I don't know what compelled me to do this.
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I don't know what compelled me to do this.
I teach a course called Character Design and Development, which I created from scratch and pitched to the university. They granted me the course, and it's been pretty popular.
I teach from the ground up, including character psychology (Jungian stuff) and the Hero's Journey, but I've had a hard time finding a graphic that really works for me, because I teach from the source material (The Hero With A Thousand Faces), and I teach all 17 stages, focusing on its intended context: mythology and psychology.
Anyway, I created my own graphic, fit for purpose. Below is the transparent version.
Joseph Campbell (Part II) Monomyth
I haven't seen a good critical analysis of Campbell's work, but I'll give you an overview after crawling through his work that spawned the "Monomyth" which the majority of authors who preach "The Hero's Journey" have never bothered to read through otherwise they would have flagged most of the items pretty hard.
CW for Campbell: Pro-Imperialism, media imperialism, racism (massive racism), sexism/misogyny, pro-Christian violence, pro-missionary work, adoptism, antisemistism, WTF Christian fuckery of the Bible doesn't say that, and some academic fuckery. Most of this I've confined to the analysis section so you don't have to put up with it the entire post.
Background on the text:
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES [Link to original text] was originally published in 1949 and was wildly successful. For those who have been following my story structure series:
This is after Freytag, Polti, Brecht (though before Brecht got picked by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber), Lester F. Ward (the sociologist), Franz Boas (the father of Anthropology) [These two social scientists become relevant later], Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, Joseph Esenwein, Kenneth Rowe [Plagiarist of the previous two], Percy Lubbock, Lajos Egri, Rev Jesse Ketchum Brennan, and Elias Lieberman and more importantly after the establishment of the Delphian society, which will be relevant also later.
An analog would be J.R.R. Tolkien, who roughly lived around the same time as him, but doesn't seem to have the same ideological approach as Joseph Campbell. I'm not saying Tolkien was "perfect", but if Brecht is very against imperialism and talks a lot about how he hates it, Tolkien is closer to Brecht, especially later than Joseph Campbell, though Joseph Campbell is nowhere near the problematic figure that genocidal Freytag is, he is still skating a little too close to fascism for me especially considering he wrote after WWII and persisted in these beliefs long after. (People sometimes forget that Tolkien was also a folklorist, which is why I'm making this ideological comparison, so one gets a sense of contemporaries so we're not stuck with the old phrase, "it was the times." It was not the times. Sometimes people are ideological AHs.)
This is before the first publication of Syd Field and of course Save the Cat, so "beats" doesn't apply in this context.
Background on me:
I have a BA in anthropology with a minor in comparative lit. Overall, I'm a nerd who has extensively loved story for pretty much my entire life and has read/watched stories from different places and I have a thing for reading folklore, especially from own voices.
Ideologically, I lean more towards Historiography, multiculturalism, own voices, anti-colonialism, and a multi-modal approach to critical analysis. I also read mostly the primary work, but tend to put it into the framework of the author's time at the period they wrote it, but also tend to make corrections in the longer arm of history.
I don't like the idea I have to believe someone just because they heard it from somewhere and one has always done it this way. I want to understand the how and why.
I did watch Joseph Campbell as a kid, but after reading Indigenous folktales, (mostly West) African folktales, various regions of Asian folktales, I was sorely disappointed with his analysis and reliance on Arthurian Myth.
Background on Joseph Campbell
He lived from March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987 and was trained in Medieval folklore. He got his degrees from Dartmouth College Columbia University (BA, MA). He mainly grew up in NY.
From what I gather reading through his larger work, he was a raging pro-imperialist that ignored a lot of his contemporaries and advancements in sociology and social sciences, favoring much, much older social sciences. I covered this in the first post analysis of his work.
(from Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell (written before 1963, this is after the coining of the idea of multiculturalism in 1957.)
The two names you need for Joseph Campbell's ideological framework are: Sir. James G. Frazer (1854-1941) [from work dating from 1890's] and Sir Leonard Wooley. He has a penchant for choosing let's say, problematic figures for his lines of proof. For example, he chooses Clement Wood:
My take of Jaune has always been that he and Oscar are answers to the question of, "What if the standard male fantasy protagonist archetypes were secondary characters or protagonist adjacent?"
Made a post about it with Oscar but with Jaune, it does feel thematic with how the narrative seems to eschew the lone hero archetype or the zero to hero template.
i adore how RWBY handles its male characters. They're consistently shown as in the wrong for that kind of Great Man mindset, and its shown very frankly for how toxic it really is. My upcoming fantasy drama KnightStones is tackling that issue is well (shameless plug).
Also, great article on it!
Calum Cooper writes a deep dive exploration into RWBY’s themes of unified feminism and the toxic masculinity found within lone hero archetyp
This is something I have been thinking about a lot since Bobby's death in 8.15 with wondering who the next Captain of the 118 will be. I did briefly touch on the Hero's Journey in regards to 9-1-1 in this post. Because of that I've decided to sit down and write this meta breaking down how even though 9-1-1 is a procedural, at it's core it follows the literary device of the Hero's Journey, particularly as it pertains to Chimney, Hen, and Buck.
You can read the full meta bellow under the cut, or for a slightly easier read you can find the full meta broken down into chapters on my AO3
One year on from Full Moon: A Prince, a Princess, and the tether-cat principle.
About a year ago, that episode of helluva boss dropped, and the fandom lost its shit so hard we’ve collectively not got it back yet.
In the immediate aftermath, there was a lot of hate channelled towards Blitzø, and then a backlash towards Stolas to try and balance it out, and he fandom has been collectively fighting about it ever since.
About a year ago, we got the finale to Hazbin and in the last four episodes the confirmation that Vaggie was indeed an angel and had been hiding it from Charlie all along. People by and large nodded that their fan theories were correct, and moved on. The lack of communication and openness and honesty between Charlie and Vaggie caused tension for exactly one episode, and then it was over. This is despite Charlie and Vaggie having a far more one-sided power dynamic that Stolas and Blitz socially, economically, and in terms of supernatural power-scaling stuff.
This is not a flaw, this is not me criticising Charlie, I love her she’s such a good egg, not me criticising Hazbin this is not me attacking the fandom. Because I don’t think that these two wildly different takes were accidental: Charlie and Vaggie were not written to have fandom drama, whereas I think Blitzø and Stolas were, and this is not a bad thing, because here’s the thing…
Philosophically, Hazbin and Helluvaboss are very different beasts:
Hazbin is about if it is posable for people thrust into in the worst posable situation, hell, to pull themselves out: it’s optimistic, and it is a comedy-drama centred on redemption.
Helluva boss, is about if people born in the worst posable situation, hell, can keep going and still have full lives. There is no redemption in this show, nor could there ever be. It is a dark comedy/drama about the journey, but with no destination. It’s very premise invites a more cynical reading of it’s characters. And then there’s the other thing…
Season one Stolas fucking sucks.
As a charicter, I love him, go, my beloved thirsty owl-dad! But as a person, He’s an entitled whiney rich snob who quite openly objectifies Blitzø, won’t even use his real name, and takes full advantage of the transactional nature of their relationship even when it’s making Blitzø uncomfortable. He's abusing his postion of power, and what's more he's writern to keep him at arms lenght from the audiance.
Where Charlie is written to present as a happy 20’s something north American queer woman (despite being at least two hundred, and not from earth let alone the Americas), something that makes her very approachable to the shows mostly American, mostly female, largely queer audience, Stolas is intentionally written to come across as an older out of touch posh pseudo-British royal, something that immediately makes him unrelatable to the target demographic.
Where Charlie and Vaggie relationship is shown in a fairly sweet, and for this show, remarkably chaste way from day one, Stolas is introduced as a complete freak into some fairly hardcore bdsm and or non-traditional use of jelly sandwiches. The fact Vaggie is Charlie’s business partner at the hotel and thus 100% economically dependent on Charlie is intentionally never brought up, whereas the class and economic difference between Stolas and Blitzø are agonised over in exhuastative detail, mostly by Stolas and Blitzø themselves. This is of course intentional: Pilot Stolas was a villain, season one Stolas was a secondary character largely there for Blitzø to angst over and to belt out the best musical numbers in the show. We’re probably not supposed to like season one Stolas, and criticisms that he was abusive and economically controlling are bang on the money, even to die-hard Stolas fans like me.
But here’s where it got interesting: the widescale fandom hate for Stolas only started after the character changed for the better. So what gives?
In episode one of season 2, Stolas breaks. He realises his relationship with Blitzø that he’s constructed in his head is “A comfortable lie, and rather that going on with that comfortable lie indefinitely, which he absolutely could, he chooses to confront it even if it hurts him. He ideally starts researching Asmodian crystals, he immediately finalizes his divorce, he begins planning to break, and, he hopes, re-forge his relationship with Blitzø. He realises “If he’s only here as a prisoner, what kind of monster does that make me?” and commits to substattive internal change even if it hurts him.
And it does hurt him. He suffers to make a change for the better… But it also invited fan analysis of his actions thus far a scrutiny of the character he wasn't getting in season one. He stopped being a joke character love interest, and started becoming the second most important character in the show and thus the fandom, and this triggered debate on if this character development was earned. (This is also why i think that Stolitz and Huskerdusk are such popular ships, Blitzø, Stolas and Angel get by far the most time for charicter growth).
And then he does it again in Mastermind were he fully commits to granting Blitzø freedom even if it kills him, and for it he is humiliated on live TV and suffers a crushing setback to all his relationships and the loss of prestige and power.
Charlie, actually does the exact same thing: upon seeing the extermination heaven wages upon hell, she resolves to use her position of power to fix this, even if it hurts her. Like Stolas, she goes on live TV, to plead her case on the TV news, and is ruthlessly mocked for it, destroying any chance of success her hotel might have had until Alastor steps in as a patron. She faces her own mockery and (minor) de-powering.
So why are these two Deeply flawed royals treated so differently by the shows fandoms when they are so very alike?
I honestly think it’s because Charlies dark night of the soul where she resolved to change for the better happened in the first seconds of the pilot. We never get to see a version of Charlie who wasn’t like this, and thus this invites no debate or scrutiny of her actions. We never get to see her first date with Vaggie or the arkwad early bits of their relationship: they’re an established and reasonably heathy couple, doing the right thing, from episode one. It takes Stolas nearly two full seasons to get to that point, and we get to see every awkward, bad and cringe moment of his journey in excruciating detail. In what I think is some of the best writing in both of these shows, Charlie and Stolas start at almost opposite points of Joseph Campbell’s heroes journey circle, and move in parallel to each other
Charlie, in defiance of convention, starts at the Abyss, goes though transformation and atonement (the Masquerade and Dad Beat Dad episodes), transformation (Welcome to Heaven) return/the Gift of a Goddess (Vaggie with Carmine’s weapons, Rosie with her cannibal army) and right at the end reluctantly heeds the call to adventure with the “I must be ready for this” musical number in “The Show must go on”, and so ends the season with the supernatural help (Lucifer) Threshold guardians (Lilith) and mentors (Alastor) that the hero normally starts the journey with. Charlie ends season one at the traditional start of the hero’s journey, ready to repeat it for season two.
Stolas, however, starts the show in a position of supreme power and comfort at the usual start of the hero’s journey, then eagerly leaps at the call for adventure (sexual freedom) and immediately plummets into the unknown facing trials and temptations (jelly sandwiches, explaining his new relationship to Via, Striker and Stella trying to kill him) , and as his first same sex lover, Blitzø takes the mentor role, and to no-one’s surprise it goes badly for both of them and these adorable morons are too traumatized to communicate their needs clearly or effectively (mood) . He comes out as a gay man, and like all too many gay men (particularly those who come out later in life) is ostracized for it and loses his biological family over it. He dives right off the top of the hero’s journey diagram and he ends season two in the Abyss, facing his long night of the soul. Charlies hero’s journey is the upward swing, ending on a victory, inviting praise, and we never see a version of her where she wasn’t like this. Stolas’s is an all to relatable dumpster fire where he starts unlikable and controling, and ends broken. Ironically, for the show about redemption, Charlie doesn’t change or grow that much as a character. Ironically, for the show about pushing on and just surviving hell, Stolas (and Blitz) does.
This, is where the dreaded Tethercat principle kicks in, and I think this is why the Stolas hate has gone on for so long.
Gary Larson wrote a lot of Far Side comics, and most of them were fucking weird and often quite dark, bu none of them none of them got so much hate or so many complaints.... as Tethercat.
He thought it was just a fun joke about how dogs find joy in chasing and tormenting cats, but the number of complaints this got was far more than his comics that involved cannibalism, death, people being either alive by snakes or ants.. the works, and in an interview, he said he thinks he knows why this one upset people: because this is a single panel comic, we have no frame of reference for before or after this moment. There is no depiction of the cat before it was being tormented like this, none after. No evidence that that cat has ever known an existence that wasn’t this awful torturous existence.
What he realised with Tethercat is that the first and last time you see a character defines their existence in the minds of the audience: we assume that they have always been this way, and always will be this way, until we’re shown new information to the contrary. It doesn’t matter how much character development a character gets or if or how their reality changes, it’s their first and last moments on screen that set audience expectations.
Charlie is first shown making a substantive change for the good, and last seen as a victor.
Stolas is first shown as a creepy rich bellend, and last seen as a broken husk of himself admitting fault.
And so, until we get another season and see the wheel of the hero’s journey turn, that’s were those characters are canonicaly stuck at as far as the story goes, even if the charciters have compleatey changed during the course of the journey thus far. (Also the show' and Stolas's popularity jumped at that time making them easy targets so that probably had something to do with it) Anyway it's just a fun cartoon show, love to you all and I hope you have a good pride.
SCENE DISCUSSION: What could have been a good rebuttal to Jaune's individualist rant of self-doubt and striving to be the lone hero who saves everyone in "Jaunedice, Part II" that retorts that in the world of Remnant, only by community and teamwork will everyone survive the Grimm and forces of evil?
We all know the rant - "I don't want help! I don't want to be the damsel-in-distress! I want to be the hero! I'm tired of being the lovable idiot, stuck in the tree while his friends fight for their lives! Don't you understand?! If I can't do this on my own... then what good am I?!". To me, this is the individualist and hurtful manhood subscriber's defense of wanting a more adult hero who is lonely yet saves his friends, gets all the women, takes down all the bad guys all on his very own. They feel that being a part of a team or ever needing help from anyone is sort of them being babied by the feminine authority figures in their lives. For their own validation and to improve their own self-esteem, they are desperate to at least put up the image of never for any reason needing or wanting any help. So that they don't have to live with some terrifying image of themselves as a burden. Must be why they want to reject heroic team-based media.
But it makes me wonder - as a fan of Super Sentai, Power Rangers, Sailor Moon and numerous other heroic team-based media such as our own RWBY; what could Pyrrha have said as one of her own gentle and friendly yet firm rebuttals of this toxic way of thinking? That could maybe carry over some of the talking points of Jessie Gender and Maggie Mae Fish's deconstructions of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth (in pedantic terms the Hero's Journey that influenced and or guided Star Wars)? That one must never put everything - especially the weight of the world - on your shoulders alone and for anyone to think that one person alone should be able to fix everything is foolish and only teaching others to be betrayed? That the status quo of wanting an individual hero will not protect everyone today and together will all the people of Remnant survive or thrive to build a new and better world? SOMETHING to break toxic individualism!
Deconstructing the Chosen One Narrative
As announced yesterday, I want to talk this week about "The Call to Adventure" and "The Chosen One". And mind you, while I have a lot of problems with the second trope, the first one in of itself is harmless. While in Campbell's telling the "Call to Adventure" will come from Fate or a god or a higher power, as writers we have long decided that the Call to Adventure can be something the main character just decides they have heard before they start their adventure.
However, the Chosen One narrative is a bad one. A really bad one.
Ironically, I was raging against this trope when I was 11. I had not heard of Campbell, but I knew the concept of "The Chosen One". And oh boy, I hated it. For one simple reason: It kinds took a lot of agency away from the characters. Which is, yes, reason number 1 why this is a dumb trope.
If you play "The Chosen One" straight as a trope, the hero saves the world, not because of their courage, or their will, or anything, but because it was their destiny to do so. They literally never had a choice about it. Neither on whether they would begin the adventure, nor whether they would fail. It was all kinda destined to happen, and that... kinda sucks.
As you might be able to guess, my first contact with this difference was Digimon. While in Adventure/02 the kids are "erabareshi kodomo", so "Chosen Children", the kids in Tamers just decided they wanted to have Digimon, and when they had Digimon decided to use them to save the world. The difference in agency within their stories is very notable because of this.
But of course, there are other issues, too.
See, our media at large tends to revolve indeed around chosen, special people with powers. The one who is special. Be it Star Wars, Marvel or DC. Their heroes tend to be super special people, who do super special things they can only do because of their super specialness. Sure, technically there are no gods involved in the "choosing" most of the time, but... They are still super special people.
And there is a reason that media in our capitalist hellscape latched onto this. (Yes, if you thought you will get a week on this weblog without me ranting about capitalism... alas, I must disappoint you.) Because if the people wait on the CHOSEN ONE they will not get tempted to do shit themselves.
Heck, I would argue that the reason that Elon Musk managed to get hismelf into the position he is in now, is, that he very much tried to play into this trope. Of portraying himself as "the chosen one", who would save the world and what not. It was always a lie. (Yes, I will need to do this vent on why Enver Gortash is Elon Musk at some point.)
Basically, the Chosen One Narrative feeds us this idea, that only the special people can save the world, and not anyone else. But historically speaking it was always the normal people rising up that saved the world. Nothing else. (And yes, I know, you have probably been taught some version of Great Man history in school, which once more plays into this narrative. To which I will quote Wicked on you: "Oh Elphaba, where I am from we believe in a lot of lies. We call it history.")
However, as I noted yesterday: The Chosen One narrative is so pervasive in modern media, that you cannot tell a story that goes into Adventure, Fantasy or SciFi without engaging with it in some regard. Because your story will ALWAYS be read in the context of media landscape in which those stories almost always are following that trope. And this brings us to the deconstruction aspect of it.
Again, deconstruction of a genre or trope means, to remove it from the fantastic and bring it somehow into reality. Basically question: "If this was not a fantasy world following fantasy rules, how would this trope play out?"
Now, I know that most of you are not aware of my Urban Fantasy stories (I am currently publsihing part of it online, though: Mosaik), but in it I subverted the trope in two ways. Ways, that I notice now, are quite similar to how the Forgotten Realms deal with the trope.
In my Urban Fantasy world all gods that are to this day known by name are real. And all gods have their own chosen. How many chosen they have and how much power they have, basically depends on how many people believe in the god - because the deities power will depend on this. The lesser powerful a god is, the less power they get to share with their chosen. So yes, all gods have backups for their plans involving mortals. And also, they will usually send their chosen after the chosen of other gods, because deities tend to be petty. So yeah, the chosen are special and have powers, but also they tend to die. A lot. And no, revival while possible, is not common.
Heck, in Mosaik the main story eventually comes to play out, due to the main character - who at that point is not a chosen - deciding to do something about some shit that other chosen are involved. Yes, this eventually ends her up with Chosen powers, because a certain deity is very charmed by her disregard for her own life, but at the point she starts her journey, she is just a mortal, and on top of that disabled woman.
But of course, that is just one way to do it.
There are others ways. And those are the ways that I want to talk about for the next three days. Three tropes in regards to the Chosen One and their Call to Adventure, that I love and would like to see more off.
These tropes are:
Missed the Call
Refusal of the Call
Right Man Wrong Call
Though obviously there are even more tropes than that. :)
Have fun.