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541 – Downward Turning Points

9h ago

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We talk a lot about turning points, where a character overcomes challenges and saves the day. But what if they don’t? Turning points can go in either direction, after all. The downward variety is most common for villains, but it can apply to heroes, too. How do you make sure this sad ending feels earned, whether it’s a minor bump in the road or a permanent end? Is there a way to keep your readers from rioting? The answer is a solid maybe.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[Intro music]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is–

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: And–

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now I know since this is the start of the episode, we’re all feeling very optimistic, but what if in our hubris we go too far? [all gasp] One of us might choose poorly. And it will all lead to the downfall of the episode.

Oren: It’s all right. I’m very confident that that’s not a problem, so I’m not going to prepare for it. It’ll probably be fine.

Bunny: [chuckles] Nobody has ever been too arrogant before. Mm-hmm.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I was warned not to do this episode, but you know, I got nothing on me.

Bunny: Don’t trust the haters.

Chris: Obviously, everything’s gonna be fine. [Oren chuckles] What could go wrong?

Bunny: I’m one day away from retirement. [laughs]

Oren: Surely, if I made the choice to not properly edit my co-hosts voices because I was feeling lazy that day and only edited mine, what could be the harm? Surely that wouldn’t lead to anything bad.

Chris: Of course not. So now that we have done the summoning ritual for something that will definitely not harm us.

Bunny: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Let’s get onto this topic, which is completely unrelated, of course, as it is every episode.

Oren: Yeah. That’s how the opening bit works.

Chris: [laughs] That’s how the opening bit works. We’re talking about downward turning points.

Bunny: Oh, like a sharpened shepherd’s crook? A scythe? Because it’s a downward turning point, huh?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, that’s right! Very appropriate. Actually.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: It’s like one of those left turn signs, but it’s kind of come unstuck. It’s sort of on its side and it’s just pointing at the ground.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: Turn into the ground here please.

Chris: I love how symbolic this is, even though you’re trying to say things that are unrelated in your hubris.

[laughs]

Bunny: We’re too confident in our joke. We’ve accidentally made a serious thing, even though we were trying to be silly.

Chris: That’s right.

Bunny: It’s terribly ironic.

Oren: I have a downward turning point that I’m very excited to share that I just saw the other night.

Chris: Oh yes, we will do that. But first we should probably remind people what a downward turning point is.

Oren: If we must.

Chris: ‘Kay, so in case there’s somebody who doesn’t know but still wants to listen to our podcast, for some reason? Some trusting listener who is sure that we will define all of our terms.

Oren: There are dozens of us. Dozens!

[Chris and Bunny laugh]

Chris: Okay. So we talk a lot about how to make satisfying endings when you have a typical plot arc, which is driven by tension. And the trick is that right at the climax you have something we call a turning point that determines success or failure, so whether the protagonist gets a happy or a sad ending. And most of the time we want happy endings. And so when we’re talking about turning points, we almost always default to talking about that because the vast majority of books have [a] standard or upward turning point. So the protagonist does something impressive or virtuous and it feels like they earned a reward and then they get a happy ending, sometimes a bittersweet ending, but a lot of times they’re mechanically the same.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: They sacrifice something, they’re actually doing something impressive and that creates kind of a bittersweet feeling. But in essence, they succeeded at what they were trying to do even if it cost something.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But this time, what we are talking about [is] how they earn comeuppance, instead. So a character, not necessarily a protagonist, does something bad, and then they’re punished and then the audience gets their schadenfreude.

Bunny: [exaggerated] schaden-freude.

Oren: right. It feels right that this happened because that’s the trick to this, is that you both need to logically show that it makes sense that this happened. You also need to satisfy the reader that it feels correct that this happened.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: That’s the trick. And if you don’t do that. Readers are gonna be mad.

Chris: Right. And just in case anybody is unfamiliar and is like, ‘oh no, that seems too simplistic.’ Well, it’s more complicated in practice, but this is how all stories work. I swear this is not us trying to impose some moral simplicity on stories that is not already there. They all already work this way. Even stories that are missing turning points are usually trying to mimic them, and it’s just the storyteller doesn’t quite know how they work.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And just doesn’t quite get them precisely. But we can still see that they’re trying in the way that they’re constructed.

Bunny: The most common kind that is trying to emulate a turning point but doesn’t really work is when the character tries really hard and then tries harder and succeeds.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Bunny: We need to know why it works this time.

Oren: Another common one is the super sayan one where they just feel so intensely because something bad is happening that they are powered up now, and you getting really mad is not a satisfying turning point.

[Bunny laughs]

Chris: So what is? It’s more complicated than this in practice, but we can basically boil it down to three traits where we have either three virtues or their opposites. Which would be our misdeeds that make us feel like somebody should be punished.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It’s not always about, A lot of it is about ethics, but not necessarily, it’s not perfectly condemning somebody. sometimes it’s just about, it only makes sense since you did that, that that would fail.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Or succeed, for instance. It doesn’t make logical sense otherwise. So the obvious ones on either side are selflessness and selfishness. obviously being selfish part of that is the hubris and arrogance and lacking humility is kind of an extension of that.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Of being really into yourself and thinking you’re above everything. Then there’s, on one side, the determination, resistance, and the other side, I’m just gonna call it taking the easy route.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Unfortunately, it kind of strongly correlates to what we consider to be “weak will”, but I don’t like to use that term because studies have showed that’s not actually a thing. Nobody has weaker will than anybody else. But in this case, if somebody gives into temptation or is lazy or gives up easily, that would all fall in the ‘taking the easy route’. Makes sense that if you keep trying you are more likely to succeed, and if you push past your barriers you are more likely to succeed. So there’s kind of an obvious cause and effect here.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And then the last one, cleverness is considered a good thing that should be rewarded. And the opposite side is not- not being clever. Lack of cleverness is not something that characters are punished for. You have to be obviously careless.

Oren: Right. Making obviously bad choices,

Chris: So ignoring warnings, cutting corners, that kind of thing.

Oren: Imposing tariffs on your own economy, things like that.

[all chuckle]

Bunny: Worse on penguins.

Chris: And the hubris thing also falls into the carelessness category, right? Not only is it self-aggrandizing, but there’s also a certain amount of carelessness that comes with arrogance. So that’s generally something that would be a misdeed. Some action based on that would be a misdeed that’s worth punishing.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Generally in a story.

Oren: Okay. So now that we’ve got the basics, I’ve got a really interesting one.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: So spoilers for Andor season two episode eight. And this is what happens with Cyril because Cyril has a little awkwardly kind of transitioned into having an arc where he’s starting to question the empire.

Chris: Right. And just for anybody who’s not familiar with Andor, Cyril is a- he starts out in season one as like a low level corporate cop, or something like that in the empire.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And then he becomes kind of like an administrator, so he’s on Team Evil.

Oren: Yeah. And so by this point, he is starting to realize that maybe he is the baddies, and that the empire is not doing good things. And this is made very clear to him when he sees the empire’s soldiers open fire on a crowd of civilians and he’s stumbling around this scene of this massacre trying to figure out what to do. And we are- he is at a turning point, right? He’s at a turning point where he could choose to turn against the empire, and we would see that as a successful turning point.

And he would deserve, you know, something for that. I don’t know if reward is the right word ’cause again, he’s done a lot of bad things, but he would at least recognize [that] the empire was wrong and that he should do something about it. But instead he sees Andor, the main character who he has like an obsession with-

Chris: Who had a big vendetta against.

Oren: and he gives in and decides to attack Andor instead of doing anything about this massacre that’s happening. And so then he and Andor have a fight and it’s, you know, very gritty and they roll around and punch each other a lot and it ends with Cyril having a gun on Andor, and then getting shot by another rebel. And like right after Andor looks at him and says, “who are you?” Which is like the greatest burn that anyone has ever unintentionally delivered.

Chris: because in Cyril’s, mind Andor is his like nemesis or something?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right. So the shock of being like, ‘so you’ve got out of your way in the middle of this massacre to attack Me personally, I don’t even know who you are.’

Oren: Yeah, it feels like in [under] normal circumstances, if we didn’t have the whole thing going on with Cyril, if Andor was just in a fight with a- with like a major bad guy and then he won the fight ’cause some random rebel showed up and helped him, it wouldn’t really be very satisfying. It’d be like, ‘oh, okay, good job random rebel, thanks.’ But that this wasn’t about Andor, this was about Cyril and Cyril dies because he made the wrong choice. And it’s a very cool scene and it works really well. And it’s an example of how this is simple in concept, complex in practice.

Chris: Yeah. So basically the most iconic turning points [are] almost always used for villains.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because with heroes we have to worry about whether they’re likable or whether the audience will get frustrated, but we don’t have to worry about that for villains. And so they’re just free to make bad choices and then get punished for that. I think the most iconic ones I’ve seen are like Indiana Jones.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: They’re seeking the Holy Grail and they come upon this old immortal night at the end of all of their labyrinth that they have to get through, and Indiana Jones gets through, but also a villain gets through. And this knight has a whole bunch of grails and so he challenges them, ‘Pick which one you think is the grail, and then drink from it and see what happens.’ And the villain chooses based on the advice of somebody who betrayed Indiana.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: One of the turning points that’s common, the downward turning points, is the betrayed betrayer. Basically, if you have a situation where what goes around comes around,

Oren: yep.

Chris: That’s a kind of a typical downward turning point. So this villain hired somebody to betray the main character, and now he relies on her advice when choosing a grail and believes her when she’s like, ‘oh yeah, this one that’s full of golden jewels. It’s totally the holy grail.’

Oren: That’s totally the one!

[chuckles]

Chris: Right? Which is where you get that meme format with that old guy being like, [dramatic] ‘you chose poorly’ as he drinks from it and ages really fast and dies.

Oren: Right. Continuing the weird Indiana Jones tradition of the bad guys would’ve failed even if Indiana Jones didn’t do anything [all laugh] Very strange. At least the two good Indiana Jones movies both have that. It’s very odd.

Chris: But yeah, obviously Indiana Jones chooses the right one and drinks from the Grail and he’s like, ‘you chose wisely.’ It’s just like that really iconic scene of good choice, poor choices. That’s basically what every turning point is, just subtler usually.

Oren: Yeah. And we see that again actually a little later when they’re trying to get out of the area and the magic of the place, or maybe God or whatever, is stopping them from leaving and bringing the whole place down ’cause you’re not supposed to take the grail out of there. Indy makes his battle of will turning point and is like, ‘okay, I will leave the grail behind.’ Whereas his hot lady friend, who is also evil, she can’t do it, and she gives into temptation to try to get the grail and as a result, falls to her death and dies.

Chris: Yeah. It’s a little funny when you think about it because on one hand, determination is usually a positive attribute.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And a different story also could just be determined and it would be good.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But because this is framed as a temptation… also, she is warned. That’s another big sign that it’s a downward turning point as opposed to she’s just real scrappy and she’s gonna get that grail and good for her!

[all laugh]

Oren: Yeah. You go lady who was working with Nazis! Are you also a Nazi? Hard to say.

Chris: Hard to say.

Bunny: Unclear. You’re hot though.

Chris: Right, but the fact that she’s warned by this knight not to take the grail past the seal, right? And let it go and [she] refuses those warnings. There’s definitely a lot of subjectivity, a lot of downward printing points, and oftentimes the more relatable ones when you have like a sympathetic villain, are the refusal to let go of something.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Which, if you look at it versus determination, one of the things that you’ll see for determined characters is their ability and willingness to make sacrifices. Including sacrificing their life or giving up something that they want, or making a choice that has some downsides that will put them in danger.

Bunny: I wonder if we’re supposed to view that particular turning point as greed? She won’t give up trying to get the cup because she’s greedy for it, maybe?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Bunny: I think that’s how I read it.

Chris: I think that certainly factors into it. I feel like there’s a certain indolence is sometimes what I’ve called this opposite of determination. You’re lazy, but you’re also used to luxury and greedy as opposed to scrappy and self-sacrificing and…

Oren: Right. We talk a lot about how traits that in some stories are positive traits that would make the character earn or deserve their victory in other stories can be portrayed as a negative and make them feel like they deserve their failure.

Chris: Which is why this isn’t as simplistic as it may sound,

Oren: Right.

Chris: Is because what is, determine what is carelessness, for instance, or when we have Hamlet, for instance, where he uses caution but it’s too much caution to the point where it’s carelessness.

Oren: Right? Ned Stark is our favorite example. Ned Stark is honorable and he’s chivalrous. And in most stories, that would be a good thing and we would want him to win. But we see that Westeros is such a cutthroat place that when he starts to ignore possible allies because that doesn’t fit with his sense of honor, now it feels like you’re just making bad choices, man.

Chris: Now you’re being careless, yeah.

Oren: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Chris: And that’s how it is a lot of times with heroes. Because we talked about that a lot of the most iconic ones happen with villains ’cause you don’t have to worry about certain constraints. But when you have heroes, readers- they can be unlikeable because of what they do, but readers can also get really frustrated.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So if you ever got mad after you saw a main character make [what] was obviously a bad choice, [to Orin] You know what this is like.

Oren: Yeah. I have a whole post about that, how I needed my character to make a mistake and my readers consistently did not like it.

Chris: There’s no perfect solution that works in all cases, but you can have them take a good karmic trait a little too far, and that’s exactly what happens with Ned is one way to make it better.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Trying to make the choices understandable as you can and just make it mild and then give them an outsized punishment for how mild the mistake is.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So it’s like you were a little careless in that [you] didn’t lock the door, but you didn’t know there would happen to be a bunch of people breaking in that night and killing people or something. Not locking the door is a relatively minor thing to be careless about, and it happened to be a bad night. That would be the kind of thing that is used with a protagonist, typically.

Oren: Yeah, and we’ve been talking a lot about these in terms of the conclusion of a character’s arc. Often that includes them dying, but downward turning points also can happen in lower stakes issues earlier in the story, right? Especially when you need your character to fail so that the tension stays high so it actually feels like failure is possible.

Bunny: Or it’s part of their arc, like it’s something they’re overcoming so we see them fail to overcome it a couple times.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yes, that’s exactly right. Here’s the thing, usually you don’t actually need this for tension, and the reason why you don’t need it for tension earlier in the story is because it actually looks just like a problem that starts an arc. So anytime you want something bad to happen or something to go wrong, that raises tension you can have the protagonist fail. And like Bunny said, storytellers typically choose that option when there’s a character arc and there’s something for them to learn. But if they actually don’t have any agency and something just bad happens that raises tension, it just looks like a new arc has started. The villain just struck.

Oren: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Chris: You don’t want to deprive your protagonist of agency, period. You don’t want everything to go wrong all the time and the protagonist not have anything to do with it. That’s bad. But as long as the protagonist has some successes and has some agency, you can have a failure that they didn’t really have agency in because that just starts a new arc. It just looks like a different part of story structure.

Oren: There’s an interesting comparison to be made in the Expanse books. Um, spoilers for those, I don’t remember exactly which books this happens in, but there are two examples in the Expanse books of the villains ending a book by pulling off a major victory. The first one is against this guy Inaros, and Inaros isn’t the perfect villain, he kind of comes outta nowhere and it feels weird that we’ve never heard of him when he’s apparently this super capable rebel commander.

But he does manage to pull off a pretty convincing win at the end of one of the books when he slams an asteroid into Earth and takes control of the belt and is in a pretty strong position. Part of the way he’s able to do that is that our team good, which is not just the main characters, are too busy squabbling with each other to properly unite against him. That really helps there, it feels like they have made mistakes and that has opened the possibility for Inaros to win the day. Now of course it helps that this is clearly building to the next book where he’s gonna get defeated, but it still generally works pretty well.

Chris: Like the Empire Strikes back, for instance.

Oren: Yeah, exactly.

Chris: Exactly. Where Luke decides that he’s gonna leave training. That leads to- he does succeed in some things as a result, but it also leads to a big failure. But because this is only the second in a trilogy, we can kind of like, okay, that failure is also kind of a hook for the next story.

Oren: Right. But then later on we try this. Again with these guys who, they go off and live on an alien planet for a little while and then there’s like a 30 year time jump, and then they show back up with a bunch of super tech and just completely steamroll over the solar system. It’s some of the most frustrating stuff I have ever read, part of that is just because these guys feel really contrived.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: ‘A totally super powerful mega tech faction was just forming off screen for 30 years. Don’t worry about it. That definitely happened.’ But even if they had had a better explanation, there was just nothing the team good could do about this, so it felt dishonest to drag it out for so long.

Chris: Right?

Oren: Team good does everything right. You know, they all unite, they all have the perfect strategy, they get all their ducks in the line, and it’s not enough. And it’s like, why did you make me read an entire book about that? You could have summed that up in a chapter.

Chris: Right? Yeah, that’s definitely the thing ’cause this doesn’t make for a good conflict, right?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: You want your protagonist to have some agency in conflicts too. So generally when you start a new problem that opens an arc, it happens pretty fast. Karma is something that is created and then sticks around until it’s paid off, right? That’s the other thing.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Why it really matters if we’re talking about the climax or an earlier sequence, because a character can do something good or bad and as long as that is not balanced out, they’re not rewarded or punished for that. That just sticks around on their tab-

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: -And we just expect it to be resolved at the end. But until then, until the very end, and if it’s a series, it could be an entire series, the payback could come later. Generally, if it happens fast and they don’t have any agency in it, then that’s something to be- okay, they didn’t do anything wrong yet they still lost, but they’re gonna turn it around.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: ‘Cause they didn’t deserve to lose, ‘so we’re gonna turn it around later.’ You could have some fight where the villain succeeds ’cause they’re better.

Oren: I think that would’ve been fine. It’s just that it took an entire book.

Chris: Right! No, it just took too long.

Bunny: That’s the sort of thing you want early in the book. Because then the idea is that you’re struggling to recoup from that.

Chris: Yeah. I can recommend giving some people some satisfaction at the end of a book. Even if the story doesn’t officially end till the end of the series, it sucks to get to the end of the book and get no satisfaction.

Oren: Cliffhanger, baby.

Bunny: It’s like a cliffhanger but you’re swinging from the cliff so you’re hitting your head against the side of the cliff.

Chris, Oren: Yeah.

Oren: Yeah. A really. Weird one that this showed up, I swear, in every Red Wall book, would be that the hero would defeat the villain and then the villain would beg for mercy, and the hero would say, ‘okay, I’m granting you mercy ’cause I’m not evil’, and then the villain would try some sneaky cowardly attack after they’ve been granted mercy and this would lead to them dying.

Bunny: Ah, the self-disposing villain.

Oren: Yeah, it’s the self-disposing villain!

Chris: When you want the villain to die, but you don’t want the hero to kill anybody. That’s right!

Oren: I swear, every red wall book ends that way. And it’s so weird.

Chris: The superhero movies do that a lot too.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yeah. The attack that reflects back on them.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But the other way that we dispose of villains is with the betrayed betrayer or victim’s victim.

Bunny: [giggles] What goes around comes around.

Chris: Yep, exactly. We have some person innocent that the villain hurt that we learned about earlier come, and one of my favorites is that it’s the end of Stardust where we have three witches that kept a bunch of animals in cages because they were using the type of divination where you look at guts. And then the animals, just as soon as they’re let out, they know exactly who hurt them and just swarm them.

Oren: Get ’em!

Chris: But that’s pretty typical, something like that.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Their minions that they were mean to, once freed, carry them away, and we hear them screaming, but we don’t have to watch anything happen.

Oren: One of my favorites is near the end of Deep Space Nine, and I don’t love this arc in general, it feels kind of weird and anticlimactic, but there’s a specific part in this, and this is when Gul Dukat, who is working with the Pah-wraiths, has decided he’s gonna go down to the cave where the Pah-wraiths are all imprisoned and let them out and Cisco has to go to stop him.

And Kai Win is also there and has sort of decided that she doesn’t want to be on Dukat’s team anymore.

And there’s this section where she could have just thrown the book into the big fire lake, the magic book that Dukatt was using, ’cause this is sci-fi, right? It’s got a magic book and she could have just done that and won. But instead she makes a big show of doing it and then Dukat blasts her with a Pah-wraith laser. And at first I was like, ‘ah, this annoyed me. She could have just won right there.’ But then I thought about who Kai Win is and I’m like, ‘yeah, no. She would want credit as she was doing it. She would want Cisco to look at her and be like, “Cisco acknowledge me that I’m doing this good thing because I’m very special and I need affirmation.”’

Chris: Gul Dukat is just like that too.

Oren: Yeah. Dukat also is like that. So in retrospect, I actually like that. I think it was in character.

[all laugh]

Bunny: Forgiven.

Chris: An example I’d like to use of a protagonist’s downward turning point that is made mild is in Spiderman No Way Home, where basically what we find out is that Peter Parker’s girlfriend and best friend didn’t get into [the] college they wanted to go to because he has a bad reputation.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And so first he goes to ask Dr. Strange to basically cast a spell to make people forget who he is to change that. And because he’s doing it for his friends, initially it seems selfless. So that kind of softens it. But then we find out when Dr. Strange starts casting a spell, and he is like, ‘oh, well you appealed the decision, right?’ And then he is like, ‘uh, no,’ which shows carelessness, right? And the lack of dedication that he didn’t do his due diligence, so that takes a point against him. And then during the spell, he keeps asking for more things. He’s unwilling to make sacrifices. Doesn’t show that he’s properly determined and then the spell goes wrong, and then he’s like, ‘okay, it’s my fault. Now I have to make up for it.’ And he didn’t really do anything super bad, we can understand why he was doing what he was doing. At the same time, we can also see how he wasn’t careful and he overreached so it’s understandable that he feels he has something to make up for.

Oren: Yeah. All right. Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close and we didn’t have to pay for any of our arrogant choices earlier, so it’s great. It all worked out.

Chris: Oh, no. Means a karma still outstanding.

Oren: It’s fine. Just assume that it happened after we stopped recording.

Chris: Please don’t punish us by going to patreon.com/that would be awful.

Oren: We would hate it so much. Before we go, I want to thank all of our existing patrons. There’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[outro music]

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