players and that when we think about D&D and pop culture, we think as much about the player experience as we do the epic scope and like the dragons and the fighting.

[00:19:34] A lot of these stories, including the new movie but also other stories based on D&D. It's about characters just trying to find their way in a world that isn't always welcoming to them. It's about finding friends, maybe doing little tricks along the way, doing heists, doing a dungeon crawl here and there, maybe fighting off a plague of horrors, but it's character focused.

[00:20:00] And oftentimes Dungeons & Dragons allows us to explore intersectional identities in really interesting ways that kind of bridge real life and the fantastic. So not just bringing in, say, the experiences of real life BIPOC folks or bringing in cultures that are non-Western, but also really fantastical scenarios.

[00:20:21] Like I'll give you an example. So I played, for a very long time, a character who's an Aarakocra. So Aarakocra’s are bird people. And in 5th edition, suddenly you could play an Aarakocra. Previously, Aaracokras had existed, but they were mounts, which is basically like they were NPCs that you could ride on. So like instead of a horse, you'd have a bird person that would just like fly you around. So it's like a flying mount. Even though they were people. Right? But they couldn’t be played. 

[00:20:55] And the thing that was so interesting was that once they became a playable character, so I was an Aarakocra cleric. We were actually in many situations where it would've been really helpful for me to be able to stick another character on my back and fly them up to the top of a cliff or a mountain or whatever. But we couldn't do that. So the mechanic had changed. So if you became a person, you could not be a mount, but if you were a mount, you couldn't be a person. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:20] Oh.

Annalee: [00:21:20] And this is… it was such an interesting way of approaching identity and it made me think a lot about what it means to be a person who moves from being somebody who's acted upon to being an actor who has agency. It made me think a lot about gender, actually and about the role of women in fantasy, where for a long time, I mean, women were mounts, you know, they were there to be mounted by the dudes in a not very cool way. And then as women became characters and started to take over those roles and to write those roles for themselves and play those roles, suddenly it just didn't seem cool anymore.

[00:22:00] And so that's the kinda stuff that I see happening all the time in D&D. And it's not… Again, it's coming from the characters. It's coming from this whole new sets of generations of people playing the game. But it's also coming from inside the actual companies that are making these games, and specifically Wizards of the Coast, which is making D&D.

[00:22:21] So we're living through a lot of changes within these stories, and it's starting to reflect the kinds of changes that we're seeing in real life. 

[00:22:29] So after the break, we're gonna talk about a real life new book that's coming out that's also about people exploring intersectional identity in a fantastical, amazing world. So when we come back, we're gonna talk about your new book, Charlie Jane, Promises Stronger Than Darkness.

[00:22:44]OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:22:53] And we are back. And now I get to ask you all of the questions about your new book. This is a super special one because this is the third book in your trilogy, the Unstoppable Trilogy, the trilogy's wrapping up. This has been a whole epic journey for you writing these books and putting them out during the pandemic. And creating a trilogy, which you've never done before. 

[00:23:19] So first of all, let's just start with the basics. So when we get to Promises Stronger Than Darkness, where are we picking up? What's the story so far? What do we need to know?

Charlie Jane: [00:23:30] Yeah, so there's gonna be a little bit of spoilers for the first two books. Just heads up, I'm gonna try to keep it a little vague. But basically, this series is about this character named Tina, who’s secretly the clone of an alien superhero. And in the first book, she's really trying to kind of live up to the legacy of the alien superhero that she was cloned from. And then she kind of realizes that that's not actually who she wants to be. She wants to be her own person and in the second book we follow some of the other characters as Elsa kind of tries to become a space princess and Rachel tries to get back her ability to make art after she kind of used her art making ability to save the galaxy and it kind of made it impossible for her to create art for a while.

[00:24:12] And along the way we learn a lot more about the threat to the galaxy and we discover more about this fascist leader, Marrant, who is trying to take over the galaxy and basically it’s—

Annalee: [00:24:22] I hate that guy!

Charlie Jane: [00:24:22] Everybody hates that guy. At the end of the second book, basically things go… as you kind of expect, we're the middle book in a trilogy, things go really horribly wrong. The situation gets a lot worse. And as the third book picks up, we're really under the gun trying to save the galaxy and stop this fascist guy Marrant.

[00:24:44] And meanwhile, Tina has kind of gotten what she wished for in a way that's actually… like, she's kind of gotten to become this this epic hero that she used to be. She's kind of regained that identity, but it's at a huge cost, and so everybody's kind of struggling in the third book. But then, you know, we prevail and there's moments of joy and happiness and wonder along the way. It's not super dark and grim the whole way.

Annalee: [00:25:05] Not at all. I mean, this is, as someone who's read the entire trilogy and actually different versions of all of the books as you've been working on them, it's actually very joyful. I mean, it has rough parts, but as I know, you're very aware, it has a very gentle Star Trek side to it as well. And a little bit of Doctor Who in there as well. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:27] There’s a decent amount of Doctor Who in there. 

Annalee: [00:25:31] Yeah, I would say so. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:31] I was so happy that Russell T. Davies read the first one and was just like gushing about it. I was like, oh my God. The actual, the Doctor Who guy really likes this book, so that's good. Anyway.

Annalee: [00:25:42] Yeah, he is like a big fan of yours in general, which I think speaks well of him. And I mean also his, actually his Doctor Who speaks well of him as well. I really like his whole run on Doctor Who. 

[00:25:52] But, back to the important point, which is what's it like bringing this trilogy to a close, as a writer? How do you pay off all the stuff that's been building up in two whole books?

Charlie Jane: [00:26:04] It's so hard, and I've never, like you said, I've never done a trilogy before. It's a whole new challenge. It's a whole new way of approaching storytelling that is… and you have to kind of, you know, you lay down a lot of markers in the first book and you really have to pick them all up again.

[00:26:26] I feel like number one for me was paying off all the character stuff, paying off all the emotional stuff, paying off all the themes that the characters are talking about in the first two books, and making sure that that stuff kind of feels like it reaches a conclusion that's really satisfying.

[00:26:42] And, you know, I feel like in terms of like the plot stuff, that's where I wanted to make sure every single plot question is answered. But we also kind of sometimes answer questions and just move on and I think that you have to do that if you don't wanna be just crushed under the weight of so much continuity and so much stuff.

[00:27:00] The kind of maneuver that I learned was just to be like, okay, once this question's been answered, we’ll maybe refer back to it occasionally, but we're not gonna keep dwelling on it because there's so many other questions that have to be answered. And I feel like I learned that from watching a lot of TV shows where a TV show will obsess about a particular plot or logistical or like, how did this happen? Why did this happen? Who was the person who did this? And then you finally answer the question. Everybody's like, oh my gosh, that's the answer. And then we just keep moving. You have to be a little bit ruthless, I think. In terms of like the pacing. You have to be ruthless and willing to just be like, okay, that question's been answered now.

Annalee: [00:27:39] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:27:39] And so there are questions that were answered in the second book, which I'm just like, that's been answered already. We're not gonna go back and re-litigate that, kind of.

Annalee: [00:27:45] I love the phrase “crushed by continuity.” You’re right. I've seen so many stories fall prey to that where they just get entangled in like, but we need to bring this back. Oh, but what if we brought this back and it's like, or what if not? Maybe we just, like you said, like just, it’s been resolved, let's move on. 

[00:28:07] And I feel like the thing that. Been not crushed by continuity, but kind of buoyed by continuity in all three books are these characters who I feel like, the more the story goes on, the more we care about them, the more we love them and we're, worried about what's gonna happen to them. And there's a lot of like near death moments, which are really upsetting, especially in the third book. 

[00:28:32] And I feel like Tina is really struggling to live up to the legacy of Captain Argentian whose brain she has inherited in some ways, but so are a lot of the other characters. And I'm wondering, once people keep saving the day, once Tina saved the day, once a bunch of the other characters have saved the day, how do you keep this theme of identity going?

[00:28:59] Like at what point are they just like, okay, they're a hero now. Like, they don't have any more things to, to learn or discover?

Charlie Jane: [00:29:03] Yeah. I feel like that was one of the biggest gifts of getting to do a whole trilogy is that you kind of have to move past the basic questions of like, who am I? Who do I wanna be? Those kinds of coming of age questions. Those are, at a certain point, you're gonna start having answers to those questions. But then the question becomes, how do you apply those answers? Do those answers really just… is that gonna be it? Are you just like, are those gonna fix everything? Once you know basically who you are and who you want to be like?

[00:29:31] And I think what's interesting about it is, first of all, showing how, like a thing that people keep saying in the third book is that, yeah, I thought it was all about figuring out who I am, but it's actually more about figuring out who I belong to, what kind of group I wanna be part of, what kind of organization, what kind of systems I wanna belong to.

Annalee: [00:29:48] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:48] Like what I want to help to build. Like that we're all gonna be part of? And what kind of world I wanna build. And also people keep failing and they fail in different ways. And the more you fail, like you might be like, okay, I wanna be the person who does this. And then you set out and you try to be the person who does this and sometimes you really screw up and it doesn't work out and this ideal of who you want to be that you've figured out is who you want to be. It sometimes isn't gonna work out because life isn't like that. Sometimes you have setbacks and you screw up horribly. And so it's like trying to find the nuance in that, in a way is part of what I'm really interested in. Not just the like, this is the character type I'm gonna belong to. I'm gonna be a cleric thief, or whatever. It's like, well, yeah, that's who I want to be, but sometimes I'm gonna fail to be that and then what do I do? And I think that that's really a fun part to get to. 

Annalee: [00:30:43] I was a cleric Aarakocra, FYI. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:46] Nice.

Annalee: [00:30:46] In case you needed more information about my Aarakocra. So I really love what you were saying about how we move from questions of who am I to questions of what system am I part of and what group am I part of, which I do feel like is something that we learn as we grow up, or something that we try to figure out. And that really fits in with one of the big overarching ethical questions of this whole series, which is when to engage in violence, when it's okay to kill people. There's a lot of characters who are racked with guilt over having left people to die. Or also who are kind of have pre guilt over potentially having to kill Marrant or kill all of the people associated with Marrant.

[00:31:36] So I guess my question is how do you build a story around that question? In the third book, the whole galaxy is on the line. We have to figure out who we're gonna kill or whether we're gonna kill. So at that point, do you just sort of throw that away and just say, now we're gonna kill 'em all? Or how do you work that ethical question into like an action scene where you're trying to like actually kill the bad guy? Or maybe not kill the bad guy?

Charlie Jane: [00:32:07] I feel like the third book is really where we get into that in a deeper way. In the first book, it actually caught me by surprise that when Tina's trying to grow and become this epic superhero and like take on the, the mantle of Captain Argentian and she kills a few bad guys, and then she just has a total meltdown. And I wasn't actually prepared for that as the author. I was like, oh, this is not what I was expecting to happen here. But it makes total sense. And it kind of changed how I thought about her character and about the themes of the story. Because that's really, when you get into like the cost of heroism, yeah, you're gonna lose people you care about. Yeah, you're gonna have horrible tragedies happen to you and the people you love, but also you're gonna have to deal with like possibly having to commit murder, or commit mass murder in order to save the galaxy. 

Annalee: [00:32:56] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:56] And you watch Star Wars where they're just going around shooting storm troopers right and left. And these are people, these are people with hopes and dreams and hobbies and everything. 

[00:33:08] So the third book is really where the rubber hits the road on that. And the thing I really decided is I didn't wanna offer any pat answers. I didn't wanna be like… Like, I would love to be able to say yes, killing is always wrong. Killing is, you know, killing is never the answer. And like on some level, I really wanna believe that. But on the other hand, if I was living in Ukraine right now and we were being invaded by Russia, I'd be like, yeah, we have to fight back. There’s no choice. We can't just lay down and let them roll over us with their tanks. And it’s really… it’s hard. It should be hard. 

[00:33:42] And like, the only thing that I know for sure is the thing that one of the characters says in the middle of this book, the third book, is that if you have to take a life, you should hold a funeral in your mind for the people you killed.

[00:33:55] It's hard to mourn for people who you love who died. But it's even harder to mourn for people who you killed and you're kind of glad they're dead, but you still have to mourn for them. You can't just not mourn for people even if you would do it again, even if you… And there are situations in the book where there's no easy way out and killing might actually be the only solution and it's something that people have to grapple with.

[00:34:19] And I think that's really the thing, is showing that it should be hard and showing that it's a thing that you wrestle with and that you try to avoid it at all costs. And in an ideal world, you find another way. But also, you deal with the weight of it, the weight of the choice you've had to make. You don't have to be like, ha ha, okay. Like, you don't just make a quip and move on like James Bond or whatever. 

Annalee: [00:34:40] Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. That the characters do have ethical questions and they really do in this book. They have long agonized conversations in between space firefights and stuff.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:55] Highly entertaining, agonized discussions. Like they're not, you know. 

Annalee: [00:34:59] No, and it doesn't feel info-dumpy. It feels germane to the situation. They're actually having to ask these questions. And some of the characters, for example, are diplomats and they would rather have a peaceful solution. That’s just not what they've been taught in diplomat school. 

[00:35:19] Okay. So, getting away from the heavy questions for a second here. I, and many of your readers loved the universal translator in the first book where basically the universal translator, not only does it work on language, but it works on pronouns, and it makes it so that it's impossible to get someone's pronouns wrong.

[00:35:40] So I wanna know. Tell us about the translator. Is it back, is it better than ever? What's going on? 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:46] yeah, so the third book… I kind of seed this into the first two books a little bit. The universal translator is called the Every Speak, and it just like makes it so you understand every language.

[00:35:55] It's like in Star Trek, Doctor Who, you know, like the Babelfish in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

Annalee: [00:36:01] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:01] But I actually talked to a couple of linguists for this book, although I think they're gonna be horrified by what I actually ended up doing. But…

Annalee: [00:36:08] Uh-oh.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:08] I kinda… something that we kind of seed in the first couple books is like when Tina's trying to even communicate with someone from like another part of Earth, like someone from Brazil or someone from China, there are things that the universal translator really can't handle. Like that it either translates way too literally or it just is garbled and you’re talking to aliens, people from other planets who evolved in very different environments, who have very different biology and different social expectations. What are the chances that this thing is really gonna be telling you exactly what someone else is saying and how much is it just gonna be paraphrasing? And the thing that we really grapple with in this book is how much of this universal translator is designed for our comfort as the people who are like the humans who are out there exploring the galaxy and how much of it is designed to actually make it so we understand people. There’s the balance of like our comfort as users versus how much we're actually getting of the context of what people are telling us.

[00:37:09] And in some cases it turns out there's actually some real issues with understanding alien languages and we have to work harder to understand some of these cultures that are so different from ours, especially the cultures that have historically been marginalized. And it becomes kind of a metaphor for how we need to work harder to understand other cultures on not just a surface level and how that's part of how you build a better galaxy.

Annalee: [00:37:32] Yeah. I feel like this is a theme that's coming up a lot in fantasy and science fiction right now. Like Rebecca Kuang's book, Babel deals with this a lot, with how language is— 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:43] Yeah, mistranslation is a huge thing in that book.

Annalee: [00:37:48] Yeah, and I think, you know, really you're picking up on some of the same issues in Babel, which is that this is a galaxy that has some pretty messed up politics. It's got a history of colonialism. 

[00:38:02] But a lot of other stuff is going on too, and I'm just wondering, how do you build a whole galaxy? Like what was going on for you? As each book arrives, we see more of the galaxy, it keeps getting bigger. So, tell us about building a galaxy, making it interesting.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:20]j Man, I did… It's so funny, like when I think back to when I was writing the first book, I wrote just like copious notes on all these different aliens and all these different species and societies and the history of the galaxy and the war that happened, back in the day between different species and the fall of this great empire that fell like a thousand years ago. There’s so much.

[00:38:42] And I was like, I wanna just create a really like complicated immersive galaxy. And actually I feel like what I did, as time went on is, I kind of got selectively deep. Like there's a few alien societies like the Irriyaians where Yatto the Montha comes from. We visit their planet, we get to know their society really well, I feel like. At least I hope we do. We understand kind of their whole social structure and, and the ethos on which their society is based and we get into a lot of detail on that. And then there's other aliens civilizations where it's like, yeah, we know a few things about them. Like the Yarthins, we know that they worship rust, which is a fun thing that keeps coming up in different places. Like that's—

Annalee: [00:39:26] I mean, rust is awesome. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:26] Rust is awesome. And it's actually—

Annalee: [00:39:28] If you like fire, you're gonna like rust.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:30] Yeah, there's a lot of talk about how oxidation is this holy process and it's a gift from the gods and this actually becomes a plot point in the third book.

[00:39:40] But we don't know a lot about the Yarthins other than that they have the Yarthin dance of rejoicing and that they worship rust. We don't really learn the ins and outs of their culture because there's just not time. And so I kinda learned to pick and choose. I learned to just be like, there's a few alien societies we're really, really gonna get invested in and, and others who just, we know there's a lot there, but we're never gonna get there, you know. Because it's only three books and they're not George R.R. Martin books. They're short. 

Annalee: [00:40:07] Yeah. It's epic taken as a trilogy, but not book by book. 

[00:40:13] So I wanted to finish up by asking you about subverting tropes that you often see in space opera. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:20] Yes!

Annalee: [00:40:20] Yeah, which I know is your jam. Pretty much, I feel like this is something that runs through all of your work, including your standalone adult books, is that you'll often bring the reader in by offering them a trope that feels really safe and kind of old school. And then slowly you'll basically reveal that it's not at all what you thought.

[00:40:42] And the trope, I think, that this happens with the most in the Unstoppable trilogy is the idea of the big mysterious object in space and ancient alien gods who are connected to it, who can never be truly understood. And our quest is to like understand this ancient object, which is, to me, a very juicy, sexy trope. And I was like, yeah, alien object! But things turn out really differently than your typical situation like that. So did you start out wanting to subvert that or were you discovering as you went along, like, oh yeah, this object is not at all what I thought it was gonna be. 

Charlie Jane: [00:41:17] Yeah, I feel like it was definitely a little of both. There was a little bit of knowing that I wanted to subvert it, but also as I went along, kind of figuring that out and finding ways to kind of get inside it. And a lot of these kind of established tropes kind of have a weird underside that's just kind of strange and confusing that you can kind of delve into if you get into them.

[00:41:40] But yeah, so you have this sort of Arthur C. Clarke thing of like big mysterious object in space and like, woo, what is it? And alien gods who are like, whoa, we can't possibly understand what they think about anything. And you see that in the movie Prometheus. You see it in a bunch of classic science fiction novels and movies, and it happens a lot on Star Trek, too, where it's just like the incomprehensible thing that is at the limits of our understanding.

[00:42:10] And oftentimes, It's a way to kind of not really have to explain anything, because you get to a certain point and then it's like, we're gonna finally understand what this was all about. And then it's like, woo, trippy lights. Woo. I'm turning into a baby. Whoa. I'm stretching out. And my arms are like 10 million miles long now. And like, oh, I'm just tripping balls, man. Just tripping balls all over the place. And then it's like, and then you come back to reality and it's like, yeah, now we understand. And it's like, no, we don't, we don't freaking understand. 

[00:42:41] And I feel like it's both an acknowledgement that something that's like a really ancient, higher intelligence, like to sort of bring back Lovecraft, kind of a Lovecraftian entity, is gonna be incomprehensible to our tiny, puny brains. But it's also kind of a cop out. It's kind of a way of being like, yeah, there's an explanation, but we're never going to actually just tell it to you because your puny brains cannot encompass it, blah, blah, blah.

Annalee: [00:43:02] Yeah. That's sort of the J.J. Abrams of it all.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:06] I mean, it’s a lot of classic sci-fi. I feel like J.J. Abrams is drawing on a rich tradition.

Annalee: [00:43:09] Sure. I don't mean to like blame him, but it's… currently, he is kind of the…

Charlie Jane: [00:43:16] And it’s Arthur C. Clarke a lot. It's a lot of those guys. And I love that. I love like a trippy, weird, like, what the heck just happened kind of mind bending thing and, God bless it. I love it. But I felt like it would be kind of interesting if we start out with that, like in the first book, we find this like weird ancient butterfly structure in space that's woven around these two binary stars, and it's just like, whoa, this is this incredible feat of engineering and we don't understand it, and it makes no sense. And then it does this bizarre freaking thing that I won't spoil, but it's really bizarre and messed up and kind of disturbing. And it's like, oh, these ancient gods and what did they want? And like, we'll never understand. 

[00:44:00] And then by the third book, I feel like you have a real sense that the ancient gods… I kind of ended up being like, they're kinda like Greek gods in that they're really petty fuckers. Their concerns are actually incredibly petty and incredibly just like, oh, that's what this was all about? Y'all just had a fight over, like… It’s just, you know, I want there to be a certain amount of like, gods, they're just like us! Kind of, as People magazine would say.

Annalee: [00:44:30] Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, it turns out that in fact, it's all too comprehensible. You know? It's like comprehensible, but with a whole bunch of power attached to it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:39] Exactly. And yeah, they have amazing science. They’ve been around for eons or whatever, eons or epochs or whatever you wanna say. But they're basically just people and they're just fucked up people who had like, a squabble and the entire galaxy is suffering because of this squabble that these messed up ancient entities had. And I feel like that, to me, is really believable. I find that incredibly believable based on like, everything I know about powerful entities in the real world and everything I know about mythology. That's what it's gonna be. And I feel like it's kind of… I find it refreshing to just pull back the curtain and be like, yep. They're just terrible. They're just terrible and petty.

Annalee: [00:45:28] Yeah. I like to pull back the curtain, the sort of Wizard of Oz. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:32] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:45:32] Like, it’s actually just some dude with a big machine. And I should say that this isn't really spoilers because you know—

Charlie Jane: [00:45:39] It’s not.

Annalee: [00:45:41] A lot of this stuff comes early on and what really matters is what our characters do not the ancient technology. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:48] Yeah. And I'll give a little bit of a spoiler, which is that in the second book, Rachel actually confronts some of these ancient super god creatures. And just kind of sits there and tells them—Rachel's the sort of shy, introverted artist type who occasionally can bring the fire when she really needs to. And she just confronts these ancient alien gods. And it's just like, you're gonna be forgotten. We’re never gonna stop dealing with the mess you made, but you're gonna be forgotten. Nobody's gonna care about you, you're nothing. You don't matter. And they're just like, no, we're gods. We’re gods! And she's like, no, you're not. You're crappy and I don't care. And you're gonna be forgotten and you suck. And she just like tells them.

Annalee: [00:46:27] I love that so much. 

Charlie Jane: [00:46:28] And it's just like, that's what I wanna say to ancient gods. I'm just like, no, you don't matter. Fuck off. 

Annalee: [00:46:33] Yeah. You think he left behind this amazing monument, but nope.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:37] Fuck off, Ozymandias. 

Annalee: [00:46:39] We don’t give a crap about you.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:41] Yep. Exactly. 

Annalee: [00:46:43] Let's leave it there with telling Ozymandias to fuck off, that's a great sentiment. So you can go out now and pick up the last book in the Unstoppable Trilogy. Now you have the whole trilogy. So now, if you've been saving yourself to read the whole thing in one big marathon, now you can do it.

[00:47:03] Promises Stronger Than Darkness. It's out now. Buy the whole set and learn more about ancient aliens who we just wanna tell to fuck off. 

[00:47:11] So, thank you so much for listening. Remember that you can find us everywhere on the internet. You can find us on Instagram and TikTok as @OurOpinionsAreCorrect. You can find us on Mastodon on Wandering.shop as @OurOpinions. And of course, you can always find us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. 

[00:47:32] Thank you so much to our amazing producer and engineer, Veronica Simonetti, now a Venusaur. And… who you actually got to hear from. I'm so excited that we finally had an episode with your voice on it, Veronica. We should do this more often. We should just make you like weigh in on things. 

[00:47:51] And thank you so much to Chris Palmer for the music. Chris, by the way, has promised that he's gonna get us new music soon. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:55] Yay! 

Annalee: [00:47:55] So hopefully we'll be hearing new stuff from Chris and we will talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord.

Together: [00:48:03] Bye.

[00:48:03] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.