The Hero's Journey Conundrum

        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 predictable. When reading books, readers become accustomed to the general trends that occur, and using this subconscious knowledge, they can accurately predict what happens next in the story. This predictability causes many books, even those with unique premises, to fall flat and appear monotonous. Another general issue is that the main characters tend to be boring, or even worse, annoying. This is because they tend to all follow similar paths of growth and development making them almost seem like copy-pastes of each other with little to no variation. These main characters end up being quite predictable, which could explain why side characters are more appealing due to their seemingly more complex feelings and motivations due to them not being as fleshed out.

Of course, having predictable stories doesn’t necessarily constitute a bad thing. The Hero’s Journey frequently gets used for a reason: it tells good stories. While the main character may be unlikeable, watching them grow and develop as a person throughout the story and gain nuance can sometimes be enough for most readers. Reading is also a comforting activity for a lot of people, so having more predictability is a plus with some people. This could also potentially explain the surplus of YA romance novels with the pastel covers. Having a tried template also makes books that break this mold even more interesting because if there isn’t a set model, how can you defy expectations?

There’s a time and place for adhering to the Hero’s Journey. Some stories strongly benefit from following the model, while others that require more nuance tend to stray further away from the template. Neither of them is necessarily better or worse, just different. I find that stories with too much predictability tend to be boring, so I prefer books that break the mold and experiment with novel ideas. Of course, some stories don’t need an enticing main character. The premises of the stories sometimes are the characters themselves, with the protagonist serving more as a vessel for the storytelling to happen. In the end, the Hero’s Journey serves its purpose of allowing authors to write stories with good character development and growth while still allowing for more nuanced stories to be written by breaking the mold.