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Episode 155: Where does this Portal go?
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Before we get to the episode we want to remind you of the Charity Event this weekend.
Alex and returning guest Reinhardt Suarez talk about the fantasy story sub-genre of Portal Fantasy (stories that generally have their protagonist, and possibly others, travel to another worlds, usually from Earth, in some manner) , and how the stories of the 5 Origins Planeswalkers seem to have taken inspiration from it.
Helpful Links:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrappedInAnotherWorld
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Magic_Origins#Magic_Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1G1xOvZzLA
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter
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Transcript
Charity Event for Reproductive Rights
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers. This is Hobbs Q. I just wanted to kind of do a little bit of an announcement before we got to the episode for today. So the episode that you are about to hear is actually one with Alex and returning guest Reinhardt Sanchez. I was not able to do the recording for this, but I wanted to come on to speak a little bit just before I kind of pass you over to Alex and Reinhardt.
00:00:53
Speaker
This weekend so if you are listening to this in the week that this is episode is coming out on our normal Wednesday this coming weekend July 30th and 31st We will be helping to host a two-day charity event for the National Abortion Federation
00:01:10
Speaker
This is an organization that helps provide access to abortions. They help women that need this, or sorry, I'm going to say anybody that can birth a child that needs access to an abortion. And that is really kind of what the mission is. We've said this on the show recently, that reproductive rights are rights.
00:01:33
Speaker
should not be threatened and should not be taken away. A person's choice of what to do when they are pregnant is their choice. And shortly after the decision came down to kind of change how Roe versus Wade was being interpreted, my wife who was an OBGYN kind of turned to me and said very clearly just, what can the magic community do? She knows how
00:01:58
Speaker
how much this community has done for mental health, how socially aware that they can be. And by this community, I do obviously mean people that maybe are more likely to probably be listening to the show, people that have engaged with our content and know exactly where we stand on these issues. We've stated them clearly over and over again, especially in recent months.
00:02:23
Speaker
She just flat out, what can the community do? And separately, I was contacted by a couple of other members of our community, in particular, Kiln Fiend Potter, Queen of Cardboard, who runs Community of Cardboard and Doodle Devs, or Dev.
00:02:40
Speaker
Kind of asking like let's let's do something.
Magic: The Gathering Panels
00:02:43
Speaker
Let's let's get going. Let's let's start planning and we did that and What is coming up is this Saturday and Sunday? Similar to the mental health charity events. We will be running two days worth of magic the gathering EDH panels We have a very diverse
00:03:00
Speaker
I will say that this is probably the most diverse guest list that we have had, and it was also done very intentionally with who we reached out to and who we've asked to join us in this discussion.
00:03:10
Speaker
We are including a panel, and this panel includes my wife, who's an OBGYN. It's going to give people an opportunity maybe to ask a healthcare provider. We are still finalizing some details on it, so I don't want to say kind of more than that to kind of put people that might not be able to join us in an awkward position. But we are having a panel that is going to talk about reproductive rights and the rights to abortion and the right to healthcare.
00:03:38
Speaker
This is something that is very important to me, my family, the Magic community that I am a part of.
00:03:46
Speaker
And we will be raising funds all weekend. So I will be putting the Tiltify link. It is already up and running. And we are actually already halfway to our initial goal because we didn't know what to set. And we've already raised half of that. So if you can join us as is typical, we would love to have you even if it's just to come watch the stream.
00:04:09
Speaker
come hear people talk about their experiences with reproductive rights, with health care, with having access, why it's important that this is a decision for each individual person to make.
Planeswalker Stories and Fantasy Relevance
00:04:19
Speaker
So if you can join us July 30th and 31st, look to my Twitter or Queen of Cardboard or the community of cardboard. I think most of the announcements of the streams will be going up there. But yeah, I just want to say that before I pass you over to Alex and Reinhardt. Thank you.
00:04:39
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast. Today we've got an episode that's a little different. Well, I guess maybe not all that different. We're going to be talking stories. We're going to be talking magic story. We're going to be talking genre fiction, fantasy stuff. So that means Reinhardt's here.
00:04:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, Hobbs is not. But we have, I hope, is an interesting idea as we were talking about it a little bit before the show. I think we're both interested in this, so good content comes out of that. So why don't I introduce myself? I haven't actually said my name yet. I'm tired, but that's not my name. Alex Newman phoned on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler.
00:05:23
Speaker
My pronouns are he him and I'm going to ask Reinhardt to introduce himself because he volunteered to answer our question first to give me more time to think and so because our topic is going to be talking about Planeswalkers their sort of their first travels particularly looking at the origins five This might be a thing for other planes walkers and we'll maybe dig into that in a future episode or maybe this one Maybe Reinhardt is bringing some of that. I don't know
00:05:51
Speaker
Anyway, and we're gonna be talking about that in kind of portal fantasy and which is just a, well, it's a whole genre subfiction that we'll talk about. I thought a good opening question would be something like, you know, what's a magic world that you would probably travel to if given a choice or maybe not. So Reinhardt, why don't you introduce yourself
Magic Origins and the Hero's Journey
00:06:12
Speaker
and I will stop talking and start thinking. All right. Well, my name is Reinhardt and I am a writer and editor.
00:06:21
Speaker
And I have written apropos to the podcast. I've written some magic fiction. I've written a couple stories for Strixhaven and a story for Crimson Vow. And as for the world that I would choose out of all the magic worlds, or all the magic planes, as it were,
00:06:50
Speaker
I'm going to be very cheeky and I'm going to pick the world of Moag pre-Urza. So this world appears in the novel Planeswalker and it explicitly is described as this idyllic peaceful place which stops being idyllic and peaceful when Urza gets there and the Phyrexians follow.
00:07:20
Speaker
Um, so, so if you're going to go by that, then it's a wonderful, wonderful place to be. As long as you're not there at, uh, after ersa arrives, um, I appreciate that, uh, managed to completely unprompted get some blows in on ersa. I mean, it's not, I mean, he, in this case, he.
00:07:50
Speaker
didn't directly do anything awful. He just kind of brought the awful after him. That's fair. Yeah, there's a whole thing with Ursa, but also he's awful. But then that doesn't necessarily mean everything he did, I suppose. Maybe I need to take a step back. It's a hard question because most of these planes are awful places.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yes, that is kind of the thing we were talking about too. It's like, it would be hard to be like, well, I would like to be here because, you know, just about anything, I think just about every plane you could say, because I think I said earlier, I know years ago we had a question like this. I can't remember what the topic was, but I believe my answer was theros, just as long as you don't do anything to get the God's attention, because then it seems like
00:08:42
Speaker
grease plus minotaurs or something like that seems like a place that could be fun to hang out but I'm gonna go today with really kind of the what feels like the low-hanging fruit but I have a have I feel I have a solid reason for it so I'm just gonna say Dominaria despite the fact that Dominaria can be a terrible place to be sometimes there's just lots of various Apokolai that happen there
00:09:10
Speaker
But that is definitely, as a person who started playing the game early on, Dominaria is definitely the plane I have the greatest resonance for, the greatest familiarity with. It's the one that gets me the most nostalgic, the one that kind of captures
00:09:25
Speaker
you know, my attention the most readily. And so I feel at least sort of in in theme with some of what we're going to be talking about some of the not always, it's not a universal thing, but in a lot of the this portal fiction, particularly the sort of the hook of this episode, kind of the thing that made me want to do this episode. There's a lot of resonance between the people who end up in a new world, the people who find a door or a portal or whatever, and the world that they end up
00:09:55
Speaker
Like there's something that causes that place to fit for them or causes that world to need them.
Portal Fiction Inspirations
00:10:03
Speaker
I feel that Dominaria is a solid choice because it's fleshed out enough that there are places on the world that probably are fairly useful.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, there are definitely places and definitely times where it would be fine to hang out on Dominaria. There are also places and times when it wouldn't be fine to be anywhere on that plane. But that's a whole other thing, which we may or may not talk about at some point. But so that out of the way, like I mentioned at the top, this came to me a while ago.
00:10:45
Speaker
The Origins V in particular, the five planeswalkers who were Magic Origins, which was the core set in 2015. These are Shondra, Liliana, Jace, Gideon, and Nissa. This was basically the beginnings of Wizards creating what would become the Gatewatch. We would recognize those five as part of the Gatewatch.
00:11:07
Speaker
didn't exist then but what they were doing with origins as they like wanted to take these five walkers that people knew at the time they were all known kind of codify here are their origins write these stories because some of them had had those stories before like like Inissa famously I think there's a big retcon for some of her history as a character some of the other characters histories were known as well at least to some degree but this really is like here is their origins here is their
00:11:34
Speaker
And like the whole setting of the set was there was even 10 sets because it was the home plane for all five of these and then all five of them in their story, their spark ignited and they instinctively jumped to another plane.
Key Planeswalkers and Their Stories
00:11:49
Speaker
And for all of them, these planes fit them as people, fit them as characters, fit them. Somehow there was a resonance between them and these planes. And I really like that sort of
00:12:03
Speaker
story beat, that story concept really kind of came back to me while I was reading a modern portal fiction series that's kind of ongoing right now called the Wayward Children's series by Seanan McGuire. And this is
00:12:19
Speaker
I guess you could call it urban fantasy. I think portal fiction probably is the best sub genre. Not that it always matters to where the genres fit, but the basic premise of these stories is it's about these children who go through doors to other worlds.
00:12:34
Speaker
and then come and then end up coming back to earth and about their ability you know their inability or their attempt or their journey to sort of reacclimate to where they are and how this world that they were in before really fit them and
00:12:52
Speaker
Things they did things their adventures or whatever different by person and world but now that's in there now they're changed and they're back home or back in the plane of the world of their birth and it doesn't feel like home and there's this journey and how they don't fit and so
00:13:12
Speaker
I really love the series, but there was this sort of similar story beat between these people going to worlds that fit them, unfortunately for them. There's a whole story thing about them trying to find their door again to go home for the last time, and then that being kind of home for them is this other world.
00:13:35
Speaker
But actually, I should say that's not necessarily for everybody. That's part of the journey of the characters is figuring out where they belong, where they should be. And then the series kind of alternates the odd books, odd numbered books are current world or the current timeline moving forward with these characters. The even number kind of take one character, talk about them before they found their door, talk about them going through the door, doing whatever they did in the other world, and then coming back to Earth.
00:14:05
Speaker
But so, um, do you want, maybe we talk a little bit about the origin five? Sure. So you, um, uh, and you explained them really well because I think now I don't have any inside information on these characters, but they seem to have been built kind of as archetypes in a way, like you're very brand new characters, not connected to.
00:14:36
Speaker
older story directly, at least. Yeah. And, you know, the world both the worlds that they originated on, and the world or the circumstances in which they find themselves after they planeswalk for the first time. There are similarities between among all of them, right? Like, these first five, when you read their stories are
00:15:04
Speaker
They're almost always, they planeswalk for the first time because of some trauma that is inflicted upon them. That surprise and they're surprised by their, their sparking into a planeswalker. They find themselves then on a new plane and they're bewildered. And they discover, they start to discover through their adventures there what they are.
00:15:29
Speaker
They learn the fact that it's a multiverse and not just a single world and not just a single universe. So it's kind of, you know, and we see that in some ways, no, in some ways it's not, but in some ways you can really look at something like the hero's journey as the blueprint for this kind of thing, for how those original five were created.
00:15:58
Speaker
Um, and they've kind of blossomed out of that since, but, and when we have new plans walkers, I see lately, more lately that the wizard story team has tried to not just repeat that, not just say, Oh, you know, someone fell down a well and they were so distraught that they planes walked to some other place. Right. Um, that they're, they're exploring different ways that they could possibly, you know, uh,
00:16:28
Speaker
discover the strange new worlds and travel, which is really cool.
Storytelling Approaches in the Magic Universe
00:16:33
Speaker
Very, very cool. Yeah. And that is, it's, I mean, like we talk, it's, it's a, it's a question we have brought up multiple times. Like for a while, I was like, are there any planes workers at spark without trauma? I mean, in the last few years, we've definitely seen some, um, like the one, one big example that comes to mind. And now I'm going to honor named Greenwood planeswalker from Amonkhet. Um, Oh, Samet.
00:16:57
Speaker
summit. Thank you. was euphoria like was got to meet the gods won the champion or the whole gamut thing that the they had to do the whole the trials on Amonkhet got to meet. Wow, just did not prepare any of this tonight. It was the Red God and Hazoret Hazoret
00:17:20
Speaker
Thank you. And just that euphoria, that wonderful, just the upwelling of positive emotion from this incredible experience, which really would be, especially for someone of that culture, like that is incredible to get to do this. And that upwelling of positive emotion is what ignited
00:17:38
Speaker
her spark. It's like, that's cool. She didn't have to go through trauma, especially like there would have been plenty of trauma opportunity for that in that storyline. Oh, yeah. Just on that plane. Yeah, on that plane. And it's like, but they took that moment. The story, you know, the the wizard story team who made those decisions who was writing that that stuff then made that decision that now this is the moment we want to have be that that that sparking moment for her.
00:18:07
Speaker
which is great. I think Tyvar from Kaldheim, I think he didn't even know that he was a planeswalker. He thought he was traveling through the various parts of Kaldheim and someone else had to tell him that he was actually traveling to different planes. So you don't really get to, I don't think you get to see that moment, but you know,
00:18:38
Speaker
how we were introduced to him is not usually how you're introduced to a brand new planeswalker, which is, this is what happened, you know, like this horrible thing.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, but it's it's also nice to see sort of that diversity of stories you get those people like that that getting way off topic, but that's kind of our brand. David Eddings and for all of his I want to say since but he as a fantasy writer, I like his books because I grew up with them. My dad really liked them. But he was like, he did not. He was not a very big fantasy. He
00:19:12
Speaker
He started writing fantasy like he himself has quoted, he said he started writing fantasy because he was a writer, like a literary fiction writer, one day walked into a bookstore, saw the Lord of the Rings was still being sold. He's like, Oh, that's still being sold. I guess I should try writing fantasy. And so like he went and just learned all this, the stereotypes, the tropes, the conventions, whatever you want to call them, he went and just kind of learned how fantasy stories are told. And he wrote the most archetypical fantasy story you can get.
00:19:40
Speaker
And they're good. Well, you can get into it.
00:19:47
Speaker
But I still love one of my favorite character bits as he has in his world. They're sorcerers that are mostly, they're kind of like the old planeswalkers. They're pretty much immortal. They're pretty much all powerful. But one of them in this off kingdom, he was just a scholar who didn't know he was an immortal until 500 years had passed. And his colleagues are like, why are you still alive? No, it wasn't even that. They tried to kill him.
00:20:14
Speaker
to figure out if he could die. That's what it was. They hired a well-known defenestrator to push him out of a window, which by the way, defenestration for a long time was one of my favorite words. It just literally means to push
Cultural Influences in Storytelling
00:20:26
Speaker
him out of a window. I like that this person's profession is pushing a lot of windows apparently. Yeah, and this scholar discovered that he was a sorcerer when this well-known defenestrator tried to push him out a window and it turned to be like,
00:20:41
Speaker
He accidentally magic the Defenestrator out the window instead of himself and that's when he discovered that he had magic powers since like I love that character who just is so devoted to his research that he just like Kept studying for hundreds of years and didn't even realize that he should be dead by now So yeah, it is really interesting that We you know
00:21:11
Speaker
And you identified it where there is that kind of root in the genre, or I guess, of the traversing of worlds. But then it can go off the rails, or then it can go in different directions. Because I would say magic has really tried to do that as a play.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Even in the beginning, when these, I suppose, early planeswalkers are a little different than the current ones,
00:21:42
Speaker
But where this is going to, even with the early Planeswalkers, even where they kind of use these sort of conventions of this genre the most, there's going to be a difference because like for the most part, Planeswalker can just like planeswalk again. Like the whole point is that they can just then leave. And a lot of these stories, a lot of portal fantasy, a lot of the various sort of things related to that,
00:22:10
Speaker
believing is not just easy. And that's kind of part of the story. That can either be something that people are pursuing, that can be something people are running away from, there could be all sorts of things, but there's always weight to it. And outside of a very small handful of magic stories that specifically aim to do this, there's not a lot of weight
00:22:33
Speaker
to the planeswalkers being able to leave. They just can. That's the whole point. And that's kind of when they formed these five, well, four of these five, formed the gate watch. That was part of their thing, was they're like, well, there's these major disasters that could happen on all these worlds. All the people in those worlds are stuck and have to try to deal with it, but we're the ones who could leave if we wanted to just to get out of the way, or we could go and help.
00:23:01
Speaker
And because we have that choice, we have the burden now to carry that choice, either make the choice to help or make the choice to leave, or make the choice to like, never help when we have the opportunity to. So like, again, you know, there's the War of the Sparks story where Bolas specifically builds, or specifically steals an artifact that makes it so planes workers can't leave, there's the,
00:23:24
Speaker
Ixalan's story where that artifact first shows up. So those have storylines tied to people being unable to leave. So that's where the stories are going to cleave the closest. But I just I thought this was a really interesting
00:23:38
Speaker
sort of mind of a sub-genre, like within a fantasy as a whole, there is a lot, a lot of different types of fantasies and smaller and smaller sub-genres that sort of relate to each other and don't. And I find it really fascinating to talk about sort of genres and these conventions and related things. I do want to make a note specifically though that
00:24:02
Speaker
They are only helpful as long as they're helpful, if that makes sense.
Appeal of Fantasy and Portal Genres
00:24:07
Speaker
Quite often genre as a whole is mostly a marketing thing to help the marketers know how to sell these books, which frankly is usually said callously and there is a callousness to it, but there's also something kind of good. There's a good element to that when it can be used that way, something I've learned over the last several years at least.
00:24:29
Speaker
The more I can understand about why I like a thing, not just I like this story, but why? What elements of the story do I like? It makes it a lot easier for me to find things that I will like because I look for those elements as opposed to the overarching thing. The more the genres can actually help you find something you want to read.
00:24:48
Speaker
Exactly. And that's where genre can be helpful. If you determine that these conventions that fit this particular umbrella tend to be things you like, then look under that umbrella, you'll mostly find things you'll find more things you like. It was a higher concentration of things you like there than you would else outside. So I guess something I did want to bring up because you had mentioned it and it really struck me as is an important facet of this kind of tale.
00:25:17
Speaker
is the return, is not only the leaving, and in this case, leaving to a different world altogether, but the returning back to the original world, either permanently or in a visit. So in Magic, we have seen many planeswalkers return to their native, where they were born, basically.
00:25:43
Speaker
Well, we see Chandra go back to Kaladesh. We've seen Liliana go back to Dominaria. We've seen, who else? A number of different characters go back and forth and back and forth. And to me, a lot of those stories are really resonant. We see Chandra reconnect with her mother and really face the demons
00:26:11
Speaker
Uh, that she, she was running from all the, you know, all, all those years that she was away from, from Kaladesh. Definitely we see, uh, Liliana literally faces her demons, which goes back to Dominaria. That's better. I was going to say that about Nissa, but it is more literally true for Liliana. Yeah. Right. Didn't face demons, but same stories of their return are very.
00:26:39
Speaker
I think so important to these particular characters, we see this, you know, really come into her own as a protector of Zendikar, or the protector, actually. And Lilliana, you know, kind of just, she has to face the mistakes that she's made and she didn't, it's questionable whether, I mean, maybe you can say that she has now, but it's questionable whether or not she's learned anything from that.
00:27:12
Speaker
So those are where I see the biggest growth for those characters and therefore like those are the stories that interest me, those stories of the return. Do you find the same thing in some of the stories that you're thinking about in terms of Portal Fantasy? I would say that is definitely a strong point of interest and not all of these are about that. We'll get into sort of a
00:27:38
Speaker
a branch of that sort of tree, like its own branch of this tree of this story. My analogy is already getting away from me, like a sentence in, but that doesn't really feature the return very heavily. Like it doesn't really show up in most of this fiction, in this other thing. But it's interesting to me, and I do want to try to define this a little bit more. I want to circle, first of all, I want to circle back to Joseph Campbell, but we'll do that in a second.
00:28:03
Speaker
I want to just to give some more examples of more commonly accessible
00:28:11
Speaker
portal fantasy things that at least Americans Westerners will be more familiar with. Like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Chronicles of Narnia are classic contemporary, I would say contemporary ish like they're all relatively old compared to things we're talking but they're not as old as well like you could go back to there's a lot of jewels burn like fairy tales jewels burn is a good one. The tale of
00:28:38
Speaker
I should look these things up. The Greek goddess who was brought to the underworld. Oh, Persephone. Persephone, the story of Persephone, sort of can be, you know, have have have some roots, the more modern versions of this could have some roots in that particular story, and stories like that in mythology. So in that regard, Alice in Wonderland was who are like only around 100 years old, are pretty modern.
00:29:09
Speaker
But so those are going to be stories like that. These are stories where people are brought into other worlds. And like you say, many of these, the story is in the return. All three of those, the return is a big part of it. Well, and as well as I have not actually read the books, The Wizard of Oz, from my brief Wikipedia skimming, there is a back and forth similar to the Chronicles of Narnia, which was a series I read. Yes, there's a long, long back and forth in the Oz books.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah. And so, that also is interesting because that's a thing that I don't see in a lot of other places. Most of the portal fantasy I've seen is about either leaving and being in the other world forever, or leaving and then coming back and dealing with the ramifications of that. Or I guess the ramifications of either. I don't see a lot of back and forth in some of the things that I've consumed more recently.
00:30:08
Speaker
But then, so it circles back to the Hero's Journey, which you mentioned, and then I wanted to jump on it, and then I made a different point and got distracted.
Merging Fantasy with Reality
00:30:20
Speaker
But it's like you say the one of the elements of a particularly the wayward children's series from from China McGuire that I think is borrowed from the hero's journey. The Joseph Campbell's hero of the house and faces for where that comes up basically almost every conversation if you want to talk about fantasy conventions for better or worse. I mean there's there's things it's but
00:30:45
Speaker
There's a whole thing with the whole hero's journey, but there is definitely elements from that story, from those story archetypes that are resonant.
00:30:54
Speaker
And it's the same thing that I was saying earlier. I said it to you. I say this every so often. I think these things are useful when they're useful. I think they're useful when they can be descriptive, not prescriptive. When they are telling you what you should be doing, just reject it. Don't listen to it. It doesn't matter. But if it actually is helpful and it fits, cool. And one of the big elements of the hero's journey is the return and the hero having grown and not necessarily fitting
00:31:24
Speaker
in their home anymore. You see this in Lord of the Rings. You look at the Hobbits who return to Hobbiton, and it doesn't take very... and most of the ones who left, well, I guess you could say three of the five who left the Hobbiton on adventures, eventually leave. In particular, well, no, no, I think Sam hangs out, but Frodo and before him Bilbo both leave.
00:31:52
Speaker
with the elves, because they don't fit at home anymore. They carried the ring, and that changed them. And so Frodo goes home for some amount of time, but then he can't stay there anymore. He has to leave. And actually, what's really interesting is, so at the very end, when the four Hobbits are coming back from their grand adventure, and they find that the
00:32:21
Speaker
The Shire has been scoured. They, in how Tolkien writes them, they're very different than who they were when they left. They're coming and they're heroes. They've proven themselves in the outside world and they're coming back to liberate their home. It's such a fascinating part of that story because in the grand scale of things, if you're
00:32:51
Speaker
putting together something like screenplay. I mean, there's a reason why this screenplay doesn't include it. It would stick out. But, you know, reading the book, you're like, oh, I, okay, I get it. I really get why this is here. It's like this mini adventure for these characters to prove to themselves that they are, they are heroes and that they are different. It's also part of Tolkien's, one of the sub, you know, sub themes of his book is
00:33:20
Speaker
you know, the mechanization and how bad it is. Industrialization. Industrialization. But in and of itself, that section is so fascinating because of how these characters who were kind of treated most of the story as kind of like, it's kind of just hangers on these little sidekicks.
00:33:41
Speaker
are like these tried and true heroes that have come along. Yeah, I mean, and to talk too about the, you know, that they don't fit, like the very things that have changed them and make it so that they don't fit at home is what gave them the ability to save their home.
00:33:57
Speaker
And it's this duality that exists in some heroes' journeys and some it doesn't. But there's this duality where this thing allowed me to save this person or protect this place, but now I don't belong here anymore because of it. And you see that, that is another sub-theme of this genre. And I would say in a lot of fantasy, even non-portal fantasy of
00:34:27
Speaker
You learn a skill or you get a power and it alienates you from the people that you're trying to save. Yes. Yeah. That is very common in many, many different ways. It manifests in a lot of different ways, which is one of the wonderful things that genre can do when you have some of these conventions is to play with them and to use them in different ways, to sometimes play them straight, to sometimes turn them on their head and sometimes just to play with them in different ways.
Diverse Narratives in Fantasy
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:58
Speaker
I don't know a lot about older portal fiction or portal fantasy. So I think that's what I got there. There is sort of two other tangent conversations that I kind of want to get into. One's more theoretical, so maybe we hold that. So one thing I was going to mention, unless you have more to say kind of on this.
00:35:21
Speaker
No, let's keep on going. Let's just go on. So what I was talking, the tree that is its own branch, that is its own tree that I was alluding to earlier, is a sort of type of portal fiction generally called isekai.
00:35:40
Speaker
which is a Japanese term for, according to Wikipedia, that translates to either different world or other world. But it is a genre of Japanese storytelling, fiction, fantasy and science fiction, that includes all manner stuff. This is an anime, this is in manga, there are graphic novels, this is in light novels and novels, it's video games, it's a storytelling device that sort of exists.
00:36:06
Speaker
Cross media and sometimes quite literally you have some of the same series starting in one place and then showing up in another like it's it's very common in sort of Anna to have a lot of anime that was started as a manga and then went into novels or
00:36:20
Speaker
one or the other. But this is something that I've been watching more of. There's tons, it's been a huge explosion of this recently. So I can't speak to all of it. I have many random hobbies that I'm sort of equally interested in. So I can't say I've watched tons and tons of anime in the last five or 10 years. I think maybe a little more than 10 years that this has sort of been ramping up. But there is a handful that I've been watching that I really like.
00:36:50
Speaker
This breaks down... Portal Fantasy kind of has a few different versions, and Isekai has some of those same flavors. Being transported to another world is very common in other versions of Isekai that exist in Portal Fantasy that exists in Isekai, too. But there's two that are a little more prevalent, and I don't really exist in
00:37:20
Speaker
the portal fantasy stuff we've been talking about more western stuff one because it's really modern and one because it's rooted more in eastern um religion and stuff so you have the trapped in a game world transported or trapped in a the world of a video game um this is really where the genre sort of exploded recently um isekai stories just like western portal fantasy have ties back hundreds and hundreds of years to stories that
00:37:50
Speaker
you know, long, long time ago, which I'm not equipped to go too deep into, but if you really want to dig into it, it's an interesting topic and there is stuff that goes further back. But some of the more modern ones were I believe like .hex sign and I know Sword Art Online is one that really exploded.
00:38:13
Speaker
It started a lot earlier than I realized as a light novel, I guess, which are kind of like novellas with some illustrations, I believe, is kind of the definition of light novel. But then the anime, maybe a decade ago,
00:38:29
Speaker
around thereabouts really exploded. And so both of these are about being trapped inside of a massively multiplayer online game. Sword Art Online, I think, is a little more overt. I think .hack, I'm not as familiar with that. There were some video games and an anime that sort of coincided together. It was about a character kind of not realizing that this is going to happen, and then they kind of realized now they're stuck in this game. Sword Art Online was a little more specific. The characters
00:38:57
Speaker
are technically not transported like they there's a brand new virtual reality game and they all on day one hop in and get their virtual reality sets on there.
Anime's Influence on Storytelling
00:39:08
Speaker
They lay down on their bed and put their headsets on and then the
00:39:12
Speaker
creator of the game says, okay, now you're all trapped here because if anyone tries to take your headset off, the headset's going to fry your brain. And so you have to beat the game in order to get out. Oh, and by the way, death will also kill you. And so it's this whole thing. And I enjoyed the first few seasons I fell off with it later because it's a media property. So it's had iterations that have come.
00:39:36
Speaker
But that is kind of given way to loads and loads of different versions. The ones I tend to watch more are reincarnation into another world. And so this is, like I said, is another version that doesn't have a lot, doesn't have, I'm not going to say it doesn't exist in the West. I wouldn't be surprised to find something similar or if not directly reincarnation, something similar, but I'm not familiar with it and I don't think.
00:40:04
Speaker
It would be as prevalent. I don't know if it's as prevalent. I think in recent times, there's been a boom in what is called here RPG lit, which constitutes, you know, discovering that you're like an MMO. And what's interesting to me is, you know, you were saying how some of this stuff has roots back into
00:40:33
Speaker
you know, stuff from Eastern cultures. And so a lot of those Eastern culture, like I can I can speak to like Filipino folklore, right of not necessarily different worlds, although I'm sure there are definitely stories of that specifically, but it's more like it's more like a permeable membrane where the world that humans inhabit
00:41:02
Speaker
borders the world that creatures and ghosts and things inhabit and sometimes one can go from one part one side of that kind of semi-permy of the wall to the other and vice versa, you know, that's definitely something in Eastern folklore that that is there but what's super interesting is like there's this interweaving of
00:41:30
Speaker
You know, when you're talking about Isekai and the interweaving of these like fairly recent modern media, for example, you know, when you described some of, you know, the general gist of Isekai because I'm old. My mind actually went back to the old D&D cartoon, if you remember the early 80s, where these kids get on a roller coaster.
00:41:59
Speaker
And they had, they played, or I don't know if they played D&D in, in, in normal life, but this roller coaster takes them and traps them in the D&D world and they have to go on these quests to someday, you know, get back home. It's kind of like, it's kind of like the cartoon version of Quantum Leap. Um, and, and so like we see, you know, where does that end? And.
00:42:29
Speaker
Isekai begin, like are they entwined with each other? Yeah, and that's there is definitely there would definitely be some story
00:42:43
Speaker
interaction, particularly in the more, you know, last 100 or so years, there've been a lot more interactions between some of the Eastern and Western cultures. But going back much, much longer than you would expect, there's often interactions like there's, there's, you know, Vikings showing up in North America well, well before, you know, other parts of Europe show up here. There's
00:43:04
Speaker
You know, lots of these people got around in the ancient world a lot more than we tend to suspect because, hey, we have got much, much more convenient ways to do it. So I think we tend to underestimate how good they were at traveling sometimes in the past. I mean, obviously, lots of those things would be slower and more dangerous, but there are still people who are going to do it.
00:43:27
Speaker
humans like to move around at least. I think that's really fascinating and kind of awesome to think about how it is really cool when you see cultures from different parts of the world have very similar stories and you do see them, you know, like Mesoamerica has some tales that aren't
00:43:56
Speaker
aren't dissimilar from stuff you found in India, for example. And that's awesome. I think it's exciting and cool and it gives yet something else for people of those two cultures to talk about and kind of commiserate on and exchange.
00:44:18
Speaker
And for me, one of the things that I found that I really like about a lot of this is I have consumed, I've read a lot of books, I've consumed a lot of Western media. And there's a point where a lot of these story conventions, you start to have expectations and then they hit those and you're like, at least for me, it's like, the stories aren't surprising anymore.
00:44:44
Speaker
Because, and that's not entirely true, obviously, there's lots and lots of things, but it's like more of these stories sort of hit the same beats, the same things. And so going to another culture, they have different conventions. And even if there's definitely some communication and some borrowing back and forth, you still get an
00:45:09
Speaker
all sorts of different influences and things that you're not going to be familiar with. And so you can find some of this stuff that is telling stories that are very different, or telling the same stories in different ways. And for me, it has been really nice to kind of find some fresh things. And also, I just really enjoy animation stuff. And Western animation has gotten
00:45:29
Speaker
For a long time, I think it sort of stagnated as, well, the Saturday morning cartoons for kids, and that's kind of it. These are the product placement things that, you know, the Transformers sort of built this empire of this is the product placement cartoon that is supposed to sell you toys. And that's kind of what we get in the West for a while, not entirely, but then, you know, for a little, I guess there were a few of the adult cartoons, your South Parks, your family guys, and even Simpsons and things, which were a little more family watching than just for kids.
00:45:59
Speaker
But like.
00:46:01
Speaker
recently, fairly recently, again, in the last decade or so you have some shows like Avatar the Last Airbender. It's a Nickelodeon show. It's more aimed at kids, but that show is telling really mature stories. It's talking about wars. It's talking about there's a character in one of the seasons who's a war profiteer and suddenly people are like, oh, wait, this is kind of slimy. You're making money off of war, selling weapons and things. And it's like, this is a kid show that's supposed to, but it's not just
00:46:30
Speaker
We're going to sell some toys. We're going to talk at this low level and every episode will be a reset of the characters and nothing will change. There's major change. There's major stories being told.
00:46:42
Speaker
in specifically, at least from from what I know, is is anime coming out of Japan. There's probably stuff coming out of other areas that I'm just not familiar with. But anime coming out of Japan has been doing animation like that for decades and telling stories like decades. I mean, we can go way back and go to Gundam.
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, what we call robo tech, you know, and yeah, talking about, you know, in inter, I think it's solar system. So it's not intergalactic, it's not around the galaxy. But you know, civil war between Earth and colonies and things like that, like, there's stuff going on here. And so it's been fun. That's nice, too. That's one of the reasons why I was attracted to anime as a kid. That's why I started watching kind of what I could get hold of then.
00:47:33
Speaker
That's why I still watch stuff now, though I'll say most of what I watch now is less heavy because the real world takes care of that. But I've found, like a lot of genres, you have a sort of spectrum. There's things that are more serious and action-packed. There are things that are less serious and more cozy. Probably one of my absolute favorite shows of anything right now is an anime called Restaurant to Another World.
00:47:59
Speaker
which is kind of a reverse isekai. It's basically, there's this guy who runs a Western restaurant in Tokyo, and every, I think it's Saturday or Sunday, just one day, whatever one day a week, that day, instead of opening to Earth, it opens to a fantasy world. And so,
00:48:20
Speaker
All these different people, I mean, and that one in a lot of ways is literally like a portal fantasy. There are this series of doors that just open to this restaurant. And for people from this fantasy world, it is mind-blowing to walk into a place with electric lights.
00:48:38
Speaker
like that running water they're they're giving you like you come to the table and they give you a hot towel and and cold water and it's like where did this ice come from does there like did you climb a mountain what how and so it's just like this this cool
00:48:56
Speaker
I love the show because every episode is basically split in half. So there's like little mini episodes, especially the first season, the second season that goes a little deeper on some of the characters and has some actual story arcs. But for the first season, it's basically just a bunch of little vignettes about this random person who finds this, this door. And so they're like,
00:49:18
Speaker
This it's like an adventurer who keeps taking the lowest level quests They can take every weekend and people like why do you keep going killing goblins? It's like ah, it's easy. It's fun It's just relaxing, but it's really because they found a door in the goblin cave and they want to go back every week And you know then you've you've got like there's this door that opens outside of a village of lizard men so every weekend like every week they do a competition and
00:49:43
Speaker
this whole Olympics multiple sprint thing to see who is the fittest champion who gets to go into this door, who gets to eat a meal and then bring some back for the rest of the village to share. It's just this cool glimpse into this fantasy world through the lens of this restaurant on Earth. Oh, man.
00:50:10
Speaker
Imagine that in one of the magic planes. I would love it. I honestly love it. A hundred percent. I could see that being on Ravnica. Like right now, I could see there being a restaurant on Ravnica that every day just, you know, one day a week opens to a different plane in the multiverse. Right. And it's completely random. Completely random. Yeah.
00:50:37
Speaker
How fun would that be? Oh, come on, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. So like, that's, it's just, I love that show because again, it's, it's just nice and cozy. There's some storylines and some stuff, but even in the second season, there isn't a ton of, there's not a lot of conflict. There's a little bit small, small, very small amounts on some of these episodes, but there isn't any overarching conflict. And that's the thing too. I walk into this and I'm expecting something's going to happen. Something has to turn, but it's like, no, we're just going to tell
00:51:07
Speaker
12 episodes, 24 stories of just this. This is what you get. There's a handful of different anime like this too that have very well realized and researched and sometimes consultant created food to be part of that too, which is also part of why I like it.
00:51:33
Speaker
And that's part of, to be honest, the menu is a character in the show itself, too, in a lot of ways, because you get these people from a desert who show up and then discover they can get like ice cream floats. And it's like the most amazing thing. And so were people from, you know, different places discovering a hamburger
Integrating Fantasy into Reality
00:51:51
Speaker
and fries. And it's just like, it's so great. I love it. And here's another I mean, here's a way, you know, we talked about Joseph Campbell before.
00:52:01
Speaker
There's a way where you get around it or you challenge yourself to create something a little bit different using the same mechanism. So yeah, it's a portal fantasy. It's technically a portal that opens a fantastic world as portal fantasy, but it doesn't, you know, it's not, it's not quest oriented as much as it is kind of, it's almost like a sitcom. And that's fascinating to me. That's really, really great.
00:52:27
Speaker
And one other example I didn't even think of, I didn't put in the notes, but now we're talking about this, that really threw me off because I was expecting a very different type of story, is a show called Gate. So this is, again, sort of a reverse Isekai, just in the middle of a random day, in the middle of the week, like a Wednesday or something in Tokyo, suddenly this magical gateway opens up and a bunch of knights in armor charge out and start just attacking people.
00:52:54
Speaker
And it's like, what in the heck is this? And so then the Japanese self-defense force gets called in and troops show up and tanks show up and helicopters show up and make very quick work of knights and armor with swords and lances.
00:53:07
Speaker
But then all of a sudden, Japan's like, what is this? This portal is just now in the middle of the street. So they declare it a special zone. They call it the special zone and declare that it's part of Japan because it's on Japan, which there's a whole thing in there that talks a little bit about the politics of
00:53:26
Speaker
the how like Japan doesn't have a standing army as part of an agreement after World War Two, but they have the self defense force. So they send them in. And I honestly, I'll just this is a I guess a little bit of a spoiler. It's saying this story arc doesn't show up. But I legitimately for 24 episodes, I think this was 212 episode seasons, I expected the portal to close and these people to be stuck and that to be the story.
00:53:55
Speaker
But that wasn't a story because I'm expecting from sort of my storytelling background, the stories that I've consumed, I'm expecting the conflict to come where they show up with lots of power, but then they have it all taken away from them and they have to learn how to survive. That's not a quest. A quest. Like a quest. The story is Japan shows up with modern armor and weapons and nothing in that world can stand against them. And now Japan's to say, well, what do we do here?
00:54:22
Speaker
How do we not make this place worse?
00:54:27
Speaker
now that we are here with all of this great power, what responsibility do we have to the people of this world? And what can we do with this power that we have? And that is not a story that I was expecting to be told in this is a much more interesting story than that. I think you went kind of the way that most would expect. You might have a really cool story, but this sounds like something
00:54:55
Speaker
really unique and fascinating. Yeah, that could be really cool. And honestly, there was a little bit of an illusion at some point in one of the later seasons, people were talking about how it this I think someone's theory of how humans got into this world is that this this portal opens every so often and then closes.
00:55:13
Speaker
after a certain point of time. And so that's part of where I was like, Oh, that's going to happen. It doesn't happen for the rest of the show. Like the rest of the show, it just remains open, because that's not the story that they were telling. They make some allusions to it, they build that into the world building a little bit. But that's not the story they're telling. They're talking about power and responsible use of it, which is a story that we don't always get in the West as much. I mean, we have a lot more recently, and I'm sure they've been around, but they aren't part of the mainstream.
00:55:39
Speaker
the same way that Gate was a pretty big event anime, like that was a pretty big show during its time when it was airing. So that was really interesting to me to get that sort of examination in a very different way than I was expecting.
00:55:56
Speaker
I guess I have just one more I want to mention just because I think the framing of this has got to be one of my favorites. Also, it starts to lead into this trend that people who are familiar with Isakai will be familiar with. As of the last few years, maybe five-ish, I don't know exactly when this trend started, but the names for anime, for Isakai in particular, have been getting longer and longer and longer. Some of them not terribly sensible.
00:56:22
Speaker
nonsensical either. Well, I shouldn't say nonsensical, but they're a little bit goofy on purpose. I think a lot of them sort of as a dig at the whole thing. But so this one is called, didn't I say to make my abilities average in the next life? So this is about like many of the reincarnation anime. So I guess neither the previous two I talked about were reincarnation. So this is a reincarnation anime where the main character dies, is reborn in this world,
00:56:53
Speaker
this one, I can't remember if they specify how there is a kind of a running joke in the community that so many random isekai people are run over by trucks. They've just named the character, they've just named it truck Coon as just a character who shows up in all these various animates to send the protagonists to the rest of the show. But so by running them over with it by running them over. Yeah, it's just a thing. It's
00:57:19
Speaker
one of my other favorite shows, the character dies by, I believe an earthquake knocks a bookshelf over on her. That's neither here nor there. So in this show, didn't I say to make my abilities average in the next life? So this is a character who is reborn and God talks to her and she's like, she was very successful, incredibly smart, incredibly athletic, all this stuff in high school and was so successful, she had no friends.
00:57:42
Speaker
She's like, I was lonely. I didn't like being exceptional because it's just set me apart from everybody. I want to be the absolute most average person I can. Well, another general convention. It's not always the case, especially now. And this was an anime intentionally making fun of this trend. But in most of the reincarnation shows, the main character is just ludicrously overpowered.
00:58:06
Speaker
And just sometimes, absurdly, sometimes they just happen to have Earth knowledge and so they show up in a fantasy world and start teaching them how to make ice cream or something. Teach them how to just do some other things. Very futuristic stuff. Yeah, they start to introduce future tech, which potentially, anyway. So this show, God decided to take her very literally
00:58:34
Speaker
And rather than average as you would expect average, he decided that she was going to have the, you take a like a sand mite and the Lord of all Dragons on a scale of magical power and he's going to put her right in the middle. Despite the fact that that is still like a hundred times more powerful than the average human.
00:58:53
Speaker
Like, the best average. So absolute, absolute living things of all living things. And so she is ludicrously powerful, the most powerful human mage on this planet by a probably a factor of, you know, at least tenfold. Also, she's like,
00:59:13
Speaker
a Viscount's daughter, I think, because again, peasant to king, that's like right in the middle of the social hierarchy, despite the fact that that's still like, what, maybe the top 5% or something with the population? But hey, that's the perfect average right between the middle. And so she, like,
00:59:30
Speaker
is wealthy, is very powerful magically, and spends the entire show trying to hide all of this from her friends. Trying to be just standard normal average adventure. This is the sitcom. Exactly.
00:59:47
Speaker
Exactly. And so that's another one where, sure, there's conflict. But you know, she's more powerful than anyone in the room. So the whole point of the show isn't the con isn't the, you know, two people fighting. It's how is she going to navigate this situation and not have her friends realize just how powerful she is and like not ruin this whole thing. I think the commonality, I mean, in the three shows that you've talked about and probably
01:00:14
Speaker
most of the stories that we've talked about in the show is, it's that fish out of water kind of story. We like that, I think. I think it's a story that naturally attracts us to want to know more because, you know, we don't, in our lives, there are certain points of our lives where, at least in the West, where we find ourselves in that position, you know, we start a new school,
01:00:43
Speaker
We graduate, we find a new job, we meet someone new, where we feel that way, but eventually that goes away. Like we get into a routine. So it's kind of like, it's that novelty that I think makes it an interesting story. And I think that's what portal, this portal fantasy stories do is introducing like the most
01:01:10
Speaker
bizarre kind of novelty in these characters' lives. You know, a planeswalker, you know, who's someone who didn't think that, like, someone who thought one way about the universe and suddenly they find out that the universe is completely different, that it's structured differently, that the people that, or the things they thought were important are no longer important.
01:01:31
Speaker
And that is true in large sweeping strokes, broad strokes. That's the term I was looking for and I got to it in a roundabout way. But in broad strokes, that's true in a lot of different fantasy genres too. Like urban fantasy very much is the, you thought you knew your normal everyday life, but there's actually an entire secret world within our world that you just don't see because it's in the shadows.
01:01:57
Speaker
Um, and there's all sorts of different ways to tell those stories too. Um, one of my favorite of which in the beginning at the end of the very first book, well, I think it was within the first couple, but like the main character basically reveals to everyone what's going on. And there's actually a couple like that. Now that I think about it, that I've read where suddenly everybody knows that this fantasy world exists and it's how does the real world react and how does the, you know, the fantasy elements deal with the spotlight? Um,
01:02:27
Speaker
But that fish out of water, you're right. I think that's one reason why these stories can be so appealing, both because there's going to be situations where you are in that fish out of water and seeing these stories kind of telling that. There's some resonance there. There's some comfort potentially. There's just, like you say, some hilarity that sometimes
01:02:48
Speaker
You stretch things to an absurd level and it makes the thing that feels scary or the thing that change that feels hard. You can laugh at it a little bit and that makes it easier to deal with.
01:03:00
Speaker
But I think there's also some element of, both in your adulthood and in your childhood, depending on your circumstances, you can feel like you are stuck in a rut, you don't have control.
Evolution of Storytelling in Magic
01:03:12
Speaker
And so reading these stories where everything changes because you get pulled into another world, everything changes because you find the shadow world, everything changes because X, Y, or Z can be really appealing for various reasons. You know, this just came to mind.
01:03:31
Speaker
So a lot of the stories, a lot of magic stories about planeswalkers, they tend to be in the whole, in very much the quest kind of, especially recently. There's one planeswalker though, that their story doesn't do this. It's really weird. It's a short story from Distant Planes. It's an anthology that is outrageously expensive if you try to find it online.
01:04:00
Speaker
Um, but it's a story of, uh, a plane's walking named Raph Thrasa or Raph. Um, and he, at the beginning of the story, he's coming back. He's already been out in the multiverse doing things, both great and horrible. He, like, he alludes to all these monumental things that he's done in his life, but he's coming back because he's retiring. He wants to, he wants to.
01:04:30
Speaker
to chill out on this island and be left alone. However, the inhabitants of the island get wise to him and they're like, wait, are you like a god or something? And he's like, no, leave me alone. And so the story is about that, is about these people who slowly they come to worship him as a god and he's furious. He's like, I want you to stop
01:04:59
Speaker
talking to me, I want you to stop just pretend I'm not here. And it's that it's a really funny, weird story. The author, there's a oh, I might send it to you after the show and maybe you could put in the notes. There's a really great YouTube video where the author reads it out loud. It's really cool.
01:05:26
Speaker
And it's a fun story about a planeswalker that everyone has forgotten. It's not exclusively that quest, but it's very heavily on that track.
01:05:45
Speaker
I hate to pull it out of the fiction and the fantasy a little bit, but some of that's a factor of the function of what the magic story does. Ultimately, it is story for this card game still.
01:06:03
Speaker
do different things than the stories of a tv show or the stories of just books that are being sold as you know any of those other storytelling medium that tend to be the story is the product well here magic cards are the product
01:06:20
Speaker
The story is one of the things to make you engage with the product more, to make the product more enjoyable to engage with and the community too. It helps to build the community. There's all sorts of stuff that exists for magic that is about the community to facilitate us buying product because we enjoy playing magic. We enjoy spending time with these people or doing these activities. So we're going to buy some cards.
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, but I think I think there would, you know, I think in general, though, that the story team and I, I, I'm not speaking as a representative of the story team, but because I'm not. But I see them trying to branch out and have different types of stories, small stories, big stories that can give
01:07:07
Speaker
different flavors of the cards. Absolutely. And I don't want that to sound like I'm saying it's a bad thing. It just is what it is. And no, and I thank you for trying to couch that a little bit too, because that helps me to, oh no, maybe I need to couch my own statement just a little bit. It's not that that's a bad thing.
01:07:30
Speaker
It's like the storytelling for Dungeons and Dragons thing is going to be different than the storytelling for a video game. It's going to be different than the thing that the story is attached to and the way that the story is being told, particularly something like magic is a little more weird because you're telling it through traditional short fiction, you're telling it sort of in function, in form at least, you're telling it through traditional long form fiction, you're telling it through traditional
01:07:58
Speaker
comic books, you know, short graphic fiction, and yet all of that story is attached to this card game that is also telling the story through the cards in its own ways. And so you're telling this story through a multifaceted way. It's
01:08:12
Speaker
I compare it to how Marvel is telling stories too, but even that is going to be different because now they have TV shows that are attached to movies that are similar to comic books, but the comics and the movies and the shows aren't telling the same story.
01:08:31
Speaker
they're telling different versions of the same characters but the stories are different and so the stories the way they're told in the comics can be wildly different than the way they tell the stories in a show without that kind of conflicting with the products whereas whatever magic you know long form or short form fiction it's going to tell the story differently than the cards do but that story
01:08:56
Speaker
Both sources have to serve the same story. It's supposed to be the same story. And when we think about magic in the late 90s, you had the cards, you had the novels starting in 1998. Well, no, before that even. Even way back with the Harper Prison novels, but you had the cards and novels, the comic books and video games, and they were all supposed to be telling the exact same story.
01:09:39
Speaker
they're honestly the early years of magic are just kind of uh oops we were way more successful than we had the infrastructure for and so a lot of early years of magic and i'd say this is like as the first decade almost is a lot of figuring out how to do this thing how to do this thing sustainably and then how to build everything else around it and making some mistakes along the way for sure
01:09:47
Speaker
different pieces of the same story.
01:10:02
Speaker
But it's just kind of, what's the expression, sewing the parachute as you're falling? There's definitely some element of them making the process up as they go along, going, whoops, that didn't work. Fixing it, they think, whoops, this other thing broke, patching that and just kind of moving along, continuing to move along as best they can, and finding ways to do things better as they go forward. And then I think what, and returning all the way back to
01:10:32
Speaker
the, the origins five, I suppose, I think, or Lorwyn five, however. Well, they're different. They're different. Oh, they're slightly different. Yeah. Yeah. And the Garak. Oregon's has their new. Well, it's a, it's a different set of five, three of them are the same, but Garak was in Lorwyn and Ajani. Ajani. Instead of Gideon and Nissa. Yes. Um, but I think what they figured out was.
01:11:02
Speaker
The best way to serve the card game was to be able to feature abundant worlds versus different facets of one world, which is what really was before.
01:11:16
Speaker
Yes. And there's, you know, a lot of other elements too. This is where they started the gatewatch thing where they realized if we have, there's always been this problem and they've definitely shortened it and made it less of an issue. But early, early on, like any given character who was prevalent in the books probably wasn't in the cards, unless it's like Gerard.
01:11:36
Speaker
because they was on every card who was on every card, but because the timelines are different product sets have to be designed like two years in advance is when they start like the set isn't done then, but they start building cards around two years before those cards.
01:11:53
Speaker
purchasable at a store, whereas fiction is written closer to the product coming out. So by the time that the fiction is being written, especially back in the earlier days, they are going to say, hey, to tell the story, we need this, we need a character to fill in this gap here. And so they create this character, they do this thing, there's no time to put them on cards. Hobbs and I ran into this at one point, we were talking about Bellby during the Commander Legends thing, where Bellby was hugely important at that time.
01:12:21
Speaker
Um, but didn't show up in the cards. You, instead you had a vertical cycle. You had a common and uncommon and a rare and nemesis that were all like referenced Bellby. So it was like Bellby's armor, Bellby's percher or something else. To, to put that character on the cards at least, so the players would see the name. She didn't have a card until like two years ago. Think about Zantja, who was the main character of the second hand.
01:12:48
Speaker
She didn't get a card I think until like 2017? Maybe even later. It was one of those commander sets. Yeah, it was a commander set. Like that's a long time. Yeah. 20 years. By the time they kind of figured out how to start doing this, Zancho was gone. Zancho was in those early stories, didn't show up in stories later, so they couldn't put a, well, couldn't. I mean, I think they chose not to because it'd be a little more confusing, which made some sense at the time.
01:13:15
Speaker
Couldn't put her in a invasion cycle set or something and they didn't have supplemental sets like the commander decks that's one of the things that commander product can be really great for because it's like this isn't tied to a particular thing so they can just kind of cram I mean that's how sit our condo got a card that's
01:13:35
Speaker
Gerard's father, who had an aim very, very close, you know, shared Kondo with a main character from the original Kamigawa block character. So it's like, well, we don't like him in this thing. And so he didn't get a set for a long time. And then they finally gave Lord Kondo, right? Yeah, Lord Kondo. Yeah. Yeah. So they finally gave Siddhar a card in one of the commander sets because they're like, well, we can do that.
01:14:01
Speaker
One of my favorite things to read was the Apology, I believe it was in... was it in Eternal Ice, I believe? Where the author was like, alright. Yes, we understand that all the names we've made are confusing. There's Jaya and Joda. There is the Kel'Dorin, who are confused with the Kel'Dins. Sorry about that.
01:14:31
Speaker
I was muted, so I'm sorry. But as someone who has written, I haven't published anything, but I've written a couple books. It is really hard as a writer to keep track of all of the things going on in the story that only you have control of and you have all the pieces in front of you.
01:14:49
Speaker
Now you bring that to a story that has multiple cards and sets and different books and different fiction and you have to have different people all working on all of these different things and trying to keep all of those things straight under those circumstances. It is incredible that we get the stuff that we get today, that it has been worked out to the point that it has where it actually works pretty well these days. Yeah. So if I may, and you can say no, if
01:15:17
Speaker
If I were to ask you, all right, you are suddenly in control of magic story and you would like to integrate like some sort of portal fantasy more than it usually does to spice things up. What kind of story would you want? See, I think.
01:15:38
Speaker
also thinking about things that tried to fit the game. I like it. Well, to have an answer that's different than just our previous conversation about a restaurant in Ravnica or maybe a coffee shop in Ravnica that opens to another one. That would be high on my list. Absolutely.
01:15:54
Speaker
Number two, let's let's talk about a little more vague rather than that specific idea. I think number two, I would want to see some citizens to sort of be similar to portal fantasy as we see it. Some random citizens end up somewhere else.
01:16:11
Speaker
They didn't planeswalk there. There wasn't a plane or portal. They just there was some weird cosmic fold or some coincidence of magic or some surge of magic. There's lots of different hand wavy things to explain it and maybe take that into a different story arc. But somehow,
01:16:28
Speaker
random civilian from this place ends up somewhere else. Maybe some Sarans from Dominaria show up on Amonkhet with the survivors and try to help A, figure out where in the world they are and then be like, well, let's just try to help the people who are here and then work from there or something like that.
01:16:54
Speaker
Planeswalkers are great and I think there's some good resonance there with a portal fantasy, but because by and large, they can always just go home. You don't have that as a plot point. I think something like that where some random person or random people get moved somewhere else and now they have to figure out how to deal with where they are could be some really interesting stories. That would be a really interesting kind of ground level story about someone
01:17:25
Speaker
finding out like they're different points. That would be really interesting. But what yourself do you have? Do you have a different idea? I mean, the restaurant is way, way, way, way high. It's number one to answer. God, I agree with you that I actually so the stories that I have written for magic are all legendary creatures. So I really haven't had to write
01:17:56
Speaker
about the planeswalker specifically. But I do like stories, I tend to like stories about kind of just your everyday person. I think like, you know, finding a relic or some sort of planar gate or, you know, back before the mending, some flashback story of some time. Gosh, I don't remember the story. It was one of the older stories where
01:18:26
Speaker
And this is part of magic lore trying to sort itself out, where when you summon the creature, you actually summon that creature from somewhere. And so it was a story about a knight who was talking to a Minotaur whose, I believe, whose wife was summoned and killed. And
01:18:56
Speaker
That kind of story is really, and it was just about the relationship between these two characters. And I think that kind of story is something that I love. I love kind of that more character based, like the implications of this kind of screwed up thing. Like if magic summoning actually worked this way, like how insane, like how destabilizing would it be to a society and like
01:19:25
Speaker
How could you make a relationship with somebody if they just suddenly left? That would be a fascinating story to maybe try. I don't think it would necessarily fit with magic or you'd kind of have to really architect it so that he does that. But that would be an interesting story for me, that's right. I don't have any interesting things. I think maybe we just end it there.
01:19:55
Speaker
unless you've got anything you want to plug maybe right at the end here. Oh, I have stuff you go first. Oh, I have nothing to plug except I'm enjoying I've been enjoying magic story as of late and
01:20:10
Speaker
It's revving up, and so I'm excited, and I hope everyone else is excited. And I'm going to actually plug the thing that we usually plug at the beginning, and I always forget, and I feel bad every time, but Grinding Coffee Company, my black LGBTQ-run-owned coffee company that's been supporting gamers, they've been supporting us.
01:20:31
Speaker
for a while. They donate stuff when we do charity events. They are just a wonderful group of people. They have a wonderful product. So I've told I'm not a big coffee person, but I know Hobbs absolutely loves their stuff. So if you like coffee, got a discount code in our show notes, and they're great folks to support. Yeah, so let's call that an end. And that's our show for today.
01:20:55
Speaker
You can find both of the hosts on Twitter, hubs can be found at hubsq and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to goblin lore pod on Twitter or email us at goblin lore podcast at gmail.com.
01:21:14
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood cops lugs to our link tree on our Twitter account and listed in our show notes, this has everything from our discounts for the grinding coffee company to our Patreon.
01:21:27
Speaker
The music for today's show was by Vindergotten, who can be found at Vindergotten at badcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at Steve Raffel on Twitter. Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing 4thos content. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmpg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.