Looking at the right wing rage over Superman, it really seems like the thing that set them off was Superman being nice. Everything else was applied later as a justification. If Clark had been a cold wall of muscle, they might not even have noticed the anti-genocide stuff.

"When we’re not having as much fun, flaws are more noticeable, and those engagement mechanisms aren’t making us forget that we’re supposed to be analyzing." mythcreants.com/blog/questio...

Very funny to check Wheel of Time fan groups and find people twenty pages into debate about what Jordan could possibly have meant by saying all men are like this and all women are like that. They’ll solve it eventually.

"I wish certain Lord of the Rings quotes were less relevant." mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"I’m happy for just about anything that gets more people into roleplaying and speculative fiction, but there is a drawback: D&D’s default worldbuilding is awful." mythcreants.com/blog/so-your...

"depending on reader tastes, love interests can be more attractive with an aura of mystery rather than familiarity and sympathy." mythcreants.com/blog/five-im...

We dunno, it just seems a little on the nose that the people who wouldn’t stop screaming about precious free speech actually hate free speech more than anything else. They’re such boring villains.

The claim that “literature” is getting worse always makes us roll our eyes because in the absence of actual data, it’s all nostalgia. Take off the rose colored glasses and you’ll discover that literature has always sucked about the same amount.

There’s a classic “prank” people like to talk about pulling on agents and/or acquisitions editors, where you send them an existing, award winning book but pretend you wrote it. If they pass on the book, it shows they have no taste and you get to do a big brain flex. 1/9

Congratulations to KPop Demonhunters on being popular enough for a bunch of weirdos to use it as their “I’m totally not sexist” movie. It’s reached the point where they’ll lose clicks for trashing it, so they gotta pretend it proves that every other movie about women sucks instead.

"enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading." mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"Checkmate, non-oppressed mages!" mythcreants.com/blog/six-wea...

"You see, I wrote my erotic Zootopia fanfic for enjoyment, and while it’s probably great literature, no one I know will read it to verify this." mythcreants.com/blog/five-th...

Don’t worry, we would never support the trend of mediocre legacy sequels that feels increasingly inescapable. Unless it’s a mediocre legacy sequel to something we really like, then it’s probably okay.

Every once in a while, there’s a video or article on the subject of why there are so many Mormon SFF writers, with various answers proposed. But has anyone checked whether there actually *are* that many? 1/2

Obviously you’re gonna find some braindead critiques of modern Star Trek if you go looking, but our favorite so far is that Ortega’s hair is “too modern.” Folks, it’s short hair with some extra taken off the sides. That type of cut has gone in and out of style for centuries.

A big thank you to Catherine Smithmyer for her generous gift to Mythcreants! We appreciate everyone who’s able to support us, making it that much easier to keep going in an ecosystem increasingly hostile to independent websites.

"I don’t know if it’s salt, but is a smell I associate with the ocean." mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"presentation does matter." mythcreants.com/blog/five-wa...

"Anytime speculative writers decide to do anything related to gender, there is always a big risk that they will make the same mistake: reducing all human beings to two gender stereotypes." mythcreants.com/blog/creatin...

In theory, sprawling galactic scifi or epic political fantasy books should be long because there’s so much to do. In practice, it’s because they spend chapter after chapter on info dumps and characters waiting around for something to happen.

To our knowledge, no fantasy story has yet captured the high stakes absurdity of a lord dismissing their army so the soldiers can go back to farming, only to immediately call them all back because of A NEW CHALLENGER

Yes, people write long essays justifying why it totally made sense for Frodo not to use the eagles or for Rand to stop using his auto-win magic sword. No, they will not do that for the plot holes in *your* book.

A lot of very unpleasant people push the conspiracy theory that the Roman Empire was brought down by evil feminists, which is silly because it’s the Battle of Manzikert, not the Battle of Womanzikert

Character ages can sometimes be nebulous, but it gets more important the younger a character is. It likely won’t matter if a character is 40 or 44, but the difference between 14 and 18 is huge.

“No, but the title, it calls to me.” mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"One common strategy is to have the school run by a violent or authoritarian regime, which is used to justify why sparring sessions are conducted in rooms full of live grenades" mythcreants.com/blog/how-to-...

"Well, hello, badguy faction." mythcreants.com/blog/lessons...

A big thank you to Lichen, our latest supporter! They join our fleet of writing advice starships on the way to do battle with the Dominion of algorithms and LLMs that have decided to strangle our traffic. A fleet of Federation ships from Deep Space Nine.

The Author's Guild is helping people sign up for the class action suit against Anthropic for pirating a whole ton of books. We don't know how this case will turn out, but if you're an author whose work may have been stolen, it's a good idea to get on the list. authorsguild.org/news/anthrop...

It often seems that “Magneto was right” because X-Men writers intentionally have him channel important political thinkers from real life, many of whom were right in their own context. Whether they would be right in Magneto’s context is less clear.

"I always object to things less when they are short." mythcreants.com/blog/questio...

"Oh yes. The very classic Musketeers of Pig Alley." mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"I’m increasingly convinced that the prologue is an artifact from older drafts." mythcreants.com/blog/which-b...

"While the hero should be a little special, be careful not to go overboard" mythcreants.com/blog/five-qu...

Authors love to write characters who are good at cool games like chess, go, poker, and the like. It takes real courage to base your hero’s entire personality on 52-card pickup.

Queen’s Gambit is a very important show that explores what it’s like to morph from a child actor into Anya Taylor-Joy while everyone around you stays exactly the same.

Diane listening to the weird messages Cooper keeps leaving her or something, I dunno I don’t watch Warehouse 13

Name a non LOTR character who could resist the one ring

"getting people to read a super long novel is not easy. People have lives and they have work and stuff" mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

congratulations to @robertjbennett.bsky.social for his Hugo win with The Tainted Cup! A well deserved recognition of how great this book is.

"If you haven’t already seen KPop Demon Hunters (KPDH), I recommend closing this tab and watching the movie instead. Did you do it? Okay, now we can continue." mythcreants.com/blog/six-sto...

"In Poetics, Aristotle tells readers that simply covering a hero’s life won’t create a cohesive plot. If ancient playwrights often tried that, then starting at the hero’s birth, David Copperfield style, might have been common." mythcreants.com/blog/in-medi...

There’s a lot of talk about how we no longer seem to have any single book that’s popular enough for everyone to have read. Based on what’s happening in other mediums, we suggest that the best way to solve this problem would be a KPop Demon Hunters novelization.

Spooky foreshadowing is great. You can’t just drop the big horror on page one, you gotta build some anticipation first. But please, make sure *something* is happening while you do that. Otherwise the spooky foreshadowing is useless.

So far, Wednesday’s second season has been a modest improvement over the first. It seems like the writers are more at home with this being an urban fantasy detective story, though that’s still an awkward fit for the Addams family.

It’s only a matter of time before someone critiques Discworld for having "Whedonesque" dialogue, at which point it is officially our moment to walk into the sea.

"Wait, I was supposed to have learned something?" We chat with @jimchines.com about his career, upcoming projects, and of course smexy book cover posing. mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"Wait, I was supposed to have learned something?" mythcreants.com/blog/podcast...

"You can’t have an emotionally meaningful scene when Neelix is in charge; it’s not scientifically possible." mythcreants.com/blog/star-tr...