alt Hacker News> Like Le Guin, he believes that we must ‘fundamentally think about how we rebuild structures’, because those we are living under ‘are literally killing us … whether that be patriarchy or racism or the climate catastrophe.’
This is why the right is surging around much of the world.
A critique of lazy story telling somehow ends up declaring lazy story telling a genocidal act that is “literally killing us.”
Or maybe it’s just a bunch of movies pandering to an audience that wants to see more of the same and if you want to see something more innovative seek it out or make it yourself.
Racism and climate denial are both narratives, and people die because of them every day. (If you're not aware of how many people are already dying because of climate change, it's not because the facts aren't available to the curious and interested.)
Patriarchy is more complex. I dislike the feminist tendency to use it as shorthand for "Everything wrong with the world" - as if the world was naturally a utopia until patriarchs took over.
But there are certainly elements that are immensely destructive.
The point is that narratives define morality and self. If every movie you see features the Good Guy heroically struggling to kill the Bad Guy, that becomes the unconscious default narrative that defines your sense of self and your moral choices.
Which is why Main Character Energy is a real thing - and often not in a good way.
If you are exposed to a much wider range of plots, with more ambiguity, more complex outcomes, much richer and more challenging social relationships, and so on, you're less likely to believe that you can fix any problem with muscles, a gun, and some wisecracks.
I'll admit I don't think Le Guin manages to do this. I think she's very on-the-nose as a moralist - she's almost the anti-Heinlein.
And being a moralist is - ironically - very much a hero's journey trope itself, with the violence sublimated into words instead of weapons.