Everybody Wants Camus The World
An Interview with Django Wexler, part 1
Hello, friends! Often I want to pick the brains of writers whose books I love, in a nonsurgical manner of course—to go deep on aspects of craft or theme or business or process or just ask, “what were you thinking?” I’ve mentioned Django Wexler’s Dark Lord Davi series on this newsletter before, and the recent release of Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, the second and final book in the series, seemed like a great opportunity to get together for a chat. We had so much fun that I’m dividing the interview into two pieces—this week focusing on genre distinctions, referentiality, and the ethics of time loops, while next week we’ll get into series planning and outlining. I had a ton of fun with the Dark Lord Davi books; here’s a link to book 1, How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. Once you’re done with that you’ll want to have Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me close to hand.
Max: We’re talking about Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, second book in the Dark Lord Davi series.
Django: True story, I wanted to put the name in parentheses to make the Tears for Fears reference clearer, but my editor said that you can't have a parenthetical in a book title because Google and Wikipedia and such will forever break on it.
Max: Oh, really? That's a shame.
Django: Yes. Literally that.
Max: It's so necessary. I like the effect of Davi having almost perfect recall of everything related to Earth, history and popular culture, and absolutely zero reference to her own background.
Django: Well, what it really is, is a license for me to put in all the weird jokes I think of while I'm writing. Like this happens all the time while I'm writing, [wanting to insert a joke or a cultural reference] but then I can't because it's a fantasy world and it wouldn't be appropriate.
If you do, you need to explain why Tears for Fears is there.
As someone who spent many years of his life communicating mostly in quotes from The Simpsons, this is just how my brain works. It's the disadvantage of writing a book as someone who is terminally online. But also, the fact that Davi’s real life is a question mark means that I don't have to worry, “oh, okay, if she's 25 in 2020, then like, what things is she actually going to get?” Like, whatever. It's fine.
Max: It also gives you that wonderful rootless experience of scrolling through social media—in the laudatory sense—when you’re not mired in the profound depression of it all you can orient—“oh, yeah, this is a person who's making a Simpsons joke.” Are they a 17 year old who has seen other people making Simpsons jokes for their entire life, but may or may not have ever seen an episode of The Simpsons? Are they somebody who is 20 when the first season aired?
Django: You don't know, and that's cool.
We're getting into very meta territory, too, with The Simpsons, because there's Simpsons stuff that was the way I first learned about like classic cinema. You know, they do like Casablanca riffs or whatever. And like now people can quote that riff without understanding it the way I quoted the original without understanding it.
Max: I appreciate this meta density of text.
Django: Right.
Max: I'm reading Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance now, and there's a bit about, you know, why does Michelangelo have all of these pagan muses in the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
It’s because when he's growing up in the Medici household, he's sitting right next to Marcelio Ficino, who's like making all of these points about how ancient philosophy was a parallel revelation to the Old Testament, borderline heretical stuff.
Then Michelangelo was just like, yeah,, I'm painting that all over the ceiling.
Text, reference, text, reference, text, reference.
Or there's another bit about how when translations of Homer showed up in the West for the first time post-Roman collapse as they were being translated out of Greek into Latin, there was this sort of gut check moment because it turns out that the Iliad, which everybody knew as the greatest poem of all time, sort of canonically, was not as much about how war is great and it's really cool to be a big heroic swording-ing guy as they might have expected from reading, say, Virgil.
And so it's like, what do we do with the fact that the canonical great war poem that we've been talking about for the last thousand years is not actually about war being All That.
Django: And that continues to this day. Like, I remember someone, you know, talking about, you know, the Iliad and Achilles and how big and tough and manly and how great that was.
And I'm like, “because the message of the Iliad is that everything works out great for Achilles.”
Max: Yes, the ending of the Iliad, one of the canonically happy ones.
Max: It seems to me that one of the things you get out of Davi not having any personal memory, is that she is sort of more relatable, a reader- insert character. The reader can kind of jump in and imagine like, what if me in this situation, in a way that is pretty cool.
Django: That's a classic of the Isekai genre.
Max: Maybe I'm just not widely read enough in Isekai. Portal fantasy in general has always struck me as kind of terrifying genre, because, like, what if you're stuck here?
Django: Yes.
Max: There's the fantasy of going to the place where magic is real and there are dragons and everything. And then there's the reality of I would never see my friends or family again.
Django: Well, and I actually, I would describe that as the main difference between Portal and Isekai is that in the Isekai fantasy, it is very clear either from the beginning or quite early that you are stuck there and cannot go back.
Often, you know, in the classic Japanese Iskeai, because you died—
Max: Because Truck-kun comes through and smashes you into the road—
Django: Exactly.
Django: Or, you know, if it's like Dungeon Crawler Carl because the world was destroyed , that's not technically an Isekai, but effectively, right? You're transitioned to another world state.
And so the Isekai fantasy is all about making a life for yourself and learning to deal with the new world because you're stuck there. Whereas the portal fantasy generally assumes that the characters will eventually go home. That they are, in essence, vacationing in a fantasy world. Whether that's like explicitly the goal of the story, a lot of portal fantasies getting home is the goal.
I think you're right. From a sort of craft perspective, the reason you make it clear early is because otherwise it would kind of make more sense for the protagonist to be like, oh my God, I need to escape back to my real life because this is horribly dangerous and I'm going to get killed.
Max: Yeah, people die here all the time.
Django: Right. So you, you make it, you know, oh, I get hit by a truck. I guess this fantasy world is my life now. They're not like, you know, I need to go home and get back to my mom or whatever .
Max: I can see how the two genres are sort of in tension with our intuitions about childhood and adulthood too, right? In the portal fantasy, if you are leaving Earth as a kid, you want to get back to the care of your parents. In the trope makers, in the Narnia books, right, you have this doubled or tripled dimension of it, especially in the first one, where they've been abstracted from the care of their parents because of the Blitz—they're out here in the countryside in the first place and then they enter into Narnia. They've already through a portal before the book opens.
Django: Isekai, in a way, has a much darker message because the portal fantasy, the classic – and like not hashtag not all portal fantasy, obviously, there have been many riffs on this genre from the magicians on and on—but the classic portal fantasy message is character thinks their life at home is bad or is bored by it or something bad has happened. They escape into the fantasy world, which is great at first, but they learn it can also be bad. They learn to believe in themselves, whatever, and then eventually come to the realization that real life is actually better than fantasy because this is a metaphor for growing up. Right? At some point you have to leave childish things behind and become an adult.
Max: You come back to your real world having been ennobled by your trek in fantasyland, with powers or maturity that you have gained there.
Django: And you then realize that real life is good. You know, your mom is there and things will be okay, even if it was bad when you started .
The Isakai is not about that.
The classic Isekai is: character’s in their real life and it sucks. And then they get hit by a truck and transferred to the fantasy world and this is awesome.
It begins awesome and generally stays awesome all the way through. Right?
There are some darker isekais, but generally, it's a power fantasy. The original classic is a guy is like “shut in video game nerd dies and gets transferred to video game world where his video game nerd knowledge makes him a god.” And that's like the power fantasy. If you are, in fact , a shut-in video game nerd.
Max: Right.
Django: And so, so basically, this is the fantasy of going to another world where your effort and the things that you think are important are acknowledged by the universe. That is the Isekai fantasy .
Whereas in real life, the things you think are important, the adult world doesn't care, and the effort you put in seems pointless.
Max: It's an interesting contrast.
Django: It comes from like a darker sociological place, I think.
Max: Yeah, I see where you're coming from. I could try to give it a more positive spin.
Django: It depends on the show, obviously. Like, again, you know, there's been a million of these.
Max: Sure, sure. But I guess, part of the journey of adulthood is seeking out the ways in which the weird nonsense that you're obsessed with intersects with the world in which you find yourself and over which you have very little control.
It's rarely like, oh, great, my obsessive Zelda trivia knowledge is now the only meaningful superpower in the universe, the way that it sometimes ends up being in Isekai.
But you can still find a place as an adult that allows you to well, I don't know, professionalize your familiarity with the obscure 1970s science fiction or whatnot.
Django: Well, and I actually think some of the older Isekai, the sort of granddaddy is Sword Art Online, which is much more ambivalent about the alternate world because they're like, literally trapped there on pain of death?
Like, it's a virtual world, but it turns out that hidden bombs are built into all the headsets and they can't leave.
Max: Oh, geez. *laughter*
Django: That's the premise. And when he does eventually escape, like his experiences there have made him like cool and awesome.
Max: All right.
Django: In real life.
And so that's, you know, that's a, that's a more interesting take, whereas the more recent Isekais are more on the veins of like, like, I got transported to a fantasy world and the gods gave me the power to kill anything. And like, that's just it. Like, you just rump around the fantasy world, being awesome and hot chicks throw themselves at you, right? The formula has sort of tended towards that lowest common denominator.
Max: It's a really good point.
I've always appreciated the ones where, where like some random skill [becomes extremely important or broken]—the power you have is like, my perfuming skill is at 99 and you have to build an entire intergalactic empire based on your superior perfumery.
Django Well, and to sort of tie this back to Davi, the two that went into Davi, you know, the two anime, I pitched this to my anime friends as re:Zero X Spider.
And so re:Zero is the classic, he gets hit by a truck and transferred to the fantasy world, but it has a time loop thing so when he dies, he repeats. And the fantasy world is awful and he dies a lot. And it's really good.
The thing that kind of made me identify with it and use it in Davi is there's a point in the first series where like the problem with the time loop, it doesn’t—in re:Zero, it doesn't gloss over the fact that like he comes back from the time loop, he's like, “okay, I know what to do”, but then he has to convince other people to go along. And often he can't because they think he's a crazy person.
Max: Right.
Django: And there's a point at which he just like breaks down screaming at people saying, like, why will you not just do what you need to do so that we can all survive? Like, I hate you idiots.
And this is the feeling that kind of Davi gives me.
And then Spider is about a whole class full of people get reincarnated, but our protagonist gets reincarnated as like a monstrous spider and she has to fight for her life in a dungeon and eventually becomes an awesome monster. So that kind of becoming the bad guy.
And so it's the mashup of those two that gave us Dark Lord.
Max: I love it. So you're crossing two very power fantasy-heavy genres here, not just the isekai, but also the time loop, the sort of Groundhog Day “you know what's going on and where everybody's going” kind of thing. How did you think about that from the character perspective?
Because, I mean, you're right. There are a lot of stories that fit this general vein that are mostly about, look how awesome my life is now that I have omnipotent superpowers, but you're doing something more complex here, and Davi does have a strong arc.
Django: I mean, it's tough. Charter arcs are tough in both those genres, in time loop and in Isekai, because of exactly this power fantasy problem.
And so the way I solved it, I think, hopefully, if people like it, is from the Isekai point of view, this takes place kind of at the end of the power fantasy arc, right? Davi’s been here a long time. She's been living with this power a long time. As we actually see in the second book, when she can sort of acquire a lot of thaumite, she is in, in fact, super OP.
And so it's about, in some sense, what happens after that, right? When the time loop has gone from empowering to frustrating. Because that's also an element in a lot of time loop stories, you know, Classic Groundhog Day, time loop story starts with the person discovering that they're in the time loop and then freaking out, but then for a while, it's empowering, but then after a while, you're like, now I can't progress.
Max: Right.
Django: And so we start at the end of that story so that we can sort of actually engage with the themes a bit.
And then also, most of this story takes place within a single loop, because the biggest problem with time loop stories is stakes, right? Because if everything can reset infinitely, then like, why, what are the stakes? Like, why is this, why is any particular thing important ?
And so by kind of drawing that out and, you know, messing with how the time loop works so that it's more in the background than in the present of the story, that gives you more stakes. And it gives Davi’s character arc more weight, because the character arc is essentially the transition from the power fantasy character who sees everything around her as objects to like a normal human again.
Max: I love that. I was struck by how you moved in the second book from what I felt was a pretty difficult—how am I trying to say this? I was really curious where the second book was going to go, because a lot of the appeal and tension in the first book is generated from that time loop aspect.
We see Davi like running scenarios over and over again, especially in the first 20% of the book, you had a lot of fun with that. And the reader also has a lot of fun with it or at least this reader did.
So moving further away from a reset point and investing in the character relationships that she's built on this particular loop felt like, “well, how's he going to handle this?” Where's the book going to go from there?
I was really impressed by how you made that the sort of central stakes issue for Davi, not just of, all my friends are going to die, or I I'm going to fail at my task, but I'm going to have to loop again, which will be the same things as all my friends are dying and I'm failing at my task.
Django: Well, and that gets into the weird morality of time loops. Like, what is the moral standing of someone who has spent a year getting to know you and then you're going to reset them to the beginning? Is that moral? Like, can you do that? Is that ethical?
Max: Yes, yeah.
Django: It's not clear to me.
Max: You get a little bit into the consent issues also with, oh, I'm forgetting. Himbo boyfriend. To what extent, how can you talk meaningfully about consent and free will when you've known people through enough iterations of these particular circumstances that you can kind of play them like a push button game.
Django: Right. But, I mean, that kind of gets back to the sort of ending theme, the conclusion here is that like people have, the premise of the book is that people have a sort of fundamental core to their personality that can't change. For better or worse, right?
So our bad guy is unable to manipulate Davi into being the psychotic murderer that he wants her to be. But it also means that Davi is unable to get Johann to do exactly what she wants, that sometimes, you know, he's just fallen in love with someone else and there's nothing she can do about it.
Max: And that's an interesting central theme to have, in tension with the desire of a book for characters to grow and change. I do think that Davi is growing up over the course of these books, from a place of, I don't know, recognizably or an analogously depression.
Django: Yeah, and also sort of intense childishness, that feeling that nothing matters.
Max: Yeah, the sort of nihilism, um, of, I guess it's childishness.
Django: It's not childishness in the sense of like a five-year-old. It's childishness in the sense of like a 14 year old edgelord, who loves South Park and nothing matters and “everything is crap, man.” Davi is growing out of that position.
Max: This is something that I think is very cool about the setup. It’s not unjustified! She's encountered a continued stream of meaningless existence.
Django: Right. As so many of us do!
Max: Right.
It's it's very relatable—Not like I’ve never been stuck in a magical time loop, but—
Django: Not to get all like Camus on us, but like, you know, the construction of meaning out of meaningless existence is like the central question.
Max: Yeah, it's the point. I found myself thinking a lot about time loop stories as a parent of a younger kid. You know, there's a degree that we can—
Django: It does feel like a time loop!
Max: Got to do breakfast, go out, morning nap, then wake up, then we're going to go out to the playground again. Got to get lunch ready—especially during the pandemic!
Django: Well, also little kids, you know, and for, you know, for listeners, readers, whatever, I have a little kid. She's three. And they don't remember that well. Like, that's the interesting, that's an interesting thing to me: to a certain extent, they kind of live in this eternal present.
You know, she remembers a few things, but like the sort of detailed day to day memories of yesterday and the day before that we take for granted, they don't really have . At least not in a way that they can express. It's hard to tell what they actually remember.
But, so, you know, it is like that.
Max: Just you wait.
Django: Yeah, how old is yours now?
Max: Six now.
Django: Oh, man.
Max: He's tracking many fewer streams of data, is what we tell ourselves, than we are. So his picture perfect recall for times that we told him he could get extra ice cream…
Max: Yes.
Django: Well, she has amazing recall for some things, but we joke that she has like a canon of things that she talks about, like the time daddy went underwater and turned upside down and his toes came up or when I was playing with her in the pool or like the time she got into her finger paints and spread them on the wall and mommy and daddy came in.
The recording, unfortunately, cut off at this point, just as we were getting around to discussion of the parallel fantasy of the time loop: not obtaining mastery over your constrained circumstances, but growing beyond the limits that confine you to them. That part, I guess, is left as an exercise to the reader! At any rate, join us next week for part 2. Happy reading!