Mythic Quest: Poppy Li is an Asshole and I Love Her
A love letter to the losers, weirdos, and freaks that write the jokes, that make the games, that tell the stories that make life more worthwhile. Also, a personal milestone!
Today is the one monthiversary of In Poor Taste! (technically it was yesterday, but I haven’t gone to bed yet, so I’m pretending it’s still the monthiversary day) The whole point of this thing is to be emotional so I’m here to say that I am proud of myself for this little milestone! Thank you from the bottom of my heart if you read and/or subscribe to this little fan club where I get to yap about my favourite stories, art and music.
I spent a lot of time deciding what I should write about to commemorate this ✨momentous✨ occasion, and I realised it was the perfect time to write about one of my favourite characters on TV. Of course, this article? essay? spiralled slightly out of control, but I promise it’s a fun read 🤓
As always, spoilers! (and if you’re not subscribed, consider how much fun we’d have if you were 😘)
xoxo,
Solah
The best sitcom you probably haven’t watched yet, even as I longingly await the arrival of its fourth season, is Mythic Quest. A workplace sitcom set in a game development studio of a hugely successful fictional MMORPG called, you guessed it: Mythic Quest.
Mythic Quest is full of characters you could easily describe as terrible people. Ian (pronounced EYE-UN) is a raging egomaniac, Poppy is not much better. David has an inflated sense of purpose brought down by his sheer spinelessness while Brad is a sociopathic money-grubber. C.W is deeply problematic in a way you can’t take seriously because if you did you couldn’t be in the same room with him. Jo is pretty much a psychopath with unchecked rage issues and staggering levels of internalised misogyny and Rachel is—well, Rachel is annoying. The whole office is chaos-incarnate and toxic, and its leadership is co-dependent. It's a terrible place with terrible people. Basically, not very different from the average office.
This is not new in the world of sitcoms. The Office, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, Archer, Bojack Horseman, etc., I could go on and on about how objectively awful people make for very funny TV. They’re horrible but we love them anyway.
Maybe we love them because they’re like this, not despite.
Maybe it’s because these terrible characters represent the awfulness inside each of us. They say the things we might be thinking but know are wrong to say out loud. They’re selfish and cruel in the ways we can be in our own worst moments when we’re exhausted and angry and desperate. They’re callous in a way that’s uncomfortably familiar, protecting themselves with the kind of armour that sits heavy on our own shoulders.
Mythic Quest is a classic workplace sitcom, except when it’s not. The first few episodes of season one are charmingly neurotic and genuinely funny, a pleasant echo of the humour found in the McElhenneys’ iconic It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But right in the middle of the first season, we are thrown into a completely new world in the fifth episode, “A Dark, Quiet Death”. Starring Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti, it’s an indie romantic dramedy injected into the middle of a sitcom that has nothing and everything to do with Mythic Quest’s two main leads, Ian Grimm and Poppy Li.
Set in the early nineties to early aughts, “A Dark, Quiet Death” is a thirty-seven-minute saga that traverses the birth, life and death of an indie video game and the rise and fall of the relationship between its two creators. You laugh, you cry and at the end of season one, when Ian shows Poppy the office pillar with Doc and Beans’ whittled engraving, telling her he never wants to end up like them, it feels like a promise and an omen of the things to come. Mythic Quest very cleverly seems to spoil itself for you, creating even just a subconscious expectation about what’s going to happen, especially in relation to Ian and Poppy and their partnership.
But much of comedy is built on subverting expectations. It’s not actually that fun or funny to constantly watch people do exactly what you expect them to every single time. It gets old. You can build out a stock character with some unique quirks and play them for laughs, but at some point, you have to make them human. A lot of shows fail at this pivotal moment. They either turn maudlin, overly sentimental in a way that feels forced and unearned (The last season of Ted Lasso), or they back off too quickly, reverting to formulaic jokes that got old last season, unable to commit to something that means more than a punchline (The Mindy Project).
The best comedy shows aren’t afraid to take it there. Mythic Quest certainly isn’t. The show straddles the tonal line with careful precision. You need the comedy to shine through so that when the dramatic moments happen, they actually mean something. When Mythic Quest does drama, when they drop the mask and ask for vulnerability and intensity, it’s always earned. In season three, when Ian and Poppy’s bickering turns into not just real and mean fighting—which they’ve done before and always come back from—but honest and painful confrontation, it’s a sucker punch straight to the gut. The people we’ve depended on to be Ian&Poppy, whom we expected to always wear their carefully crafted masks, rip those masks off and show us their humanity. And they are so much grander in scope than the show seemed to set them up to be. They’re not another Doc and Beans. They never were.
Poppy Li is Such an Asshole and I Would Die For Her: Making Characters That Mean More
Poppy Li is an Australian expat and lead developer, then co-creative director of Mythic Quest. She is my favourite character on the show. She is such a fucking asshole and she’s the best.
As a surface-level thing, I will always be a supporter of women's rights and wrongs, so on principle, I love the concept of an asshole female lead. Even with the recent influx, I don’t think we have nearly enough of them on our screens. We’ve always had irredeemable female villains, but run-of-the-mill jerks are a rare breed.
Why is Poppy Li so likeable? I think sitcoms are the great equalizers. It views characters the same regardless of their apparent morality. I don’t mean that every character gets the same treatment, that would be very much impossible in crafting a cohesive story, it’s more that there isn’t a set villain or hero.
Sitcoms flatten the character hierarchy present in shows where there is “good” and “bad”. This, in turn, allows each character to be more than what they represent. This is vastly more reflective of how we genuinely live our lives and how most people really are.
We have these ingrained mental models when we watch or read stories, instilled in us from childhood through moralistic fairytales and classical paradigms. There is the main character who is the hero, so they’re inherently good and everything they do is viewed through this lens of goodness, even when they do bad things, while flattening everyone else into their narrative function. Their motivations and nuances disappear, and their humanity is snuffed out to support the overarching moral message.
And that’s something that Mythic Quest doesn’t do. Poppy can be an absolute nightmare, but I would never call her a bad person. I know too much about her and who she is and where she came from to make such clean-cut judgments. In a good sitcom, we see characters for who they actually are over what they’re supposed to represent.
Like I said, Poppy can be an awful person. She’s abrasive and rude and so full of herself. She hates how stupid people can be and isn’t afraid to make her distaste unknown. She never wants to admit she’s wrong and she can’t stand to lose any fight. She and Ian very neatly fill the role of The Genius Asshole. In fact, Mythic Quest’s cast of characters each falls squarely into a tried and true character archetype. Brad is The Cynic, Jo is The Bully, and Rachel is The Friend Nobody Likes. The archetypes are important because they establish behavioural expectations and each archetype plays a role in situational comedy that allows the joke to be fulfilled every time. Set up, punch line, repeat.
The key reason why Mythic Quest doesn’t ever get old is because the characters’ stereotypical attributes and archetypical roles are actually the least interesting parts about them. Creating a truly meaningful character is not about writing someone so entirely unique and special that they’re unrecognisable. It’s about creating someone who’s instantly familiar in their humanity. It’s creating a character that people see, and at first glance think, “Yeah, I know someone just like that”, and then with some time and reflection think, “Oh fuck, I am that guy.” It’s that progression that makes them more than just well-crafted characters.
This might be a bit of a distasteful leap, pulling a James Baldwin quote to explain a video game sitcom, but it is in the title of this Substack and nobody said it better than him:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
In many ways, none of us are unique. We like to think we’re special, like there’s no one else in the world that’s just like us and that’s true in some ways, but in so many of the ways that matter, we are all the same. We laugh when we hear a good joke, we cry when someone breaks our hearts, we get mad when we feel like something is unfair. We’re all just people, begging to be seen for who we truly are. For someone to make us feel real. Mythic Quest is really good at this, and it kind of feels like they’re pulling off some magic, making unlikeable characters so empathetic but what they’re doing is making their characters more, developing them into people that feel real.
The Freaks, Geeks, Weirdos and Losers—I Love You, I am You: S3E07, “Sarian”
At its heart, Mythic Quest is about what all my favourite sitcoms have been about. Society’s losers. The freaks and geeks (I am proud of this joke, nothing anyone says will change that) that nobody wanted to be friends with.
You have to remember that Mythic Quest is set at a video game studio in 2020. Ian is forty-four and Poppy is like twenty-seven and from their origin story episode, “Sarian”, they were both kids at a time when liking video games meant you were a weirdo loser who had no friends. You don’t ever stop being the weirdo loser without friends. Even when you grow up and become super successful and make your dreams come true at a scale so big you have people who are actually fans of you and your work, there’s always a part of you that’s ten years old without a single friendly face at school. You don’t ever forget that your parents never liked you the way that you really are. You don’t forget that you had to pretend to be somebody else to be worthy of love.
Comedy, and to a larger extent any art, is full of losers. I think our attitude toward people who aren’t commercially successful artists kind of says it all. Stand-up comedy is only a cool job when you’re famous. Saying you’re a creative writer somehow garners more derision than saying you’re unemployed. It’s not the art part that makes you cool, it’s the success part. And as much as artists love to talk about how much the work itself, the art itself matters to them (not a single word of which is a lie), artists are also inherently insecure. I don’t think I’ve met a single one who didn’t at some point in some way live and die on the approval and validation of others. Taylor Swift describes the inherent vulnerability of artists in her documentary and says:
We're people who got into this line of work because we wanted people to like us. ‘Cause we were intrinsically insecure, because we liked the sound of people clapping 'cause it made us forget how much we feel like we're not good enough.
And Jenny Slate said something about her anxieties around performing that I will never forget in her Netflix special Stage Fright:
…I am presented with this essential question which is, “Will they… will they like me?” And I know that they will once I start to talk, but I don’t earn the love unless I give something beautiful...
And that’s all Mythic Quest really is. A bunch of weirdos and losers and freaks doing whatever they can for acceptance. Because you never forget being ten or eighteen or twenty-five or forty-something or whatever age and realising that it is not enough to just be yourself. It’s a lesson you never forget. So you contort yourself into a hundred different shapes because eventually, someone said, “Yes, I like that”. You realised if you do these things, act this way instead of that, say these words instead of the ones that you feel inside and make yourself smaller or bigger or louder or softer then people see you and they like you and think you're cool and fun and not a weird little loser. You think, “Maybe they’ll never love me at my core but they’ll like this version of me”.
Honestly, we’re all just little aliens trying to find love and a place to call home.
Maybe you’re super well adjusted and have a stellar, unshakeable sense of self-worth so you would never ever change who you are to try and earn love and acceptance, but I have the sneaking suspicion that you’re more like me and know what it’s like to have debilitating anxiety around being enough for anyone, so I think you’ll love Mythic Quest and its band of losers and freaks.
And I want to say, it’s not really about excusing bad behaviour or humanising villains, it’s something a bit more radical. It’s an affirmation of self-worth. That people do not have to earn love and acceptance. People choose to give those things to you because you are who you are. That is the inherently healing effect of sitcoms like Mythic Quest in which these objectively terrible people find belonging.
By watching these shows you’re showing yourself a model of life where people at their worst, in their ugliest moments are still worthy of love. That you, at your worst moments have inherent value as a person. And that is super scary! Because you’re confronted with the reality that more often than you could ever expect, someone loves you in a way in which the unforgivable is forgiven. You are now redeemable, and you’re not actually a monster. The horror! Because maybe that means there’s someone you want to do better by. These characters find family in each other and in the words of The Little Prince, they’re all foxes that tamed each other. They’re responsible for one another now. And in the taming process, you make yourself a little kinder and more open because you want to be. Even though it’s really hard. You want to be a better person precisely because someone loved you even when you weren’t.
It’s providing the very motivation to be a little better, even when it feels impossibly difficult. It’s letting yourself love the entirety of who you are, even in the moments when you’re kind of an asshole.
Revisiting The Pandemic: S01E10, “Quarantine”
Mythic Quest premiered right before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They then released one of the best narrative depictions of the ensuing lockdown and quarantine life I have seen. I rewatched it just a few days ago and it was such a strange experience because I was reminded that the lockdown was a bizarre fucking experience. Nobody knew what to do or how to be and during this episode, neither do any of the characters of Mythic Quest in their virtual office.
The whole episode takes place on a computer screen, vignettes of Zoom meetings, FaceTimes, videos, texts and coding windows. It's an eerily accurate imitation of how so many people spent over a year of their lives. This is both a practical thing, (The lockdown meant that the Mythic Quest cast and crew couldn’t be on a set together), and a great visual emphasis of the episode’s themes of community and humanity.
One of the major reasons why this episode works so well is how much things didn’t change. The outrageous shenanigans continue and people don’t stop being who they are. Sue is constantly ignored, Carol gives out warnings for things no HR person should have to give out warnings for, everything is right in the world of Mythic Quest. Except it’s not. There’s a distinct strain, because things have changed, no matter how much everyone pretends it hasn’t. That contrast and the resulting tension is a painfully accurate representation of the unique stresses of the lockdown. This tension builds and builds until something—or in this case, someone—breaks.
One of the most emotionally poignant scenes to grace anybody’s screen was filmed on an iPhone in Charlotte Nicdao’s apartment. Poppy is unravelling over the course of this episode and when confronted with the end of a project she coded alone, in her room by herself, success is bitter and flat. So she hides further and further into herself and her work until someone who knows her better than she knows herself reaches out to her, even after all his other attempts to connect with her fail.
And Ian isn’t the exact type of person you’d picture as emotionally sensitive but that’s irrelevant. He cares about Poppy. She’s his closest friend and he loves her. When he calls her, that’s all that really matters.
For the whole episode, everyone is contained in their own box. Their little box on the screen, that butts up against all these other people’s boxes, an artificial intimacy that’s never really enough. Then, you finally see two people share a box. Ian leaves his FaceTime screen and enters Poppy’s as she opens up the door of her apartment and he is there. He’s really there. In a small vertical rectangle in the corner of a computer screen, you see two people save each other.
When Ian exits his box and enters Poppy’s, you’re suddenly pulled out of the established status quo where people only exist within a little two-inch, two-dimensional square. It’s a visual reminder that people are so much more than pixels on a screen. People aren’t flat images, They’re not just your idea of them, they’re real, just as real as you.
The ending of this episode is weird because, at any other moment in time, this whole virtual Rube Goldberg machine event would have felt incredibly cringeworthy. And it kind of is, but I do think that’s part of the point. It’s an homage to all the ridiculous stuff we did to stay connected to each other when we felt impossibly alone (Among Us has entered the chat). Watching sixteen small boxes on a screen trigger their mini contraptions in sequence is so fun, you can’t help but cheer along with them when it works. It feels good to do something so silly but take it so seriously with a bunch of other deeply silly people. Ultimately Quarantine is Mythic Quest at its best: A celebration of odd people and the weird community they built, even in all its awful imperfections.
God, I can’t wait for season four.
