I recently visited a Barnes & Noble, and the biggest section of the entire store was the manga section. American booksellers have discovered that American readers will browse an entire store and not find a single Western story they want to buy. So every year, the manga section gets bigger and bigger.
If you don’t believe me, go to your nearest Barnes & Noble and count the manga shelves, then count the shelves of the other genres. I challenge you to find a single Western section that can compete with the Asian section.
Once you realize this, it’s no surprise that K-Pop Demon Hunters is the most-viewed Netflix movie of all time in the United States and in the world.
Some of you are about to tune out because you don’t care about comic books or manga. But this isn’t a story about comic books. It’s representative of cultural changes that will hit your genre next, if they haven’t already. Where comic books go, the rest of the industry follows, some genres sooner than others.
Indie authors who’ve cracked this code are already making a killing. American traditional publishers, on the other hand, are still pushing the same grimdark books that no one wants to buy, and they don’t understand why Asian publishers are drinking their milkshake.
Readers have to read manga backwards. In a manga book, the front of the book is on the back, because Japanese reads right to left instead of left to right.
So if you don’t yet grasp this tectonic shift, here’s one more data point: One Piece, a Japanese manga comic series, just passed Superman as the bestselling comic book of all time, and Superman had a 59-year head start. Superman dominated the gold and silver ages of comic books, and still, One Piece sells more copies in one day than Superman sells in 10.
Our gatekeepers are failing us.
How do you explain the shift?
Thomas: For the last 20 years, fantasy publishers wanted to see characters who were relatable, flawed, and morally conflicted. The good guys weren’t that good, and the bad guys made some good points. Readers were left wondering if Thanos was right. The characters were grim, and the settings were dark.
Readers are now tired of grimdark stories, and they are sending that message with their wallets as loudly as they can.
Yes, Superman adopted narratives focused on identity politics, and yes, One Piece is fiercely anti-authoritarian and pro-freedom, but the readers in the manga section didn’t walk past the Western comic books because of politics. They skipped Western stories because those stories were grim, dark, and boring.
Taking the wokeness out of a story is not the same as making a story fun to read. Removing the political messaging is not the same as giving readers what they crave.
What do readers crave now?
Thomas: Readers now want aspiration. Readers don’t mind dark settings, but they want to see noble, aspirational characters in those dark settings. As a culture, we’ve moved from the grimdark era to the noble dark era. The setting is still dark, but readers now want characters who are good and powerful enough to make a difference and fix that dark world. And they will do anything to find those stories, including reading backwards via manga.
You have no idea how low the bar is for Western storytellers. After all, we’re writing in a language our readers already read. Most American publishers won’t even consider a story about a morally good hero who grinds to become powerful so he can fight evil. That’s one reason traditional publishers are losing market share to indies.
We cover these sales numbers on my other podcast, Author Update. Every month, we get new industry numbers, and every month, the story is stagnation or losses for traditional publishers and steady growth for indies.
Not all indies are thriving, though. Plenty are still writing the same tired grimdark stories about the same tired anti-heroes. But the indie authors who understand the shift are selling millions of copies because Western readers still prefer Western stories if they can find stories that scratch their itch.
I recently spoke with Seth Ring, who is one of those authors. He’s the co-host of the World Craft Club podcast and has sold over a million copies of his fantasy and LitRPG books.
Thomas: Do you have any thoughts on this shift?
Seth: I think you nailed it. The appetite of readers has shifted even in the last five years, skewing harder toward wanting aspirational characters.
When I started writing, there was still a lot of grimdark in the market, but we were already seeing cracks. Now those cracks are canyons. People are abandoning that type of storytelling wholesale and looking for anything that will give them the stories they love with characters who drive change in their world.
What makes a character aspirational?
Thomas: Many people have forgotten what an aspirational character is.
For example, isn’t Superman the ultimate aspirational character, the man who stands for truth, justice, and the American way? Well, first, he doesn’t stand for those things anymore. In modern comics, he stands for more leftist ideals. Second, he’s not even in his own comic book anymore. He’s been replaced by the Superboys.
What makes an aspirational character, and why is relatability less now?
Seth: Aspirational can cover a wide range, but at its core, you’re looking for a character who can affect change in their world and is, without qualification, making their world a better place, depending on their idea of “better.”
For an aspirational character, we’re talking about heroes, not villains. People who are genuinely good, genuinely trying to improve the world and protect the people around them, and who are succeeding. That’s what ultimately separates them from grimdark or “relatable” characters. If you have a superhero fail in their own story, that may be relatable because people fail in life, but it doesn’t encourage the reader to believe that they can change the world.
We’re looking for characters who represent genuine positive change in the world they inhabit.
Thomas: And the failing can’t be ultimate. Struggling to gain power is very appealing, but the struggle can’t be pointless. The world has to be brighter at the end.
This cultural shift is showing up in how people react to popular TV show finales. When a show ends without a brighter world, when characters go through all that suffering and trauma only to swap one evil person on the throne for another who’s just as evil, readers and viewers reject it. They want progress. They want good to triumph over evil.
Seth: There’s a sense that the world is hard enough as it is. When people are trying to be entertained or escape reality for a little while, they don’t want their fiction to mirror it.
For a long time, people wanted that mirror. There was a catharsis in fiction that expressed the angst people couldn’t express in real life. But now it’s the opposite.
People want their fantasy to be fantasy. They want swords and dragons with the good guys winning. They don’t want the evil wizard to ultimately triumph, or a hero who sacrifices everything only to find the victory hollow and pointless. That describes most of the stories written over the last 20 years, and readers are simply tired of it.
What are readers hungry for?
Thomas: There’s a hunger for glory. The grimdark era lasted about two decades, and this new noble dark era will probably last a couple of decades as well, if history is any guide.
There’s a hunger for that feeling of “I did it, I accomplished it, I won, and I get the medal at the end.” We saw the very tail end of that with the original Star Wars. What do the heroes get at the end? A medal. There’s a moment of glory where they get to experience and celebrate their victory.
That kind of moment hasn’t been replicated in Star Wars or really anything since. The last time you saw that was right at the end of an era when such moments had been common in earlier storytelling.
What kind of villains do readers want now?
Thomas: In the recent past, the villains and heroes in grim dark stories have been drawing closer and closer together. But with this new shift, as heroes become more noble, villains need to become more unequivocally evil.
In our previous zeitgeist episode, we called it the Terminator-to-Thanos continuum.
The Terminator is an unequivocally evil force, and destroying it is cathartic precisely because it’s purely evil.
Interestingly, as we moved into the grimdark era, even the Terminator stories got reimagined with good terminators and bad terminators. On one end of the continuum, you have the original, mindlessly destructive Terminator. On the other end, you have Thanos, the protagonist of Infinity War, who makes some good points. Is he really evil, or is he just trying to save the world from the suffering he experienced as a child? Maybe he’s just working through his trauma. Is he really a bad guy?
I am so tired of that Thanos-type villain, but ten years ago, Thanos was the most compelling villain in film.
Seth: There’s a real sense in which people stopped being able to tell whether they were the hero or the villain when they were relating to a character. That does something to you. When you’re deep in a story and excited about it, and then you have to stop and ask, “Are we the baddies?” It’s exactly that sketch.
But there’s also something that happens in the culture when people start to feel that there are actual barbarians at the gate, actual evil in the world coming for them. Suddenly, a morally gray villain, or even a morally gray hero, becomes repugnant. You don’t want to be associated with the guy so full of himself that he thinks it’s his responsibility to snap away half the universe. But you also don’t want to be associated with heroes who start a civil war with their best friend over an inability to find any compromise.
The difference between Iron Man, Captain America, and Thanos is almost nonexistent. They’re all effectively doing the same thing, and as a reader or viewer, you don’t want to be associated with any of them. Because of the world we live in, people want some distance from that.
It’s a far better experience for a reader to encounter a villain who is unequivocally villainous. He might have reasons for what he does, but what he does is absolutely evil, and there’s no excusing it. His ideas are clearly wrong.
That also frees us to have a hero we want to associate with and who will do what is right and stop genuine evil, in the same way we wish we could stop the genuine evil we see in the world around us.
Thomas: It’s also about being able to truly enjoy the defeat of that villain. If the villain made good points, you’re almost sad when he dies.
With Thanos, you might think, “Oh, he just had trauma. He wasn’t really evil, and now he’s dead, and all his dreams are gone.” But when you see the Terminator melting in the lava, you’re relieved. “Finally. He was so scary, so dangerous, and now we’re safe.” At least until the next movie.
There’s a sense we all share that the world is a less safe place than when we were kids. You rode your bicycle around the neighborhood without a second thought. Now there’s anxiety everywhere, a feeling that we’re living in a dangerous world. Fiction becomes a way to escape that.
What is the cultural effect of so many heroes who aren’t noble?
Thomas: Ignoble characters produce cultural cynicism. In the last era, stories were very cynical, and heroes weren’t that noble. The underlying message was that there’s no real good and bad. There’s only the powerful and the oppressed. Your moral value comes from how much suffering you’ve experienced rather than from your deeds.
This, I think, is the core moral question underneath the wokeness debate.
A big part of what people call wokeness is the view that moral value comes from how oppressed you are. The more oppressed you are, the more morally valuable you are.
It’s not even about what you personally have done. If you belong to a group that has historically been oppressive, you carry diminished moral value by association. That’s the framework. It’s entirely about oppressor and oppressed, as opposed to a classical moral framework in which there’s an absolute right and wrong, and your moral value comes from whether your actions align with that standard.
Seth: It has very much become an “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” situation. Many people didn’t realize it was morphing into that, but they are starting to wake up to it. Across the political spectrum, people in every camp are starting to say, “Wait, this standard is untenable, because I can’t guarantee I’ll always be in the more-equal-animals category.” It just doesn’t work.
To see if your story falls into this trap, check out the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker in the Patron Toolbox
What is postmodern fatigue?
Thomas: There’s definitely a purity spiral happening. More and more people keep getting ejected as the spiral tightens, and once they’re ejected, they go through a painful transformation. Suddenly, they start listening to voices they used to ignore, and their whole worldview gets reoriented. It’s disorienting. This has been happening for about 10 years now, and it’s accelerating.
For example, I recently started reading Aristotle, whom I’d always assumed was too complicated and dense. Then I found a modern translation and listened to the audiobook. I found myself thinking, “This guy is like an autistic blogger explaining emotions for other autistic bloggers. He’s not complicated at all, and he makes genuinely good points. I love Aristotle. Why was I avoiding him?”
This connects to a bigger philosophical shift we’re living through. One way to describe it is postmodern fatigue. Brandon Sanderson was one of the first people to identify it about 15 years ago, and he’s made a hundred million dollars because he saw it coming.
He wrote an essay about postmodern fantasy in which he essentially said he was going to stop doing what his publishers were pushing him to do. He’d already succeeded by sneaking around it. He’d pitched Mistborn as a subversive story, and at a meta level it has that quality, but it really wasn’t subversion in the grimdark sense. Once he’d sold enough copies, the rules no longer applied to him, and he could tell the stories he wanted to tell.
Postmodernism is built on subverting expectations and deconstructing characters and narratives.
If you went to college, this is what you were taught in English class, because English departments are almost universally postmodern in their orientation. So thoroughly, in fact, that many readers have never encountered classical or even modern storytelling. Aristotle was filtered through two or three layers before he ever reached you, and you never realized he’s quite accessible.
What are your thoughts on postmodern storytelling?
Seth: That fatigue is absolutely real. I’m reading a fascinating book right now by Kingsnorth. He makes an interesting point: we are not currently in a culture war. We are fighting over the scraps of a civilization whose war has already ended. We are in the ruins of the West, quarreling over what to preserve, clinging to some semblance of nostalgia for what it was.
Postmodernism drove the final nail into the coffin. The West was already dying before postmodernism arrived, but postmodernism ended any chance of revival.
Now we’re in the gap, between civilizations, with all kinds of competing forces rushing in to fill the space. Postmodernism was an attempt to create a societal structure that would allow us to carry on. It has objectively failed.
It’s a staircase to nowhere. Remove the purpose and point from things, let them simply exist without meaning, and you completely untether them. Nietzsche knew this.
How does postmodernism hinder storytelling?
Thomas: In previous generations, a standalone novel had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Readers would close the book and feel something. But because postmodernism produces depressing or nonexistent endings, writers raised in a postmodern educational system don’t know how to end a story in a satisfying way. So they put it off. That’s why we have this era of the never-ending series. After each installment, they realize there is no satisfying ending, and in some cases, they simply give up, as George R.R. Martin has smartly done by not ending his series.
Seth: I think the never-ending series is a reaction to postmodernism. Readers are desperately looking for hope and a satisfying resolution. They keep reading because the author is searching for the same thing.
So many authors who work in a postmodern mode create these series, reach the end, and think, “This isn’t satisfying for me, and it won’t be satisfying for my readers. I guess we just keep looking.”
It’s the same quest so many people are on in their personal lives. Maybe the next thing will fill the need. Maybe the next relationship, the next car, the next purchase will make me happy. This is what happens when you mix materialism into everything.
When the material world is all there is, it ends up crushing you, body and soul. Without a grander purpose, without a reason for being, existence becomes a boulder that rolls on top of you. There’s nothing to it except its weight.
Why is fantasy so popular in a materialist culture?
Thomas: That’s a fascinating point, and it may explain why fantasy is so popular right now.
If you grew up in public school and attended a mainstream university, you were presented with a worldview in which the material world is all that exists. Your teacher wasn’t allowed to tell you that ghosts are real, but was allowed to tell you they aren’t and that there is no spiritual world. Readers, deep down, know that’s false, which is why they’re so desperate for stories that don’t take materialism as a given.
All fantasy stories reject materialism. They have magic, spirits, gods, elves, and gnomes, and those immaterial things change the world. There may not be dwarves in your story, but the rejection of materialism is nearly universal to the genre.
Seth: Eastern stories presuppose a spiritual dimension to the world. They take for granted that the material world is not all there is. It’s almost as if our Western philosophical tradition made itself unfit for the kind of storytelling that feeds the soul.
Eastern stories carry a sense that there is a grander world beyond what you can see, and the goal is ultimately to connect to it. Western stories, by contrast, have spent years pushing toward more expressive individualism, more separation from the world around you, because in a postmodern context, if everything is genuinely relative and subjective, the only anchor is your own experience.
Thomas: Your emotional reality becomes reality itself. If someone makes you feel bad, that feeling is treated as a form of violence. But your emotions aren’t reality. You can govern them. Read Aristotle.
The answer to good Western storytelling is not to write Eastern stories. We have our own civilization. The fact that Western readers can only find their thirst quenched in Eastern storytelling is not an argument for Eastern answers. It’s an indictment of Western stories.
To reset, read Aristotle and the Bible. Read the actual texts, in good translations. Western civilization rests on two pillars, one in Athens and one in Jerusalem. Start there and spiral outward.
Read the Church Fathers, read Plato, and you’ll find them grappling with the same eternal questions: What is the good, the true, and the beautiful? What is truth? What is justice? Their answers, I think, are far more satisfying than anything Marxist deconstruction has offered. When you read them, you find yourself asking, “Why was I never shown this?”
Seth: It’s an indictment of the ruins of our society that this has been lost.
We do go through cycles, and there were genuine reasons people shifted away from these foundations. The course was just never corrected, and the result has been catastrophic in a cultural sense.
But there is a real awakening happening in storytelling. We’re seeing a reintroduction of good and beautiful stories, heroes who are genuinely trying to improve the world, not just for themselves but for the people around them, and for its own sake.
That was clearly lost in postmodern storytelling. In the postmodern story, everybody is ultimately selfish, including the hero. The hero is just trying to get theirs. We happen to be watching over their shoulder, and they’re the one we’re supposed to empathize with, but they’re doing the same thing as everyone else.
We’re starting to see that shift. We’re starting to see heroes who seek good for good’s sake, not because it adds something to their personal ledger. They are trying to stop evil because it is evil, full stop, whether or not they personally benefit. Their motivation matters, and more and more stories are getting this right.
Thomas: A true hero may get something bad out of it. A true hero is someone who sacrifices and seeks good for its own sake, despite the personal cost. Advancing the good, the true, and the beautiful is expensive. Going along with the flow is cheap and easy. The path to destruction is broad, and the path to salvation is narrow.
Seth: I don’t think we’re seeing many heroes who suffer as a result of their heroism, though.
We’re in a particular moment where people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want heroes who succeed and get a good outcome. Culturally, when Western civilization was dominant, we had a deep understanding that sacrifice for others was the highest good. “The greatest thing is that a man lay down his life for another.” That was a real pillar of our civilization, and it’s gone.
The best people can conceptualize now is that “I do good for others, and good is done for me.” That’s where our aspirational heroes currently are. We’re not quite where we need to be, which is the ultimate laying down of life for others. We’re in the step before it. Our heroes will have to work toward it and arrive there, but we’re not there yet.
What role do authors play in navigating civilizational collapse?
Thomas: Navigating civilizational collapse is something authors are genuinely important for. We make sense of reality by first making sense of it narratively.
You mentioned the ruins of civilization, and I recently saw a tweet asking how medieval peasants could live among the ruins of a great civilization without it troubling them. People in the Dark Ages lived in wooden structures next to Roman stonework.
Someone responded to the tweet with a photo of a person walking past a Sears sign with a fallen letter.
We are in the ruins of a previous civilization right now. The Rust Belt is full of dilapidated factories and rust-covered skyscrapers. How do we handle it? We don’t look at it. We turn our eyes toward the areas that are still doing well, which is exactly what people did back then. While England was in a dark age, Constantinople was thriving. Civilization still holds as long as Byzantium is strong. Of course, Byzantium wasn’t strong forever.
We have navigated civilizational collapses before, both localized and global. There were two major ones: the Bronze Age collapse, which most people know little about, and the Dark Ages collapse, which is more familiar. In both cases, the stories that gave people hope were essential.
Hope is a core superpower for navigating difficult times. Noble characters survive a dark world through hope, and that is exactly what the postmodern worldview destroys. Postmodernism offers no hope at all, but readers are hungry for hope. Give us hope, something to hope in, someone to hope in, and make it feel real and earned, not cheesy.
What genre do we need next?
The term for this that’s gaining traction is hopepunk. I almost feel like your writing is hopepunk adjacent.
Seth: I don’t really write punk in the strict sense of the term.
Thomas: You write hope LitRPG.
Seth: You could call what I write hopepunk.
The point of all my stories is that you can carve out a good life, build good relationships, overcome evil, and strive for greatness. That is absolutely possible, and it’s a core tenet in all of my work.
I’ve had trouble with some of my series because they’ve gotten very grim, and I’ve had to set them aside until I could figure out how to turn evil to good, how to rescue these characters, and get them out of their situations so they can ultimately create a better world for the people around them.
That’s the thing about hope. In the postmodern world, a counterfeit hope told us to get rich, get a nicer car, get a bigger house. It was materialism and corporate consumerism. That’s what the American dream became.
But the American dream that drove Americans across the continent was something different. You can go establish a home. You can have a family, a community, a place to worship in peace. You can get out of the overcrowded cities and provide a living for yourself.
When I was young, one of my favorite books was something like The Good Old Days Were Awful. It walked through the terrible conditions people endured in previous generations, and it really opened my eyes. People had it hard.
The original American dream was not escape for its own sake. It was the chance to establish yourself, and establishing yourself meant building a family, a community, and becoming a pillar in it, which means lifting other people up alongside you.
But in our fiction, for a long time, that wasn’t the dream. Hope meant escaping the machine, getting out, even if you had to leave everyone else behind. Cut the ropes on your way up and let them fall. Everything became a crab pot, with everyone pulling each other back into the boiling water.
We swapped the hope of community, fellowship, and building something lasting for a different message: by the time you’re dead, none of it will matter anyway. You can’t take it with you, so go get yours. Climb as high as you can, build as big a house as you can, and amass as much power as you can. Then your problems will go away, and your life will be set.
How are philosophical materialism and consumer materialism connected?
Thomas: There are two kinds of materialism, and we’ve been using the word both ways.
Philosophical materialism says that the physical world is all that exists. There are no ghosts, no spirits, no God. Consumer materialism says, “Buy as much stuff as possible, and whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
Philosophical materialism leads to consumer materialism.
Most people reject consumer materialism on some level. We all sense that keeping up with the Joneses is hollow. The classical way of articulating this, what Aristotle or the Bible would say, is that it’s rooted in envy and covetousness and that true happiness doesn’t come from what you own. The left articulation is that it’s bad for the environment, that it externalizes costs onto others.
We know instinctively that consumer materialism is wrong, and yet we don’t reject philosophical materialism.
Many people assume we simply live in a secular world, free of invisible forces or spiritual influence, and that all of that is a fairy tale. But if you reject the ghosts, you end up philosophically embracing “he who dies with the most toys wins.” We want to square that circle, but you can’t. It’s the same materialism all the way down.
Seth: It really is. Even people who reject it outright still buy iPhones. We might reject it on the surface, but we still live and participate in the machine that drives consumer culture. We buy the cars, the houses, the clothes. We work at jobs that drive the machine. Saying “I reject that” is one thing; rejecting it is another.
Most people can’t realistically opt out. They can’t simply buy a parcel of land and go off-grid. That’s not an option. So they seek escape through entertainment and fiction.
When people want to do something they cannot do, they find escape in stories with characters who are doing the right thing. It helps them manage the internal tension so many of us feel as we keep participating in the culture around us.
How can novelists help society navigate change?
Thomas: We have to get there narratively before we get there as a society. Novelists help society navigate change, often a generation before society catches up.
AI is everywhere right now, but it was a preoccupation of fiction a generation ago. WarGames came out over 40 years ago. Storytellers could already see that thinking machines were coming, and they were grappling with the ethical dilemmas. The thrust of WarGames was a warning not to give the machines control over the nukes. Many other stories were wrestling with AI long before the rest of the culture was.
Interestingly, almost nobody is grappling with AI narratively right now. There are no stories on the bestseller list with a thinking machine as a meaningful antagonist or protagonist. We’ve moved on.
True novelists are looking further ahead, toward something like homesteading and building.
You talked about “building a better world for the people around you,” and I think that’s one reason you’ve sold so many books.
One of the features of your books is the act of building a town, kingdom, or castle. That is deeply satisfying, particularly to younger readers. The most popular video game with young men, year after year, is Minecraft, even though it has some of the worst graphics in gaming. All you can do is build things. Young men crave building. They want to go out into the wilderness and create a new civilization or build something in the ruins of the previous one, or build a family in the ruins of the previous family.
It doesn’t have to be grand. It can be small.
Seth: We’re turning away from desperately trying to preserve the ruins of our civilization, away from the preservation of nostalgia, and moving into a new time when people genuinely feel the system has failed.
What previous generations built simply hasn’t worked. So what do we do? Because there are so many people with the drive to build and create, that energy will be channeled into a new civilization. It may not come in our lifetime. It may come in future generations. I hope it comes sooner, because I think it matters for us as a society.
What we’re doing now in our writing is setting up the next generations for how they understand the world and experience reality. We have to understand something narratively, in story before we can really understand it in the real world.
Then, when we start to see those same patterns happening around us, something clicks. We know what to do. Stand up. Hold firm on your principles. Seek the good of the people around you. Reject evil and genuinely fight against it.
This is not about maintaining the wall or protecting the bastion. We are in a pioneering time. This is about going out, gaining ground, establishing community, protecting it from external threats, raising the people around you up, and building something, rather than wallowing in the destruction of the surrounding society.
Will a rebuilt civilization have a uniquely American character?
Thomas: As we think about rebuilding, I’m curious whether the new civilization will have a uniquely American flavor.
Civilizational collapse is far worse in Europe. The average European you talk to isn’t even convinced that Western civilization is superior to other civilizations, or that their own country is worth preferring.
There’s a basic logic to patriotism: you have to prefer your own wife to other people’s wives. Your own family to other families. Your own nation to other nations. Without that in-group preference, you don’t survive long-term.
What we may be seeing is Europe and America diverging sharply. European Western civilization may be acting as a kind of bootloader for a new American civilization, one that’s more Western in its core principles than whatever combination of Islam and communism Europe ends up producing.
That result could be largely unrecognizable from what came before. We’re already seeing this geopolitically and culturally. Europe and America don’t feel like the same civilization the way they did when they were fighting together in the 1940s.
Is Europe lost, or is there still hope for the West?
Seth: Europe and America have completely diverged. Maybe this is just the hopeful part of me, but I think we’ll see a stronger, more Western world in the not-too-distant future, partly through the stories we tell.
We’ll continue to face challenges, but what’s happening in Europe is inoculating the US and the broader Americas against the same thing. People are starting to realize that not everyone shares the same values, and that if you don’t hold territory, you lose it.
I also want to say clearly: I don’t think Europe is lost.
Thomas: We don’t know that yet. The decision may ultimately come down to a handful of people in a room somewhere. There will be a moment when the future of Europe is decided, and we don’t yet know who will have a seat at that table or where the table will be. That moment hasn’t happened yet, but the decisions being made now are guiding it.
Seth: I agree, and I think there’s a type of person who saw that viral photo of the young woman in the UK carrying a dagger and a hatchet to defend herself and her sister and thought, “Oh. Is that what we’re doing now?”
There have been moments when a narrative lands and something inside us starts tingling. We recognize the story, and we understand it goes one of two ways: it ends in despair, or it ends with a hero.
That’s why the stories we tell matter so much. You see that photo, you understand the context, and you either say, “There’s nothing I can do, so I’ll retreat,” or you say, “No. We’re going to organize. We’re going to patrol our neighborhood. We’re going to make sure this never happens again, and anyone who thinks about it will pay the consequence.” One of those is a heroic response. The other is despair.
Thomas: Some of you have never heard this news story, depending on which information bubble you’re in. She’s a young woman who was being harassed by migrants, she and her sister and other young women, in the broader context of a serious rape gang crisis. She was so afraid for her life and her sister’s that she began carrying a knife and a hatchet for protection (which is illegal there), trying to chase off her attackers. She was willingly breaking the law because she feared the people around her more than she feared the police.
Imagine you’re writing a novel for that young woman in the viral photo. Now imagine the main thrust of your novel is “violence is not the answer.” She has experienced violence. She has watched it perpetrated against her sister. A superhero giving a speech about nonviolence is not going to resonate with her. But she’ll pick up One Piece, about a character who is deeply willing to fight against evil, and think, “Yes. This is my story.”
That’s why we’re bringing this full circle.
Young people are hungry for those Eastern stories not because they’re Eastern, but because they’re more connected to the timeless, universal truths that all stories can reach. Western authors who understand those truths and give them a Western flavor will find readers beating down the door, even readers who’ve been reading backwards. They’ll read backwards if they have to, because they’re that hungry for a story that speaks to their moment. But they would prefer a Western writer, writing in English, where the story starts on the left page.
This got very philosophical, but I think the philosophy matters, and most people never consider it when they’re writing. They don’t understand why their story isn’t working when the root cause is a worldview problem showing up on the page.
I’ve just launched a tool called the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker that evaluates a manuscript against all of my zeitgeist conversations on this podcast and on Author Update. It will read a manuscript and evaluate it on the turnings, assess your protagonist and your villains on the Thanos-to-Terminator continuum, and help guide the story.
It can’t replace reading the Bible and Aristotle and reconnecting with the foundational principles of your civilization. That worldview work is on you. But the tool can help identify symptoms of that work not being done.
Seth: I encourage everyone who’s listening and writing to write the kind of future you want to see. The people who read your stories are internalizing those messages, and it will shape how they interact with the world. If you want to see a better world, write that better world.
If you want to see the whole world burn, well, that book has already been written. Everyone’s been writing it for a long time. They just haven’t written the final installment, because everybody knows deep down that no one wants to buy nihilism.
Nihilism has a terrible sales pitch: “Hey, do you want to be miserable, hopeless, purposeless, alone in a meaningless universe with no God, and then just die? Pay me $20 to read that story.”
Thomas: I’m currently reading the seventh book of Seth’s Titan series, and I’m really enjoying it. In his Stardew Valley, I took issue with some economic elements, but both are great stories.
If you haven’t experienced LitRPG or this new wave of storytelling, and if you don’t understand why it’s selling so well, I encourage you to pick up at least one of these books just to shake up your thinking. It won’t replace reading Aristotle. You still need to read Aristotle, and you still need to read the Bible. But Seth’s books will show you how that philosophy can be worked into fiction through a video game framework. Don’t dismiss the LitRPG setting as merely a video game aesthetic. He’s doing genuinely interesting things with it.
Seth: One of the coolest things about LitRPG is that it’s a permissive genre. So many of us have been told for so long that stories have to work a certain way. Reading LitRPG is genuinely eye-opening. You realize: I can just tell the story I want to tell. I can do what I want in my own world.
Thomas: You can write an overpowered protagonist that everyone is afraid of.
Seth: You can just do it. You don’t need permission. You can write the kind of world you want, the kind of story you want. LitRPG has been fantastic for that, specifically in giving authors permission to tell the story they want to tell.
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