500 – Mythcreants Retrospective

The Mythcreant Podcast

As of today, we’ve recorded five hundred of these episodes, which is kind of a lot. To celebrate, we’re gonna slack off and talk about ourselves. Okay, in fairness, we’re mostly answering questions about us. But wow, it’s still much easier than a normal topic. We’ll be back to business as usual next week, so for now, we hope you’ll enjoy getting to know us a little better.

Show Notes

• The Alchemyst
• Apple Podcast Review
• 444 – Storytelling Education in School
• 445 – Interactive Fiction
• Sandwich Discourse
• The Poetic Edda
• Hunting Monsters
• Mary Roach
• Because Internet
• If Books Could Kill
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
• All Systems Red
• Piranesi
• Thud!
• A Spell for Chameleon

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. And with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Oren: …and…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: Back in my day, we didn’t have none of this fancy voice chat and editing technology. We all gathered in a single room around an old gaming headset, and then we uploaded the raw footage. And we liked it!

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Bunny: Our footage had to go up the hill both ways when it was being uploaded.

Oren: Yeah, there was a lot of snow on the internet back then.

This is our 500th episode since 2013 or so. And to celebrate, we decided to do less work this time.

Bunny: You do the work for us!

Oren: Yeah. We decided to be really lazy for our 500th episode, and we’re just gonna talk about ourselves.

Chris: We’re like the beginning of the Alchemist, when Nicolas Flamel has this journal entry where he just talks about how awesome he is.

Bunny: [laughs] Dear diary, I’m very suave and quite a sexy girl, and I think everyone should listen to me and my life story.

Oren: Death has no hold on me… or whatever it was he said

Bunny: Even death cowers before the Mythcreants podcast.

Oren: Before we get into that, we actually have a few questions from our lovely patrons who had wanted to know things about podcasts, so we’ll go ahead and go through those first.

The first is from Emma, and she asked: What inspired / how did the meta intros come about? And which are your top three?

Chris: When we did our 10 year anniversary podcast, I actually tried to look into this and find out where the meta jokes came from. The thing is trying to find out where something comes from, requires listening to a lot of podcasts because our early ones don’t have any transcripts, so I found one as early as episode 53, which is really early.

Oren: What?

Bunny: Wow.

Chris: But I didn’t wanna listen to the 50 episodes before that, but they certainly became more common. So that one was me. But what I noticed is a pattern of one of us introducing an episode and then Oren, cause of course it was Oren making a meta joke.

Oren & Bunny: [laugh]

Chris: …And so I think that we picked up on that. And of course we would always alternate who was introducing a topic. That’s a lot of pressure because you’re trying to introduce it in an interesting way. So I think coming up with a meta joke was a pretty reliable way to create an intro that was better than just, okay, and today we’re talking about blah, blah.

So by the time that Wes became a host, in 2017 or end of 2016, that’s about the time when they became pretty constant. But I think before that they were just more and more frequent.

Oren: And even once Wes joined, there are a few where we don’t have them. Wes took a little while to warm up to the idea, cause he had real things to say.

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Oren: At this point, honestly, starting an episode by telling you what the topic is feels really boring to me. We gotta spice it up a little bit. Not too much, though. I don’t wanna have too much shtick. I need the perfect amount, a mild amount of shtick. I hate starting a YouTube video and before it gets to the topic, it’s five minutes of the presenter just goofing off. That’s too much. That’s too long.

Bunny: You don’t wanna get stuck in the shtick. You don’t wanna stick in the shtick. Stop sticking in the shticking!

Oren: I’ll just leave that as a note on any YouTube video that I don’t like. From now on. I don’t know if I could pick a top three. We’ve done so many.

Chris: It’s honestly hard to remember them.

Oren: Yeah!

Chris: The whole idea of a discussion podcast, it’s all ad hoc and very ephemeral. Comes in one ear out the other. So it’s hard because again, to pick a favorite, I would almost have to go through the mall. Some of them really cause a lot of banter and a lot of interactions. We go back and forth. Those are definitely the better ones. The ones that I remember.

The few that I remember, there was one after we had that hilarious review on Apple podcasts talking about like the holistic cup of depression. There was one episode where instead of just opening with, you’re listening to Mythcreants podcast, I started with, you’re listening to the Mythcreant Kettle of Soulless Commentary with your hosts…

Bunny: [laugh]

And then Oren and Wes, they were supposed to answer me, but they just started laughing instead. And then I was like, so you’re not supposed to laugh. You’re supposed to be straight faced. And they’re like, you didn’t warn us so…

There’s also the one where, as part of the joke, I told Wes that he was supposed to be the annoying character with the repetitive comedic gimmick, and then he made a weird noise that was genuinely funny, completely undermining my intro. So, I think those ones are the ones that I actually stuck in my memory.

Oren: I looked back through some and I had the same problem, Chris. I just don’t remember them at all. But the one that I remembered is actually more recent ’cause my memory’s not as good and it was bad metaphors episode that we did a little while back. It’s only like a few weeks old at this point, but I just thought that our opening about oppressed podcasters, it was unintentionally very good.

Bunny: [laughs] Well, gee, thank you. I was pulling from ample source material.

Oren: I love podcasting, but I’m also just embarrassed about podcasting because some of the people who podcast are very weird about it.

Bunny: Not familiar with that.

Oren: It’s a whole thing because nowadays. Podcasting is unfortunately associated with very weird people on YouTube who do podcasting on the most unfortunate topics, and I don’t think that’s a hundred percent fair. There are a lot of other podcasts that don’t do that, but that kind of podcast is very prevalent.

Bunny: It’s definitely found its cultural definition, and that stretches in some weird directions. It’s like when you go down to the fourth definition on Miriam Webster, that’s those special podcast people.

Oren: And there’s also a group of those people who are known for doing nothing except podcasting. And so it creates this impression that they are sort of detached from reality and just going from podcast to podcast talking about a world they never experience.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: You could also tell they’re detached. cause most of these people are like men’s rights activists and they’re detached no matter how much they know about the world. But the fact that they don’t seem to do anything outside of podcasting also lends this very surreal bent to a lot of what they say.

Chris: I have to say, I only started listening to some podcasts recently. Because usually my audio listing time was devoted to fiction because I gotta fit that in somehow. On top of everything else I’m doing.

And so, it was interesting to hear what other people were doing after 10 years of podcasting and not listening to podcasts.

Bunny: Wow. I’m surprised you avoided it.

Chris: What I realized is that we are very high energy. We’re very hyper, apparently, in comparison to a lot of other podcasters who tend to be more laid back often, talk a little slower. It feels like most people have less banter than we do. That was my impression as to how our style differs from others.

But I do get really impatient with other podcasts that are supposed to be on the topic, and I like personality, but I don’t really wanna listen for 10 minutes about what shirt they’re wearing today and other things like that.

Oren: I tend to be the same way with my podcast listening. Like for example, I would hate this episode, that we’re recording right now. I would be like, what? This isn’t what I signed up for and I would just skip to the next one.

I get really nervous whenever I listen to a super well produced podcast. Cause we do our best, but we don’t have the time or the budget to do that. Every time I listen to one, I kind of wonder, is this what people expect us to sound like?

Bunny: Oh, they’ve gotta be used to this by now.

Oren: Yeah, we’ve been here for a while. Does being 10 years old give you the right to slack off a bit? Cause you’ve been doing it for a long time.

Chris: Well, I feel like if we were gonna drive people away it probably would’ve happened already.

Bunny: Yeah. They’ve drunk their holistic cup of depression and left.

Oren: Bunny, we never heard what your favorite meta intro is. Do you remember one?

Bunny: Oh, it was actually the very first podcast we recorded with me, although I think it came out in a different order. The first one I appeared on the show was the Writing Instruction podcast.

Oren: episode 444.

Bunny: Oh yeah, that’s my special lucky number. This was then the first podcast that I led, which was the interactive fiction one. And I was able to keep the bit going. I remembered that I had said, skip ahead to the five-minute mark to hear me laugh maniacally.

Oren: [laughs]

Bunny: Um, and then I remembered to do that, which I was very proud of.

Chris: [laughs]

Bunny: I don’t know if anyone noticed that, but I also enjoy being the podcast villain. I think every podcast should have a villain.

Chris: [laughs] Yeah. You think these are laughs but really they’re nervous laughs because Bunny has some weapons that are getting closer.

Oren: Laughs of terror.

Bunny: Yeah. My microphones double as cudgels.

Chris: That is, I think the best part of having such a long running podcast. It’s how it builds on itself until new people come and listen and they’re like, I do not understand what you are talking about. What is a sandwich? Why are you talking about sandwiches so much?

Bunny: That is good recurring guest Sandwich Discourse.

Oren: Oh man, that is a struggle, right? I don’t want to make our podcast unlistenable to people who are not familiar with it, cause how far back are you supposed to go? We have too many episodes, you can’t listen to all of them.

But at the same time, it’s unavoidable that we are gonna develop some recurring banter. Otherwise we would sound fake.

You gotta do what you gotta do. I hope that sandwich discourse is a well-known enough term on the internet that most people have an idea of what I’m talking about, but maybe not.

Bunny: It’s very easily Googleable and fall-down-rabbit-hole as well.

Oren: There’s diagrams.

Bunny: Oh, there are diagrams. There’s cube theory and alignment charts and all that.

Oren: Okay, so our next question is from Julia. And Julia was sneaky and actually has two questions in one.

Chris: Is this like more of a comment?

Oren: No.

Chris: I don’t have so much a comment. Question. Is a comment a question?

Oren: Oh man. The worst I’ve been at multiple panels where people have lined up to ask a question, and I have been the only one with a question.

Chris: Right after, somebody’s like, Really. We just want questions. No comments, please. Just questions. And then people line up.

I get it now, after listening to more podcasts. People have told this before where they’re just itching to be part of the discussion and bring up something that we haven’t brought up.

Sometimes people are like, why didn’t you bring up this story? Is, this story was an obvious example. Sorry, there’s so many stories out there. We can’t bring up every story in existence that’s relevant.

Oren: Well, I mean, we can. We choose not to, just so you know.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: We have actually read them all, and if there’s one we didn’t bring up, it was a personal affront to you.

Bunny: Our brains are so full of stories that they just bulge out of our skulls and we have to drag them behind us.

Oren: The actual questions are: First question is, do you guys have jobs outside of mythcreants? And will you ever sell a mug saying big holistic gulp of soulless commentary on them?

Bunny: [laughs] I mean, I feel like we have to.

Oren: The answer to the second one is, sadly, probably not. Because our best research suggests that most people don’t want merch.

Chris: We’ve dabbled in merch a little bit, but the internet is just saturated with merch. There’s so many influencers doing merch, and that’s not really what our followers want. What they want is for us to help them with our story, because of course, that’s what we write about. Makes perfect sense.

Oren: Really unreasonable of them. [laughs]

Chris: So yeah, that’s what we’re focusing on.

Bunny: We need to start including examples in our articles that are like T-shirt-centric…

Oren: [laughs]

Bunny: …So that slowly they’ll be inundated with a desire to buy a T-shirt.

Chris: Start separate fashion content that’s very picky.

Bunny: There once was a lonely T-shirt, wishing it had a wearer. It was purple.

Oren: [laughs] Okay. But for the other one: Do you have jobs outside of Mythcreants?

For me, that depends on whether or not you count my editing as outside of Mythcreants. Not really, if not, cause half of my time is creating stuff for the website or running the website or answering questions or all that stuff. And then the other half is editing client work. So that’s pretty much my entire day.

Chris: I did, for the first nine years. I was a freelance web designer and developer, which honestly is why we can afford to have a big elaborate site that takes a lot of work. And if you hire an outside developer, that’s real expensive.

In fact, just last year, LitReactor closed down, and a big reason they cited is that they had a founding member who was a web developer and that person was no longer involved and they couldn’t afford to redo the site. And the site had gotten old and wasn’t mobile compatible, all that stuff.

So, yeah, pretty important skills, which I will hopefully maintain enough to continue working on the site. But what happened is that just doing Mythcreants on top of a day job, it’s too much long term. It’s not something that I can continue for the rest of my life. I would burn out. And I realized that I just can’t get Mythcreants to a place where it could be my primary income source unless I put my day work and use that time to develop revenue.

So fingers crossed, that was just a couple years ago that I’ve wound down my day job to work on Mythcreants. So here’s hoping it works out and I won’t run out of savings.

Bunny: Anyway, this episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] No, no! No, no!

Oren: I had a kind of basic warehouse job for the first couple years, and I was working there. It was at a gaming company, and I worked there basically in the hopes that I could move up to a creative position. But I had been there for a total of four years by the time I left because it just became clear that was never happening. And so it’s like, well, this place is not paying me enough for the time I’m spending here.

To be clear, that was something I could do because I’m very fortunate to have a family that is both supportive and capable of supporting me. So that’s not something a lot of people could do, but in my position, it was the right choice.

Bunny: Going off of that, because I am a youngin and a foolhardy youngin, I am currently looking to get into the game industry. Unfortunately, it’s a hot mess.

Oren: Yeah, a little bit.

Bunny: With tons and tons of layoffs, like over 10,000 people have been laid off in the past year across the industry, probably more. And suffice to say, there aren’t a lot of narrative design roles open, especially not for entry level people. It’s always like senior lead, lead senior five years. And then you’ll see an entry level job and it’s like three to five years experience, and I don’t have that. So I am looking for work in that area currently.

But aside from that, I am working retail. I work at a big outdoor retailer that most people have probably heard of, so I get to interact with the public and all the special people that entails.

Oren: You could start a podcast about that.

Bunny: I could start a podcast about that. It would be called a Big Outdoor Retailer Special People. Rolls off the tongue.

But yeah, I actually graduated college this last May and when I was in college, I majored in creative writing, minored in philosophy and computer science, two thirds of which are highly unemployable. One third of which I don’t think I’m good enough to get a job in.

Chris: I will have to admit that Bunny and I had had a conversation and I was like, do you really wanna do creative writing as your major and computer science as your minor? And I even went so far as to accidentally slip up and be like, yeah, that’s the wrong choice.

Bunny: Look!

Chris: But Bunny was like, excuse me. Don’t tell me what to major in. I’m like, okay, you’re right. That was a little far.

Bunny: Look, you’re not wrong though, but I am certainly not gonna be finding any hot roles in philosophy, but that’s okay. I can argue ontology a little better now.

Oren: That has made the podcast a lot better. So really, who are we to complain?

Bunny: That’s true. Technically bringing in revenue. If anyone credits their subscription to me, which, wow, what are you doing?

But yeah, I’m taking the summer off before I really start job hunting and get myself more thoroughly crushed to work on my portfolio. I’m making games. Just please someone pay me, someone pay me to do that. That’d be great.

Oren: And then finally, we have a third question. This is from our good friend Perspiring Writer, and they want to know: What are your personal favorite and least favorite books? Which could definitely be an entire episode, but we got 10 minutes, so we’ll do our best.

Bunny: Oh man. This was a hard question. Go ahead.

Oren: So first, I don’t think it’s fair to compare all books together. I just don’t think that’s something I can reasonably do.

If I was gonna go with nonfiction, I’ve read some nonfiction that I really liked recently. I really liked Jackson Crawford’s Poetic Edda translation.

Chris: Obviously related to a fiction writing project he’s working on.

Oren: Maybe I just like Old Norse. You don’t know.

Chris: The fantasy writer tells you their favorite nonfiction book is Old Norse. Like, okay, but this is clearly for a fiction project.

Bunny: Okay, suuuuure.

Oren: I found a bit about how Loki and Hell had their own undead soldiers to fight the Einherjar, and no one has written about them as far as I could tell, and I’m gonna tell their story.

Bunny: Goddammit, somebody has to!

Oren: Someone’s gotta.

Anyway, I’ve also really liked Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish, which is about cryptids and the psychological phenomena that lead to people seeing cryptids.

Bunny: Oh, I really wanna read that one.

Oren: Yeah, it’s really good.

Bunny: It’s been on my list.

Oren: And how sometimes people just wanna sell newspapers and so they say that they saw a monster.

Bunny: For my nonfiction–I guess I’ll jump on that there—I have trouble with this just because there’s so many categories of books and so many that I have positive feelings towards, but wouldn’t necessarily describe as my favorite. So I tried to narrow myself down by basically saying it can’t just be a book that I’ve enjoyed. It has to be a book that I would read multiple times or have read multiple times.

But for nonfiction, my favorite author in nonfiction is Mary Roach, who writes about weird scientific topics essentially. And so, my favorite of her books is Stiff. Which is about what happens to human cadavers. I find that really interesting.

But she’s also written one about the digestive system.

Oren: Is that where the cadaver ends up?

Bunny: Cadavers show up in a lot of places talking about science. The cadaver’s gonna come through the door at some point.

Chris: The bar of reading it more than once… for me, nonfiction is too high. I’m not gonna be able to name a nonfiction book that’s like that.

Bunny: That’s fair.

Chris: The one that stands out is something that I did enjoy all the way through, because a lot of times with nonfiction, I will buy it and then I will skim it or just pick out the parts that I want. cause usually I’m seeking particular pieces of information.

And I’m not searching on Google for it because there’s just so much trash that comes up these days that I’d prefer to buy a book that has no ads in it. Well, some of them do [laughs].

Bunny: But they don’t stall the book down to the point that you need to restart it.

Chris: But one that I did enjoy all the way through is Because Internet, that one is about the evolution of language on the internet. And how technology changes and how people express themselves online and what is the equivalent of a gesture, for instance, in person and all that stuff. And I found that very fun.

Oren: If we’re gonna talk about our least favorite nonfiction books, I got one of those too. Of ones that I have read all the way through—because if we include ones that I’ve only read, parts of it’s Atlas Shrugged hands down. but I have not read all of Atlas Shrugged.

Chris: Atla Shrugged is fiction.

Bunny: Is it not fiction?

Oren: Oh, right. Yeah, it is fiction.

Chris: Sorry, that was on my least favorite fiction list. Maybe somebody wishes it was nonfiction, but it’s definitely a fiction book.

Oren: That’s a good point. I don’t know how I got that mixed up, but books of nonfiction, books that I’ve read all the way through. My least favorite is probably The Blank Slate.

At least of the ones that I feel comfortable mentioning on the podcast. Cause there are a few that I don’t think anyone’s heard of, and I’m not gonna mention them in case they get more marketing. But this one’s already like a bazillion bestseller and I hate it so much.

Cause the whole book is basically arguing that we don’t need social safety nets or anti-discrimination laws because we’ve actually solved all of our problems already.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: But it’s so subtly written that if you aren’t looking for it, you don’t notice that. And as you’re reading, it sounds like it’s basically disproving the idea that people care about each other and that you should just free market solutions baby to everything.

And it’s pretty convincing. I only figured out it was all wrong cause it got to the end and that was when he suddenly said, oh yeah, by the way, we don’t need anti-discrimination laws for gender anymore because the wage gap’s not real. And I was like, hang on a second, my mom just got an equity raise. cause the university did a study and found out she was getting paid less than her male counterparts with the same experience in the same role. So clearly that’s not right. And then once I realized that the book could just be wrong about the things it was claiming, everything else fell apart.

Bunny: Yikes.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a bad book and it’s a bad book because it cloaks itself in seeming reasonable and it has tricked a lot of people.

Bunny: So many of these big theory like economics or law pop nonfiction books. We were talking about podcasts earlier. I know I got you thrown onto a podcast that made you unproductive, which I’m still not guilty about. But every book they read on that podcast is basically that like they’re just saying stuff in these books.

Oren: They’ve done another of that same guy’s books. I’m hoping they’ll do The Blank Slate eventually cause that would be cathartic release for me. Listen to them tear it apart.

Chris: You should send them some fan mail.

Oren: Oh, I should, that’s a good idea.

Bunny: You could, that’s true.

Oren: And you’d know how to write it too. Cause we’ve received lots of mail and I can tell them that I’ve developed a parasocial relationship with them and that I would like them to do the thing that I care about.

Chris: Gosh, listening to podcasts, I also felt like I’d experienced the parasocial relationship thing for the first time on the fan end. And I was like, I do not like this.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: I do not like this. This is frustrating. Sorry folks, that it’s happened to you.

Bunny: I think when I was splitting up my list into most and least favorite books to put it wordily, I feel like I had to go through in a couple tiers, partly because my memory is short and I was only able to think about the last couple books I’ve read, and partly because I feel like I’m pretty good at having avoided the things I will actively despise. I think I’m pretty good at identifying those and then not reading them. However, there are a few.

One is Cathedral, which I’ve mentioned on this podcast before. It’s a short story that I was forced to read in multiple creative writing classes.

The story itself is fine. It does include the phrase, juicy thigh.

Oren & Chris: Ew.

Bunny: But I didn’t like it and I didn’t understand why we had to read it multiple times. There are other short stories in the world, please. Choose any other, so I have a dislike of that one.

Chris: Yeah. For me, in fiction, I just stopped reading fiction very quickly if I don’t like it. And so the ones that stand out in my mind as being my least favorite are the ones that I was compelled to finish, even though I don’t like them, like Atla Shrugged. That one was not actually assigned to me, to be fair.

We were doing an assignment where we were pairing up in class and we had to choose a book together. And my partner suggested it, and I did not know it was over a thousand pages long. And then I was committed to reading it.

Bunny: Oh gosh.

Chris: So yeah, that and Catcher in the Rye.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Catcher in the Rye was assigned in class.

Bunny: There was a book I read for my senior thesis where I was studying mysteries and thrillers because I was writing something along those lines. My professor hadn’t read this, but she was like, oh, I’ve heard good things about this book.

Chris: Mm. That’s definitely something you shouldn’t trust. I’ve heard this is good, but is it though?

Bunny: I looked at it. What is it though? That’s right. And it’s this book called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was pitched to me as a thriller mystery. It wasn’t, it was mostly the main character hanging out in the woods. And then murders happen around her and like the towns folk are shitty and she’s got a unique way of narrating and then— spoilers—It turns out she was the killer. So it was also a meta mystery. No.

Chris: Sounds like it did not actually succeed in being tense.

Bunny: No, it felt meandering.

Chris: That would be hard if she knows that she’s the killer and you’re trying to make her act realistically, why would she be worried?

Bunny: She thinks she’s the killer, but she thinks she’s doing it on behalf of the animals, but she’s still killing people, which was obscured by her first person narration. And she would’ve been thinking about that. And when I talked about this with my professor, my professor was even like, yeah, that seems like a bad decision on the author’s part. It just shouldn’t have been pitched as a thriller. The characters spend a lot of time sitting around and translating poetry.

Yeah…

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Is that not thrilling?

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: Okay, let’s talk about the fiction books we like.

Oren: Yeah. Cause we’re pretty much outta time already. But anyway, we’re gonna finish this question.

Chris: I did not know it would take us so long to answer three questions. Well, four questions, Julia.

Oren: Thanks Julia.

Bunny: Thanks Julia.

Oren: Of the books that I’ve read recently, I wanna pick either all Systems Red or Piranesi cause they’re both really good.

Chris: I’ve read all Systems read three times now, so I, that has to qualify as my favorite.

Oren: But I think my all-time favorite book is probably still going to be Thud! from Discworld. There are a lot of good Discworld books, but I think that one’s my favorite. It’s the culmination of several storylines and it moment in Vimes’ parenting storyline, which I found really, really touching. So I think that one’s probably gonna be my favorite.

And my least favorite of books I’ve actually read is probably a Spell for Chameleon, which is so gross and so bad, and also so boring. It’s not even bad in an interesting way. It’s just bad.

Chris: What’s your favorite, Bunny?

Bunny: Well, again, narrowing it down to things I’ve read multiple times. Wildwood by Colin Meloy, who’s also a singer for the Decemberists, interestingly, and his wife did the artwork. Wildwood was a book I loved growing up, and I still love, it’s just, I just really captured my imagination and saw this interesting world and I just love the characters and the setting and the vibes of it all, and I’ve read it many times. So that has to qualify.

I also really like Good Omens. That was the first Pratchett I was exposed to and it went over well. And I’ve read that one multiple times as well.

I also just really like a whole laundry list of graphic novels, but I think The Girl From the Sea, which is about a selkie human romance between two young girls. There’s no creepy skin stealing, thank God.

And then the Tea Dragon Society, which is about these dragons that like grow tea leaves. And when you drink the tea made from the tea leaves, you get to relive the memories of the dragons and their owners.

Oren: We finally answered the questions. So, I guess our 500 episode was actually just a mailbag, so that’s great. Good job everybody.

Bunny: Everyone loves a mailbag.

Oren: I think with that, we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like us to make 500 more episodes—but please give us 10 years for real—Consider supporting us on Patreon so that we can keep going. It’s not a given that we will last another five years. So just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon 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]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.