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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

"the hero's journey, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed."

Hero stories have been following the same template since the dawn of mankind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

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The Hero's journey is a quite infamous concept between more serious literary scholars, particularly folklorists, as the Wikipedia article mentions. Its grand claims of psychological universality are built out of cherry picking. Its huge applicability is also built out of very vague concepts and quite manual fitting.

For an example, try to fit the Epic of Gilgamesh (as an extremely old conserved folklore tale) or Don Quixote (as one of the oldest and most famous literary works) to this framework - you will either fail or need to contort them quite a bit, or ignore large chunks.

Everyone reacts badly to this when they first hear of the concept. Then at some point you realize, that you actually don't like the scripts that won't fit too well to this. It's like a fashion sense, hard to describe the thing.

A friend of mine, when he heard about this in the class, argued "but I want to create something unique that doesn't fit to this or anything else, like... the Matrix!". The professor was speechless for a moment but could keep his calm :)

2020/21 has had quite a few movies that ended with the hero dying or negatively impacted. They follow the “hero’s journey trope” and then subvert. I guess they match the pandemic mood. I’m not sure if I was just made more aware of this due to COVID, or there really just has been a glut of them.

The two most recent off the top of my head:

* Don’t look up

* James Bond No Time to Die

Thanks for the insight, I really appreciate it but it'd be nice for others if you don't give unexpected spoilers :)

I think a good example of a subversion of the classic "hero's journey" is Blade Runner 2049. (I won't go into exactly why to avoid spoilers)

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