The Hero's Journey is a Cult

[dreadlordmrson]

Watch on YouTube

My comment:
Pausing in the first few minutes to say:
YES. Frickin' finally, a take down of the Hero's Journey that I might be able to share with people to explain why it bothers me.
I'd been stuck with my own experiences and feelings about which, which are not fully coherant.
I always knew it couldn't explain EVERY story, but I kind of accepted at first that well, maybe it just explains MOST stories and the outliers are outliers?
But the more I saw people using it as an actual analysis tool for the stories I liked, the more it fell apart.

I was watching some video, years back, where someone was going something like, "this is a perfect example of how you can remove pieces of the Hero's Journey to make a stronger core narrative while still retaining the core vitality of the Hero's Journey."
And I found myself thinking... at what point in hacking away at the supposed Hero's Journey do you admit that it's not a Hero's Journey story any more? That it's something else? How far before you let go of the framework you're trying to jam the story into? When will you admit it doesn't fit right?

And more recently I've been finding myself watching writing advice videos in case there's something interesting or useful to me for my current project... only to run into the problem that a lot of things people treat as universal just... don't apply to the sort of stories I want to tell?
Advice on handling your villain? There's no villain character in my story. The closest to a villain we have exists off screen and we only know them by their effects on one of the main characters. And they get taken down off-screen through no action of our main characters either. They're a side note to the real story.
Advice on giving the character strong wants to help the reader "emphasize" with them? Neither character has strong wants at the start of the story. One because he's a bland everyman who's been putting off his desires because he keeps thinking he isn't prepared enough for them yet, and the other because they've been horrifically traumatized into not expressing their personality. The arc of the story is actually centered on character two learning to feel safe enough TO want things?

Anyway.
I'll actually watch the video now. XD

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...oh no manosphere stuff.

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Oh right the refusal of the call. Another point my current project immediately "fails" on. Because my main guy #1, Ren, at no point tries to refuse "the call" (his new responsibility) in this story. Something shocking and unexpected gets dumped into his lap, and while he gets mad and scolds the person who did it, he never turns it down. That's one of his core defining character traits, that he accepts this burden immediately and without hesitation.

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"Being stuck in a state of arrested development and having to make the active choice to move on, improve, and bring something back to your society."
Oh damn it Ren's arc DOES fit that, ahaha. XD

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I really need to find that website once that explained a Japanese four-beat storytelling structure.
It went something like
A. The first premise
B. The second, seemingly unrelated premise.
C. The information that ties them together.
D. The twist/perspective shift.