In this week’s episode, we take a look at what fantasy writers can learn about worldbuilding from the Willow streaming series. I also discuss how I wrote 10,000 words in a single day for the first time since January 2022.
TRANSCRIPT:
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 161 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 21st, 2023, and today we’re going to discuss some lessons in fantasy worldbuilding from the recent Willow streaming series on Disney Plus. Before we get into all of that, let’s have some updates on my current writing projects.
I am almost halfway through the rough draft of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods, and in fact, after I finished recording this, I’m going to work on it a bit more and then I will be over halfway through the rough draft of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods. If all goes well, I’m hoping to have that out towards the end of August sometime. That is, if you’ll recall from previous episodes, part of my Summer of Finishing Things. Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods is the final book in the Dragonskull series, and I’m going to follow it up with a Silent order: Pulse Hand, which will be the…excuse me, the final book in the Silent Order science fiction series. In other news recording is underway for Dragon Skull: Curse of the Orcs. I think I mentioned that in previous episodes, it is being narrated by Brad Wills and if all goes well, it’ll be out towards the end of August or sometime in September.
I’m also very pleased to report that on Wednesday, July 19th, I wrote 10,000 words of Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods in a single day. That is my first 10,000 word day of 2023, and in fact the last time I wrote 10,000 words on a single day was back in January 11th, 2022 when I was working on Cloak of Iron, and since then in the Nadia series I’ve written Cloak of Iron, wrote Cloak of Shards, Cloak of Spheres, Cloak of Masks, and Cloak of Dragonfire. So it’s been a while since I wrote a 10,000 word day. If I remember right, I had eight 10,000 days in 2021 and then I had twenty-two 10,000 words days back in 2020. But that was during peak COVID when there was nothing else to do. And I did write the entire Wraithshard series that year.
Here the tricky thing about 10,000 word days is that 1: I can’t have anything else major I need to do that day. And 2: everything has to go exactly right during the day. Like, if I have a phone call to make or home maintenance to do or a podcast to record, or something unexpected comes up unexpectedly, that means it’s not going to be a 10,000 word day. So for the first time since January 2022, both conditions one and two aligned on the same day and I had a 10,000 word day. Hopefully I’ll have at least one more in 2023, but we’ll see how the rest of this year goes.
00:02:33: Reader Questions/Comments
Before we get to our main topic this week, we have a couple of questions from readers. Charles writes in to ask about the Dragonskull series: How long have most of the Dragonskull books been? Most of the Dragonskull books have been between 80 and 90,000 words, with like around 83,000, 84,000 words being the sweet spot, and I think Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods will end up somewhere in that neighborhood as well. So I think that’s a good length for a book. I think overall the best length for a novel is between 80,000 to 100,000 words, with some exceptions of course, because that way the reader gets an entire story and hopefully doesn’t feel cheated, and hopefully that is not a strain on the sanity of the author because I found if you’re writing a long book, once it gets over 100,000 words, it gets harder and harder to write.
Our next question is from Juana, who says: Come on, write the next Cloak book. Enough with the other series, please. Marshall Worldburner deserves some actions. Though I suppose that is less of a question and more of a declaration. But in answer to the implied question there, once I’m done with my Summer of Finishing Things and the Dragonskull and Silent Order series are complete, the next thing I am going to write is a Caina book which I believe will be entitled Ghost in the Serpent. And then after that I will write a Cloak of Embers, the final…no, excuse me, not final (definitely not final!), but the next Nadia book in the sequence. So before the end of the year, we will have some more Nadia, if all goes well.
00:04:04: Main Topic: Fantasy Wordbuilding Lessons from Willow on Disney Plus
Well, now let’s move on to our main topic for this week’s episode: fantasy worldbuilding lessons, specifically fantasy worldbuilding lessons derived from the Willow streaming series that came out on Disney Plus towards the end of the end of November 2022 last year. I tried watching it, and I got so annoyed with it that I gave up after the first episode. I couldn’t quite articulate my annoyance at first, so I thought about it and then realized it connected with one of my favorite topics: fantasy world building and we’re going to spend the rest of the episode discussing that.
My annoyance with the Willow series reminded me of an e-mail I got when Dragon Skull: Fury of the Barbarians came out in October of 2022. A reader was annoyed that I used the phrase lean in, assuming I’d used it in the modern parlance of giving additional effort to a certain task. The use of the phrase lean in that way was popularized in a 2013 book called Lean In, written by former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, where she argues that women can succeed in the workplace by simply 1: leaning into the work 2: working for the most unscrupulous companies in the world and 3: having the personal wealth to hire domestic servants. But perhaps I’m snarking on the book somewhat. Anyway, back to our point. In Fury of the Barbarians, I didn’t use lean in in that sense. The actual sentence was, “Gareth leaned into his momentum, attacking a second muridach.” I wasn’t using the phrase in its idiomatic sense.
I meant it literally. Gareth was literally, physically leading into a sore blow to lend it extra power while fighting a muridach. Probably I should have phrased it better so there would be no misunderstanding with my readers. However, I can understand the annoyance of the reader who emailed me. It would be massively jarring to have such a cliched concept as and one so stereotypically 21st century and as trite as leaning in appear in a fantasy novel. That would be very annoying. And the Willow series does that constantly.
The plot of the first episode revolves around an arranged marriage for the princess. I have to admit the princess was basically every plucky rebellious tomboy character trope mashed together, and the result was so bland, I can’t remember her name, but the princess is betrothed to a foreign prince and isn’t at all happy about it. Now, this should have been an excellent setup for a conflict. However, the concept of an arranged marriage in the show is so removed from anything connected to reality that it becomes pointless. One of the keys to understanding medieval history, and indeed most preindustrial history, is the idea of food scarcity. Now one of the great blessings of living in the 21st century West is that we’re more likely to die of obesity related complications than of starvation. This was most assuredly not the case in the Middle Ages, and most preindustrial civilizations.
One bad harvest could set off a chain of events that could lead to famine and civil war, along with lowering the overall health of the population, which would contribute to a plague. Medieval Europe from about 1100 to 1300 AD, didn’t have that many famines, though did have some. But after 1300 or so, the weather got cooler and wetter, which caused several crop failures, which in turn directly contributed to the many wars and overall political instability of the 1300s, especially since a chronically malnourished population did not have an immune system capable of fighting off the Black Death from 1347 onward. So what does this have to do with arranged marriages?
Life in the Middle Ages was often very precarious. Nobles and royals arranged marriages to produce heirs and secure alliances. This seems primitive to modern sensibilities, but remember that the concepts of will of the people and of democracy were still quite nascent in the Middle Ages and most people strongly believed in the ideas of kingship, and that the king was the anointed of God and God’s representative on Earth. A king or noble not having a viable heir was an invitation to civil war and other catastrophes. A war could also disrupt the planting season and destroy crops which could result in a famine, and all the problems we discussed previously. So an arranged marriage between royals was a massively serious business, with potentially disastrous consequences if it went wrong. Like for those nations whose fortunes would be bound up into it, an arranged marriage between royal families was as serious a meeting, as serious an event as a meeting between the President of the United States and the head of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Examples of this are manifold and here are a few of the more prominent ones: King Henry the Second of England ended his reign at war with his sons because he fell out with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry the First of England’s son drowned in a boating accident which directly caused twenty years of civil war. King Edward the Confessor died without an heir but had apparently promised the English throne to three different men, which led to a year of war. Philip the Fourth of France died without a son, which directly contributed to the Hundred Years’ War that devastated much of France. King Edward the Fourth of England marrying Elizabeth Woodville in a fit of passion caused the War of Roses to restart after Edward’s early death.
Henry the Eighth’s relentless quest for a male heir didn’t cause a civil war, since Henry had the ultimate long term survival trait for a monarch: ruthless paranoia. But it did set off the English Reformation in all the social chaos and upheaval that it brought. By contrast, his father, Henry the Seventh, brought an end to the War of the Roses by marrying Elizabeth of York, which helped him secure a mostly peaceful reign. Now, wars obviously have many causes, but the failure of marriages and heirs in royal families was a significant cause for all the conflicts and loss of life described above.
But the Willow series doesn’t have any of this with its arranged marriage. All the characters are basically 21st century people dressed up in fantasy clothes. There’s no reason for the queen to force the princess to marry. You get the impression that if both the queen and the princess died suddenly, the characters of Willow would decide they were ready for 21st century parliamentary democracy and maybe put those Coexist bumper stickers on their ox drawn wagons. The queen is forcing the queen is forcing the princess to marry for no other reason than to be a mean mom, which allows the princess to be a plucky, rebellious tomboy and generate conflict for the plot. Now I’m not saying that all fantasy needs to be filled with Game of Thrones style Grim Dark, but you can get a very tense plot with just say, like 15% of the reality of the stakes of a medieval arranged marriage.
Indeed, if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time or listening my podcast for a long time, you know and you know that I enjoy taking cheap shots at Game of Thrones, a petty vice that I try not to indulge in too often. But I will say this for the House of the Dragon, the spin-off series of Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon does get the very serious stakes and the lethal dynamics of the medieval succession crisis mostly right. Perhaps we should count ourselves fortunate that Henry the Eighth did not have access to dragons.
Another dissonant note in the show is how pointedly egalitarian everyone is. In the 21st century, we live in a very egalitarian age where billionaires and politicians feel the need and the social pressure to make gestures to show that they really are part of the common man. Like the President of the United States and the President of China are two of the highest ranking people on Earth, and they both dress in somber black business suits most of the time, suits that would not be out of place in a wide variety of professions. Compare this to the way that, say, Louis the 14th of France, dressed where his clothes were so magnificent that helping him get dressed in the morning was considered a great honor.
If the President of the United States gave a press conference addressed as Louis the 14th one day and proclaimed that his rich garments reflected his authority and status, both his allies and his rivals would assume that he had lost his mind and start plotting to remove him under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. So egalitarianism is so ingrained in modern life that most people assume it’s the natural order of things and take it for granted. Now I want to be clear, this is not a bad thing. Overall, I think an egalitarian society is better than the sort of society where, for example, you could be executed for accidentally making eye contact with your social superior. Now what does this have to do with Willow?
The princess’ brother, the charming, roguish prince, is conducting a romantic affair with one of the servants in the kitchen. This, of course, is so common to be unremarkable. Even today, it’s fairly common for married CEO or high-ranking politician to have an affair with one of the staffers in his or her offices. Hardly commendable, but that’s true of a lot of things connected to human nature. What’s odd is how the charming, roguish Princess affair is treated, exactly like a modern teenage romance, complete with bouts of squabbling and hurt feelings. It’s portrayed like the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks dating the richest and most popular boy in high school. In real life, in real medieval history, a prince who had a commoner mistress could and often did behave very badly. But the sword could sometimes cut both ways.
If the prince acted in a way too far outside of his station, his peers could react badly. Remember Elizabeth Woodville from earlier? She was technically very minor nobility, but she was of low enough rank that when King Edward before married her, several of his most powerful supporters immediately turned against him and nearly deposed him. It didn’t help that Elizabeth had a large and very greedy family and had immediately began enriching themselves as fast as possible when she became queen. For that matter, the prince’s mistress could have been cast off at any time with no recourse. But remember the food scarcity we described earlier? Being the prince’s mistress was a lot better than working in the fields or in a tavern.
It could have been a reflection of the charming, roguish prince’s character that he acted courtly and chivalric towards his paramour from the kitchen in defiance of social convention and the pressure of his peers. Or the rest of the servants could have turned against his paramour, both scornful and jealous, that she was acting above her station. That would have been a potentially interesting plot, but there’s nothing like that. It’s just teen romance in the background while Mean Mom forces plucky, rebellious Princess Tomboy to marry for ill defined reasons, and the only backlash the prince’s girlfriend from the kitchen gets is a vague warning that her heart is probably going to get broken. Given that the charming, roguish prince’s girlfriend isn’t who she appears to be, there is potentially an interesting plot there but I got too bored with the show to continue on.
Even in the modern egalitarian-esque age, romantic affairs between two different people of drastically different social standing can have very bad consequences for both participants. We can all think of many married politicians and business leaders who got caught having affairs with subordinates, which often winds up destroying the careers of everyone involved. For that matter, there are numerous situations where single people entering a relationship would have harsh consequences: a college professor dating a student, for example (even if both are technically of age) or a military officer seen as subordinate or someone higher in rank. So what lessons can fantasy writers learn from all this?
I think one of the appeals of most fantasy fiction is that’s different and an alien place from Earth. Conan’s the Hyperborean Age, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the Forgotten Realms, Earthsea, the Dying Earth: all of them are fantastical places that aren’t like 21st century Earth. Even in urban fantasy that takes place in something like the contemporary world, there is an element of the fantastic. Your neighbor might be Harry Dresden or an exiled elven noble living in disguise on Earth because Earth is neutral territory between the elven courts like Switzerland or something. So there needs to be an element of the fantastic, the alien, the eldritch, and they’re just…can’t just be characters throwing CGI magic swirly things at each other. I think that’s why the Willow series didn’t work for me, and given that it was cancelled without a second season and Disney is pulling the show from its streaming service as a tax write off, I think it’s fair to say the show did not work for a lot of people.
All the characters were basically 21st century people LARP-ing as fantasy characters. Even that could have been interesting. You could have a 21st (sic) character transported into a fantasy world and find himself baffled by monarchial bloodline succession, only for the local characters to sternly and perhaps condescendingly explain to him that the gods instituted a bloodline succession. And if the rightful heir is not seated upon the throne, famines and plagues will visit the land, and orcs will come down from the frozen north, seeking man flesh to devour. And since it’s a fantasy world, all that might even be true. So if you are a fantasy writer, maybe it would be a good idea to lean in making your setting unlike the modern world.
When I talked about this on Facebook, longtime reader William had an interesting comment about it, and William said: I think the strange thing about the Willow series is that it has a perfectly good premise, but it’s like some executive decided to rebrand it from a family adventure story like the original movie to make it more appealing to teenagers or some similarly nebulous target youth audience in exactly the kind of comically ham-fisted way that show…that shows and movies make fun of when ridiculing movie executives with an inflated opinion of themselves.
I think it is very likely that William may be correct here because the original movie, which I had watched again in 2021 and 2022, is actually quite good. It’s. It’s a bit weird in places beyond that, and George Lucas was very obviously copying the plot of his Star Wars movie because Queen Bavmorda was like the Emperor, General Kael was a bit like Darth Vader, Willow was a bit like Luke Skywalker, Madmartigan was a bit like Han Solo and so forth, but it was still a good movie and a good family adventure story in a way that the series was not. But like I said earlier, the series provides lessons in fantasy worldbuilding for fantasy writers to avoid.
So that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
