The Battlefield Man (Episode 22) Transcript

Hannah: "Santa's reindeer travel to the Vatican on a business trip to unite."

Jennie: Somebody write this.

Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This, where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea and then we brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.

Jennie: And I'm Jennie. And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Let's welcome Richie Norton.

Richie: Woo hoo.

Hannah: We're so glad to have you on the podcast.

Richie: Yes, me too. You guys are amazing, I love this. I'm already excited. I'm a little scared, I got to be honest.

Hannah: Oh, it's going to be so much fun. I'm so excited for this story. Before we get started though, let's give the listeners a little sense of who you are as a story reader, watcher, teller, or whatever it might be. Tell us a little bit about what kinds of stories or characters or themes do you really tend to gravitate toward?

Richie: Well, I might be different than many, I focus on whatever I want. I don't know what I gravitate towards, but I do like the hero's journey. And I'm typically writing nonfiction and I took a riding around creating lifestyle and entrepreneurship and those kinds of things. But I am a super fan of all things centered around how hard life can be, but how you can overcome. Rocky kind of stuff.

Hannah: Yeah.

Jennie: Nice.

Hannah: No, absolutely. As you work with other people to improve their own life story and improve their own journey, have you found that connecting it to fictional stories is also useful? How has that developed the way that you speak about this?

Richie: Yeah. As by way of a shared or common knowledge as a metaphor. One of the most helpful things to people is a metaphor and also a metaphor inside a metaphor. So we could be talking about XYZ and then say like I just did, Rocky. And all of a sudden-- I could have said Harry Potter, you know what I mean? I could have said any story, but immediately you and I have a shared understanding of what that might mean and what that looks like.

Hannah: I like that. Do you find that there are specific ones that people tend to use as descriptors of their own journey or as aspirational goals for themselves?

Richie: That's a good question. The classics are always there and then when you talk about what's new and relevant, it's usually some Avenger.

Hannah: Interesting.

Richie: You know, we like using these comic book heroes and things like that. I mean, you can always jump into Shakespeare. People are always plucking out characters here and there, you know what I mean? So that's a good question, is there one that people talk about most... Honestly Harry Potter comes up a lot. Probably because it's newer in the scheme of writing for thousands of years. But then, we'll just be honest, throughout history, it's been these religious, biblical, or whatever religion and texts you use. We've been using these people as ways to justify and or illustrate what our life is and what it might look like.

Hannah: I'm curious, for you do you feel there's a fictional character or a fictional story that has felt interwoven with your own journey?

Richie: Oh yeah. The first one that comes to mind is He-Man. I don't know, He-Man was really cool. Grayskull and stuff.

Jennie: Casually compares himself to He-Man.

Hannah: I've been seeing that meme go around where it's like "Name the four TV characters that you're most like." And then I had a friend who was like, "Okay, so there's a difference between the TV characters I'm most like and the ones that I want to be." And so I'm curious, if He-Man is one of those for you, maybe it's like, "Actually I do see this in me, or I want to be this aspect of him someday." Or if it kind of encompasses everything.

Richie: I think He-Man is probably better to say out loud than Spongebob Squarepants.

Hannah: Thank you so much. We're going to scoot on to the storytelling portion of this and come back at the end and give you a time to share some of the work that you do. As a reminder this is the story that we're fleshing out today. "Santa's reindeer travel to the Vatican on a business trip to unite."

Jennie: Fantastic to start with because in one sense, we all know who Santa's reindeer are, but on another, don't we really only know their names?

Hannah: I want this to be about one of the other reindeer that does not get a story.

Jennie: Like reindeer singular?

Hannah: It could be maybe two of them, maybe Donner and Blitzen. I guess my first question to help unravel this a little bit, is the "to unite" is really throwing me off. Is the business trip intending to unite something? I don't know. What are they trying to unite?

Richie: Wait, wait. I thought that Santa Claus was reuniting with his reindeer.

Jennie: Ooh.

Hannah: Maybe they're reuniting with Santa. At the Vatican?

Richie: They definitely got separated for some reason.

Jennie: Well, he is a saint.

Hannah: Yeah, it's true.

Richie: Now that's a good connection.

Hannah: We can bring in like the actual Saint Nicholas--

Richie: Saint Nicholas.

Hannah: --who's hanging out in the Vatican. Has Santa not been at the North Pole for several years? Has he been lounging around in the Vatican and the reindeer have been doing all the work?

Richie: Yeah. So St. Nicholas, the Vatican, that just makes sense. The reindeer, they're obviously not in the North pole anymore because that's where they work. But I think where they're from is actually Scotland. And so they're doing something and somehow somewhere they may have found a loop, a hole in the universe where times collapsed. And they ended up giving presents to children all over in the world of Avatar where the blue aliens are.

Hannah: Maybe there's a portal involved here somewhere in time travel. We have joked that we bring guests on partly because if it was just up to Jennie and I, we would just do sci-fi every single time. And this way-- we only get sci-fi about half the time this way, which is good. Last one we did wasn't sci-fi. This one might be. So they're on a business trip, they're going to the Vatican for business. Is the business just to get Santa back onboard, to get St Nicholas from his Vatican vacation that he sat on for far too long?

Richie: Actually I think if we're going only in this direction, we didn't know this about Santa, but he has to report to the higher ups as a Saint and he hasn't been very good. And all of his presents he's creating are turning into coal for other children, which is a problem because the children weren't bad. It was just some of the problems he's been having, so he needs to work that out. And the reindeer are angry because they're unionized and their union boss told them they had to go on strike. And some of them want to do it, some of them don't. They're afraid of the effects going could have on their children, they love Santa. They know it was a mistake.

Hannah: I love the idea that Santa himself has violated the naughty or nice thing.

Jennie: Yes.

Hannah: I love that. I kind of like the idea that he didn't tell anybody but he just disappeared and was like, "I'm going to go figure this out. I'm going to go to the Vatican, I'm going to report to the higher ups. I'm going to figure out what I need to do to fix this." And they have no idea, they don't know what happens. Santa just disappeared and they've been like, "Well, we got to keep doing the work." It could easily have been 50 years or something, like a really long time.

Richie: This story is epic. I mean, this could be equal unto star Wars. It has that eternal vibe where the principals here can just live on and be used to demonstrate all kinds of things in our lives. And Disney will pick it up eventually.

Hannah: Totally.

Richie: There'll be a ride there.

Jennie: Yeah. I'm wondering about the other saints involved. Is he buddies with St. Peter? Or St. Christopher?

Hannah: They're all hanging out in the Vatican?

Richie: Of course they are.

Jennie: What do they have to say about his behavior? And then,

Hannah: Has Santa been missing from the North pole since the days of actual Saint Nicholas? Saint Nicholas became known because he left the North pole and was out trying to do penance for his bad deeds. And it didn't work, so he disappeared again.

Richie: That's a great idea.

Hannah: So yeah. So they go to the Vatican on a business trip, they hear that Santa is hiding down there and they're like, "We need to get him back to Duke because we need him to be heading up this Christmas thing we're tired of."

Jennie: The world has changed, the wooden toys just don't cut it anymore.

Hannah: And maybe you can play into... Every Santa Christmas story has something about the problem of kids not believing in Santa anymore, that's a theme for so many of these. So maybe that's exactly what's happening. They don't really have a way to be like, "No, there totally is a Santa." Cause he hasn't been there in 150 years.

Richie: This is really good. Imagine the opening scene where it's actually a picture of closeup of it. There's an old man in these harsh conditions and then it kind of zooms out and you see it's actually his workshop there in full. But it doesn't look jolly, it actually looks fortifying. It looks pretty but mysteriously why is this? And we realize something happened when he was younger and he was banished there. And him going around the world is penance of somehow he has to give children presents to make up for whatever happens,

Jennie: I have never heard that angle before and I love it.

Richie: He's up to finish his term and he's going down there to talk them through it. But he's done so much good that he actually fell in love with the work and doesn't want to end it. And some bad guy takes the reindeer because the reindeer are his witnesses showing support that he did all the good things and he's ready to feel free to be out of it but still do it. And then it turns into this whole thing.

Hannah: It's the trial of Santa Claus, the reindeer are going to the Vatican to testify.

Jennie: So it's his parole hearing?

Hannah: Okay. So we have this beginning, I'm going to pause for a second to give us our randomly generated title. Our title is "The Battlefield Man."

Jennie: Whoa.

Richie: Is this still part of the Santa thing? Are we doing a whole new--

Hannah: It's still part of the Santa thing, we just have a randomly generated title for it. I'm assuming Santa is the battlefield man,

Jennie: Battlefield man. No, what if he used to be some ancient mythological God of war. And then his penance is being Santa Claus.

Hannah: Because he killed so many people.

Jennie: Well, what if this battle man was introducing a new character and this was the person that he's at odds with, because he definitely needs an enemy to push against. But obviously his enemy is going to turn out to be like a Mr. Miyagi, you know what I mean? Who actually was helping them out, they just got confused somewhere along the line.

Hannah: I was wondering if Santa has been trying to do penance all these years and never seems to make it out. Maybe it's because the battlefield man is still doing bad things, but framing Santa for them. And so Santa's reindeer go down to try to testify in his favor and.

Jennie: "We need to clear this up."

Hannah: Yeah. So maybe they're solving the mystery of all these things that he's being accused of doing, we don't think Santa would do that. We've seen how he's been genuinely wanting to do good for the children of the world. And then they find the battlefield man who could be an ancient or god or something like that. Who is just doing all kinds of terrible things and framing Santa for them,

Jennie: Or even the horse man war, if you want to go that direction.

Richie: But instead of being that, they're reindeer,

Jennie: The battlefield man also has reindeer, I like it. The Four Horsemen are actually reindeer men.

Richie: That's actually where it begins, that's what they were doing. They raised reindeer,

Hannah: Is one of Santa's reindeer a spy?

Richie: Of course,

Hannah: One of them is working for the battlefield man.

Richie: It has to be, because he has a red nose and the nose is lighting up. It's actually an antenna. It's sending signals

Hannah: Santa trusted him and put him at the head of his sleigh.

Richie: Yeah. You thought that the glowing was to the light the way, it was for an entirely other purpose.

Jennie: Yeah, it was saying, "Hey battlefield man. Here's where we are."

Hannah: So he could follow behind everywhere that Santa went and do something terrible to these children's homes.

Jennie: Like Jack Skellington, switching out the presents for creepy stuff.

Hannah: It brings to mind the rise of the guardians, which is this sort of fable take on the mythical creatures story, with this sort of darker undertone but still for kids. I like this as a weird Santa related mythos where you've got this character who is trying to undo all the good that he's been doing.

Richie: Well, there has to be a reason. Maybe it's not just revenge, it's fear that something will be found out. You know what I mean? Like there's a secret somewhere between these two. If Santa has to always be the good guy, but we're going to take him back as this is the hero's journey we were talking on, right? Something happened, he's doing his thing, he's overcoming and he falls in love with it. He has an adversary. So what do you call some kind of a battlefield man or something? And these two houses, they have to confront in some way, shape or form. And somehow the Vatican is either orchestrating this or approving or disapproving it. But somehow they're creating a structure and all turns out well in the end because children's still get their presents. And they are presents not coal, they're actually presence.

Hannah: I think the final battle has to come down to the reindeer. The reindeer are the central character, so it does have to come down to root of all leading the battlefield of mans,

Jennie: Well, no wonder they never let him play the reindeer games. He was a tattletale.

Richie: It could be there's this world of the reindeer too.

Hannah: Yeah.

Richie: And for better, for worse or somehow it's mutual. I mean, we're getting some Narnia stuff going on here, I think. But

Jennie: Mythologically I mean, didn't the goddess Diana, would turn into a deer. Only guess its a deer not a reindeer, but mythologically reindeer have a,

Hannah: They have a place there. They have extreme.

Jennie: Yeah.

Richie: Well look at it, now we have teams. Santa has his reindeer and now we're introducing a whole other host of reindeer from battle man.

Hannah: So Rudolph's red nose is not only a signal, but also they're the battlefield man's rude reindeer look different than Santa's reindeer. There is an actual different design and the nose is maybe part of a disguise. As long as he keeps the nose on, he looks like a regular reindeer.

Richie: What if battle man's reindeer all had red noses and we thought Rudolph was unique. He just really was one of them.

Jennie: Like this army of reindeer with angry red noses and it's really scary.

Hannah: I don't know, I think there are a couple of different ways it could go. It could be just supremely weird and silly, but I do think there is an undercurrent to the idea of Santa having this checkered past.

Jennie: Yeah.

Hannah: And trying to make up for it and over hundreds of years, still not being able to. There could be a darker fairy tale vibe to this that I think could be really interesting depending on this sort of good versus evil vibe.

Richie: It can go all kinds of directions. I think the premise though or the question that sets it up, why is Santa Claus in the North pole? And that this is some sort of banishment, it creates a whole new way of looking at Santa Claus.

Jennie: My mind is blown and I want somebody to make a story like this so much. And the potential for the deeper themes title and traditional theology even, since we're going to the Vatican.

Hannah: Yeah.

Richie: What blows my mind is that you threw some random things together that you thought would be interesting and funny, but somehow we actually connected the dots.

Jennie: Every time.

Hannah: That's my favorite thing about this.

Richie: Yeah. I mean, besides the blue alien people in Avatar, but the direction of the Saint to the Vatican. And then the North pole being way out there as a banishment, that's our story. I mean, it's stupid but it's awesome and that's something that someone literally could flush out there. You guys are rad, that was super fun. I don't know what happens now, but I'm still scared of what someone's going to do with this. But here we go,

Jennie: Well, this is where we tell our listeners, what is missing, you take over the story now and write something or draw something or record something.

Hannah: I want this to be a graphic novel, I think.

Jennie: Oh yeah.

Hannah: That's what I'm picturing. Sort of fairy tale, not quite gritty style, but something a little bit darker. A little bit more ominous and I think this can make a really interesting and lovely graphic novel,

Jennie: I agree,

Hannah: Playing out with these themes.

Richie: It's just one more thought, this for fun for someone if you type in. The reason I had the reindeer go to Scotland, I went to Scotland recently. And my wife's dream was to hang out with reindeer, so we went there and hung out with reindeer. We did this. I've also been to the Vatican, this is why I chose it, I thought, "Oh, I have some something interesting." You know what I mean? To think through, even though I didn't bring any of that up, I just thought of it in my head.

Hannah: Well, probably when you went to the Vatican, you didn't see Santa on trial for his life? With reindeer testifying in his favor.

Richie: It could have been in one of those paintings, somewhere there's a lot of Easter eggs. I don't know if they were telling us some of these things that may be the jokes that were written to some of these paintings. I was like, "Whoa," At the time, you know what I mean? Anyways, type it on Netflix, type in Scotland. I did this, we're sitting here in quarantine and not much to do, but there's still tons to do. I have to write, I like to have some background noise. I don't like it to be completely silent, so I have some background, there's nothing on. You've either seen it or you don't want to watch it, or you don't want to get invested in watch all of them for like 20 days in a row, there's all these things. I started typing in things by area. So I typed in Scotland cause I love it there so much. And all these really cool things are set in Scotland there. And it's not all, but like the old school ones talking about the past, there are always these battles of kingdoms or the fractions of one King. You get the idea that actually sets the stage for this.

Hannah: Cool.

Richie: Here's this thing reindeer supposedly were and are. Scholars trying to reintroduce them they kind of disappeared, something happens. They're in a battle, Santa's gets banished. But he's beholden to the Vatican beat or that structure, but it can make sense. And somebody said--

Hannah: You can draw from the legends we have and weave them together to make this kind of work. Yes, we are just at the end of our time talking about this. I think this is the time where we hand it over to our listeners, if you are inspired by this, I would absolutely love to see this,

Jennie: Yes, absolutely.

Hannah: New Christmas classic about Santa's banishment to North pole and attempt to clear his name. So before we wind things down, one of the things that we like to do is recommend stories to our listeners. I am going to start off and I actually am just going to recommend Rise of the Guardians. I think it's a really solid kid's movie, it was so much better than I expected it to be. The premise of it sounds like it's going to be cheesy and dumb. And then it ends up being actually this very lovely, very beautifully animated story about legends and about myths and about fear and about beliefs. And it's a lot better than people give it credit for, I think. So if this vibe that we ended up with on the show if this story sounds interesting, I definitely suggest checking out that movie. I think it connects. Jennie, what would you like to recommend for our listeners this week?

Jennie: I'm driving a complete blank, hold on.

Hannah: That's okay. We'll give you a second.

Jennie: Because I was going to do Rise of the Guardian. 

Hannah: Another Christmas favorite? A Vatican favorite.

Jennie: Actually, well, I guess I'll recommend in the lines of, if you haven't seen this yet, why not? You need to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is a beautiful movie and the other fun part of it is that you can watch it from October to December, because it's also a Halloween movie. It's a gorgeous little story with some beautiful musical numbers and the gorgeous animation and the creepy beauty Tim Burton always brings to his creations. And it's one of my favorite movies. So go watch a Christmas movie in August. What are we doing?

Hannah: I guess when this comes out it'll be September, it'll be closer. We're getting in preparation for October. Okay. Alright, Richie, we're going to let you offer one as well. It does not have to be a dark Christmas one, that's just what we happen to do. So maybe an old favorite something you keep coming back to a new favorite whatever you want, the story you want people to check out. Okay.

Richie: If we're talking movies for a second, anything Claymation from the sixties and seventies. If we were going to talk something adjacent to less Santa Claus and more just maybe the mystery around these types of things, this is going to be tied into like Da Vinci code or something like that, you know what I mean?

Hannah: Yes.

Richie: This one is those hidden gems that Saint Nicholas has something to do with for some reason. Or maybe we get really crazy and say that Santa is a horcrux, you know what I mean?

Hannah: So many stories that have connections to this one.

Richie: But if I were to totally break from what we're talking about now, one would be As A Man Thinketh. Very short classic, that'll just change the way you think, the way you look at the world and who you are and who you're becoming. And then a favorite of mine that literally has nothing to do with these things but it completely changed my life, is by a guy named Muhammad Yunus. I believe he won a Nobel prize. He invented or created a model to help women work their way out of poverty. And he's been doing this for decades now, I believe. And the book's called Banker To The Poor and it's just a fantastic real life way of seeing people under some of the most extreme conditions, working through systems that actually work and support. And anyway aside, I love that kind of stuff working your way out, because it's hard to compare, but life's hard. Yeah.

Hannah: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for those recommendations. All right. Before we go, Richie, go ahead and let our listeners know how they can find your work. The stuff that you're working on, where can they find you?

Richie: Well, if you want to learn more about He-Man and Rudolph, you just go to richienorton.com and all the resources you could ever imagine are right there.

Hannah: We'll make sure and include the link in the show description so people can go check you out and see the work that you're doing elsewhere.

Richie: Very cool. This was thrilling to say the least. You guys are amazing. That was excellent, super bizarre, but--

Jennie: We're glad you had fun.

Richie: --it was actually really fun. So thank you.

Hannah: That's our goal. I said that on the last one, we just want the guests to have as much fun as we are with this bizarre concept.

Richie: It's a good time. And what you've done is really cool because having those kinds of brainstorming sessions, no risk, no judgment, are rare. And writers, we're all kind of huddled up doing our own thing alone, kind of like Santa and the North pool, although more than we imagined. But what you've created online, I feel like people are able to participate with us, even though they're listening and can create their own. Anyways, you guys created something super unique and creative. I applaud you for that. At least I've never experienced that before. That was amazing.

Jennie: Thank you,

Hannah: Thank you. We really appreciate that. I think we do have something different here than a lot of other podcasts and a lot of other storytelling options that I love. I do love the collaborative nature of it. Not only us, but I love when we get people sending in stuff that they've written it's based on these. That's one of my favorite things, feel like, "I was inspired. I did this."

Jennie: We have so much fun every time.

Richie: If you talk to, as you have, any author almost always, they'll tell you their best ideas came from stupid ideas, you know? And my last book was called the power of starting something stupid, if you're doing something that already exists, people already know, how's that smart cause smart's already been done? The smartest things are things that haven't been done by generating stupid ideas that become the new smart.

Jennie: That's right,

Hannah: Nobody has yet written a story about Santa's reindeer traveling to the Vatican on a business trip.

Richie: Oh my gosh.

Hannah: All right, folks, that is our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod. And if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a story or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Hannah: We will be back with another episode in two weeks. We'll see you then.

Jennie: And as they say, "He who likes a thing, will mention it often."