Main Character?

  Turning Red follows Meilin, or Mei, as she discovers that she can transform into a giant red panda. In the beginning of the story, Mei has a falling out with her mother, signifying a separation from the feminine. Her overprotective mother, Ming, discovers her drawings of her fantasizing about a convenient store clerk and proceeds to go and confront him, embarrassing Mei in front of everyone. Mei the next day discovers that she has transformed into a giant red panda which belongs to the feminine side since this ability is passed down to all the female descendants. What’s most interesting though is that this ancestral power symbolically represents the masculine due to separation from the women in the family and this power through a special ritual which seals it into a talisman. I would say that the red panda represents masculine side while the human side represents the feminine even though both could be interpreted as the feminine. I think that her discovering this ability right af...

 (Imagine a picture here; It didn't allow me to load a picture.)       Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey at first glance seems like a simplified version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but upon further inspection, they each pertain to a different set of stories. While both templates utilize heightened language to make them more exciting, the Heroine’s Journey’s steps aren’t necessarily as “action” inducing as say an action movie with fighting. That isn’t to say that the stories can’t contain a lot of action, just that they are more likely to contain different types of action such as emotional fallouts etc. I think that this possible branding of the steps could be to incentivize those who enjoyed Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to be able to also appreciate the Heroine’s Journey even though they are different and speak for different types of stories.  When looking at the Heroine’s Journey’s steps and what they actually mean when you break them down, t...

          Joseph Cambell’s Hero’s Journey is a template that many stories utilize. Following this template allows these stories to document a character and have them grow as the story itself develops. This is done by having the character reborn as essentially a different or evolved person multiple times throughout the Hero’s Journey such as in apotheosis or belly of the whale. While apotheosis explicitly states that the main character has gone through a divination and reached a higher level, I also think that the belly of the whale constitutes a metamorphosis where the main character leaves their known world and enters a new area, forcing them to change. This template allows for any premise to be easily modified and molded to the Hero’s Journey so that it’s a novel idea while still capturing important parts of stories that people now expect to happen. An issue with the amount of stories that follow the structure is that many of these stories become mostly...