🎙️ Welcome back to The Mythic Mic Podcast, where sometimes the best fantasy stories don't need heroes at all.

This week, hosts Bethany Amanda and Sara Santillan sit down with V.E. Schwab to discuss Victorious, the long-awaited conclusion to the Villains trilogy, a series Victoria describes as Magneto and Professor X meets The Secret History and a toxic college bromance where superpowers definitely don't make you a superhero.

From the book that helped save her writing career to the finale she waited eight years to be ready to write, Victoria takes us behind the scenes of Villains, her intensely precise creative process, and nearly two decades of building a career by refusing to stay in one lane.

⚡ What if superpowers didn't make you a superhero?
🖤 How do you end a series readers have spent more than a decade fighting for?
✍️ And what happens when you realize you aren't the right version of yourself to write a story yet?

If you love morally gray characters, superpowers, toxic friendships, villain stories, dark academia, complicated rivalries, obsessive characters, and fantasy that makes you question exactly who you're supposed to root for, this episode is for you.

🔥 IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK ABOUT:
✨ Victoria's journey from poetry to novels and why she believes you don't need to be published to take yourself seriously as a writer.
✨ How a poetry background shaped her obsession with rhythm, precision, metaphor, and making every sentence earn its place.
✨ Why Victoria spends months outlining before drafting and how she preserves the beauty of a first draft without relying on the dreaded “garbage draft.”
✨ The realities of publishing even after nearly two decades in the industry, and why Victoria says no one ever truly figures the business out.
✨ Why writers are the one truly original ingredient in their stories and the importance of writing for yourself instead of chasing trends.
✨ The origin of Vicious, the canceled series and career uncertainty that pushed Victoria to stop writing what publishing wanted and create the story she wanted to read.
✨ Victor, Eli, near-death experiences, manufactured superpowers, and Victoria's original experiment: could she write a book without heroes and still make readers root for someone?
✨ Why Vicious was never an overnight success and how years of reader word-of-mouth transformed a small first print run into a fiercely loved trilogy.
✨ Why Victoria waited eight years to write Victorious and how she knew she needed to become the right version of herself before she could finish the story.
✨ Saying goodbye to Villains, writing the ending backward, and why Victorious feels like both the end of an era and a love letter to the readers who kept the series alive.

CONNECT WITH US

🎙️ The Mythic Mic Podcast – @MythicMic
👤 Bethany Amanda – @BethanyinFantasyland
👤 Sara Santillan – @the_magical_quill
📚 VE Schwab – @VESchwab

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