[aeonque]

Excellent reminder. Thank you.

Commonly ignored critical insight:

Storytelling is for the HUMANS who hear the story, because our lives are in the format of heroes journeys. It matters not if most or some movies/stories follow it, because if the story doesn’t follow it - it’s not remembered by HUMANS. Because, you guessed it…our lives are in the format of a monomyth.

Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist. Not a script writer.

Christopher Vogler was a script writer for Disney.

They both understood that stories were just a vehicle for lessons. And if the structure wasn’t followed then the lesson wouldn’t be received, let alone passed down from generation to generation.

The super super basic shit is 3 steps: 1. Normal world- suspect something is wrong 2. Supernatural world- seek the thing that makes it right 3. Return- bring it back to share

That format fits not only every story ever told, but more importantly - it’s the dna of your life experience. And if you disagree, then ask yourself: am I refusing the call to adventure or a stage in the journey in my life? Give it a shot. It’ll change your life.

Side note: by “lesson” I mean the fundamental building blocks of your worldview. Lookup Weltanschauung.

[bccdee]

That formula does not fit every story ever told, or even every popular story. Consider a romance story, where the protagonist doesn't "bring it back to share" at the end, because their journey is entirely personal. Or wilderness survival stories, where there isn't necessarily anything wrong with the normal world at all; the problem is that they are in the supernatural world to begin with, and it challenges them in ways they must endure. Slasher movies and other horror movies follow more of a "(1) something is wrong in the normal world, (2) people get sliced up, (3) everyone's dead" plan that may not involve any grand symbolic journey more substantial than the journey from a sharp knife to a bare throat.

As people try to generalize the hero's journey to claim it fits all stories, they simplify it by paring away many of Campbell's more specific elements, like "the meeting with the goddess" or "atonement with the father," but even the most pared-down version still does not describe all stories. How about The Stranger by Camus? That story doesn't map onto the hero's journey at all. Waiting for Godot? That story doesn't even resolve its narrative tension in any conventional way.

The urge to generalize narrative is understandable, but I think it's a mistake. Ultimately, the purpose of art is simply to provoke interesting or entertaining emotions in its viewers, and a story doesn't need any one essential component to do this. There are recurring conventions and useful tools that repeatedly crop up in genres and in the medium as a whole, but these are not necessary—only commonplace.

[kibwen]

> They both understood that stories were just a vehicle for lessons.

I agree, but it's much too bold to suggest that the hero's journey fits every story ever told. It's entirely possible to demonstrate a lesson without having a journey at all. You don't need a protagonist to end up in a better place, and you don't even need the protagonist to experience any growth; sometimes the cruel indifference of fate is the lesson, and sometimes a character's lack of growth demonstrates by way of example the importance of growth.

[crdrost]

More importantly what Dan Harmon is describing is what I would call a 4-act “Descent into Hell,” with acts “Setup, Descent, Belly of the Beast, Escape.” This is a very general structure, but the phrasing of that last act as “Escape” makes it fundamentally a comedy (Substitute your favorite rom-com! Or, for a really interesting case, the Amy Poehler/Tina Fey comedy Sisters is a descent-into-hell where the hell in question is the stereotypical-High-School-drinking-party trope).

It also isn't even universal for comedies: if we diagram the descent-into-hell as

    ____          _
        \        /
         \      /
          \____/

Then there is clearly an inversion of this story structure which is an ascent into heaven, looking instead like

           ____
          /    \
         /      \
    ____/        \_

This is actually so common of a Far-Eastern storytelling device that it is best known by a Japanese name, Kishotenketsu[1].

The basic idea is that you still need a setup act to tell the people who the characters are, and those characters still are not perfect and still have flaws which may be addressed by the end of the work, but you do not need to motivate their ascent to heaven: everybody wants to go to heaven, it's obvious why they wanted to go too. Similarly unlike the Descent phase where everything is difficult to make the story believable, in the Ascent phase everything is candy bars and ice cream, the character is unreasonably successful, beyond what we would have imagined. Where the Belly of the Beast in Hell amounts to mounting successes in the face of overwhelming odds, the Belly of the Beast in heaven amounts to mounting friction in this place that is supposed to be paradise. And that needs to build up to a sudden explanation of the friction, a twist, where paradise is not what it seemed and the character must flee, having acquired nevertheless what they need to resolve their difficulties at home.

Another interesting subversion is when the last act of descent into hell is not Escape, is not Tragic Collapse, but is Redemption: Hell is turned into the mundane world. That's just a different sort of comedy that can work very well, I am thinking for example of Will Ferrell’s classic Elf where Hell is clearly NYC and its utter lack of Christmas Spirit, and Buddy the Elf brings that spirit back to NYC. This I would call a “Light-bringer” structure because it doesn't have the same motifs of descent or ascent...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu

[andrewflnr]

We only wish our lives were in the form of heroes' journeys. That wish is why the formula has its power, not the actual fact of our lives, which on objective inspection more closely resemble random assemblages of events.

[syntheweave]

It has nothing to do with the kinds of stories I tell when I go for a walk, come back, and tell the household something about what I saw. "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air." I can embellish that moment and add details like, "and one of them swooped down near me and I had to duck." And that's life information, that's like, "oh, being around birds can be dangerous." And yet it has no hero's journey in it, unless going for a walk is a "call to adventure". What it has is story elements: moments with meaningful relationship, encoded in a way that audiences can immediately digest. I once took a fiction writing class where one of the students could not filter her stories down beyond a bare enumeration of events that took place on a certain day: everything was included, the bathroom trips, the specific purchases, the things family members said to each other, the "oh, I forgot something, we need to go back". As a story, it was incredibly hard to follow because it was data, not information.

What does tend to happen as story elements get added and more tightly bound together is something resembling traditional story structures. But that's like observing that natural systems tend to look like scale-free networks: it's an "end-up", not a "fate". Most of the industrial products made to fit story templates are providing entertainment, but only a facade of information: the story is actually built on wish-fulfillment or appeal to preexisting beliefs(nothing sells like a story you want to hear because it validates you), and the formula suggests a way to fill up runtime reiterating that.

[camoufleur]

Your comment makes a lot of sense to me. But I think that "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air" is your definition of data, not a story. Mentioning having to duck is either a detail (more data) or an event in an incomplete story e.g. if you go on to explain how you made a truce with the crows. There's information in the crow statement only if it communicates more than a proclamation that you went on a walk. People often hate when people tell them their dreams because it's (nonsensical) data mistaken for a story. There's no information.

[maroonblazer]

This maps nicely to some advice I read somewhere recently about how to increase your value at work.

"Be curious.

Ask questions.

Try stuff.

Tell your story."

[smogcutter]

Critically, Joseph Campbell was very much not an anthropologist.