Yeah, I got disabused of that notion a couple years ago–still a good read tho.
The target audience of the monomyth is, like, “boomers that are into philosophy”, I think (like my dad, lol). It ticks all the boxes:
- it “makes sense if you think about it”;
- it doesn’t really question our[1] cultural superiority;
- it’s vague enough that you can make it your pet theory and never be wrong.
I guess what changed for me now is that I went from “I mean if you’re not too prescriptivist/dogmatic about it, it can be useful yadayada” to “lol trash lmao” /shrug
“Western Civilization” or w/e. ↩︎
: We did a myth minor in college and completely forgot that this is still a thing people take for granted, oops. I don’t remember the exact level of vitriol, but it wasn’t well liked at all.
My general understanding of the Hero’s Journey, without actually reading into it but rather just what people say, is that much like “Show, Don’t Tell” it can be used as a tool, but a tool is only as useful as the situation requires, and aren’t universally good. So making a story about someone refusing the call or going on a road of trials can be perfectly valid, as long as you don’t try to cram every single other “rule” into it, much like if you want to Show and not Tell, it can be good, but there’s no reason why Tell, Don’t Show can’t work either
And then we also have all the other colonizer, sexist, heteronormative baggage, I guess
To think this al could be avoided if Campbell included “Nort a boy” in the steps
i think i only ever heard about the hero’s journey in youtube videos about movie scripts and finding out the source text lays it out as a random ass list of 20 vague steps that are supposed to solve every myth ever is not surprising but very funny. thanks for this one george.
Monomyth guys are really funny to me because their ranks include information visualization maestro Jordan Peterson
This article is great! Read it a bit ago and had to not like, squeal in delight at such a good takedown cause i was on the train.