alt Hacker NewsThe Hero’s Journey is useful as a writing tool, but imo it is also a lens through which we analyze stories (once we learn about it). My feeling is that _any_ story can be cajoled into matching the hero’s journey with enough imagination. For this reason, I’m not as concerned about the limited palate — i think it says more about our perspective than about the story itself. It’s like complaining that we’re missing out on math because we learn numbers in base 10. Consider this example:
“I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
Is that really constrained by the hero’s journey? Or is it just that communication discusses dilemmas and resolutions, and these can be fit into our stereotypical hero’s journey?
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Reminds me of another frequently poasted/discussed story arc classification attempt where the author basically draws some graphs that look like "down-up", "up-down", "down-up-down", "up-down-up" and so on. Well after a down you must have an up and after an up a down, if you aren't planning to quantify things...
Though I agree with you to an extent, the hero's journey includes an element of inner change in values or moral disposition. That, and not the subject's situation (or GPS coordinates), is what makes it the hero's journey.
Be as it may, I'm not a fan of this element, because it assumes that every hero worth following is morally lacking to begin with and that that's the only thing worth writing about. First, the inner world of a well-crafted character can be so fundamentally alien to any reader that its discovery can fill any number of pages. Second, and more importantly, focusing on the accidental faults of an individual person while neglecting commentary on the vices of the world at large is asinine. It also gets very tiring as you age, because you keep reading the same story for decades.
The good news is that, in many novels (and certainly in mine, check for example "When Ra Rows through the Gates of Duat"), that inner change is elided. The character's situation changes; they may completely step out of GPS range, but they remain fundamentally the same person. The conflict can be about creatively making do in an imperfect world.
This is one of the more insightful comments in the thread.
> “I was hungry (call to action), so I went to Filipe’s to get a sandwich (transformation, now bearing sandwich) (Return is implied, I’m no longer at Filipe’s)“
That’s the version of the Hero’s Journey used in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.