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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

For those complaining that this structure doesn't fit their favorite stories - of course not all story types can fit into this one (or any one) scheme. The one presented is a trope sometimes called "The Hero's Journey", and while not all stories fall into that category, a lot of them follow the basic tenet outlined in the article.

Also, the term "101" should make it obvious that this it not meant to serve as an all encompassing compendium. It's an introductory piece that outlines a basic structure, to get started thinking about commonalities in story telling.

It's also nothing new. If you scroll down to the comments, you'll find a mention of the book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell which is a go-to treaty on the subject - and it's from 1949! (I personally find it a bit of a slow read, but it does cover an impressive amount of classic narratives.)

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The problem is that the author is claiming (at least in the next parts of this series) that essentially any story follows this formula - from scripts to books to anecdotes we tell each other to our more vivid dreams.

Of course, that is completely wrong, and while the hero's journey is indeed a very basic and common story structure, it is most certainly not universal (unless you stretch it beyond all reasonableness).

> unless you stretch it beyond all reasonableness).

Im gonna give you a spoiler, he does.

Dan Harmon's sotry circle is how he wrote most of the episodes of Community and Rick and Morty, and tbh he uses it to great effect even when he tells anecdotes and stories (he famously played a DnD campaign where he would meta roleplay to add necessary steps to the circle to make the stories more compelling even if they were not the best strategy at the moment).

Due to his adherance to his own method, he sees it everywhere, to the point where most of us would be squinting to see what he even means.

Its just a framework and he really likes it. Essentially the same as a dude who really likes one programming language and uses it out of place, in a terribly complicated place because he just really likes it.

Community is very funny, but god, every single episode has the same layout, the same emotional conflict, the same heartfelt speech 3/4 of the way in...

The Hero's Journey in this form was adapted to a Hollywood script writing formula from Campbell's books, iirc. The dumbing down into a single formula mostly happened after the success of Star Wars, for which Lucas referenced Campbell's monomyth.

If you like "The Hero's Journey", you might like Noah Caldwell Gervais discussion of it with regards to Star Wars (KOTOR in particular in this case): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI2iOB8ydGo

As he points out, there's a lot of troubling stuff in The Hero's Journey, but there's still a lot that is of interest, particularly with how it informed the Star Wars universe.

One other note is that the story circle doesn't necessarily map to a text. A movie may have three circles (two consecutive ones for the A plot, one for the B plot). A book may have six. A fantasy epic might have twenty iterations of the circle in each volume.

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