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I started watching Myths & Monsters on Netflix last night, because you can leave academia, but academia never truly leaves you.
It's a reasonably scholarly series, if a little Masterpiece Theatre-esque in its presentation. Entirely Eurocentric (which is acknowledged, so fine) and sometimes lacking in nuance, and one of the commentators straight up said that no one knew how to swim in the pre-industrial age, which...what.* Nevertheless, not a bad survey of a lot of myths I didn't know, and it focuses on recognizing the historical context and use of myth alongside (and in place of) historical record for the purpose of teaching and enforcing social/cultural structures, which is very very much my jam.
But anyway, it got me thinking about Hero with a Thousand Faces, and whether there have been any direct inversions of the whole hero narrative, and what that might look like. And I think it might be quite cool as an experiment to attempt a reverse hero's journey, as an examination of female versus male narrative.
The hero's journey is coded male, and that's only been reinforced by pop culture's adoption of Campbell's model, e.g. Star Wars, The Matrix, and roughly 80 billion other things. A big part of that male arc after the call to action is the learning, gaining all the skills necessary to confront the big thing at the end, before returning to a new and better status quo back home. But what if the process is one of unlearning bad things? A heroine's journey could be the shedding of hierarchy and social trappings and coming out the other side with a call to action not to herself, but to her society. Could be cool, if it's done well enough.
Don't know if I'd write it personally (indeed, it seems likely that someone already has done it - it doesn't strike me as a particularly revolutionary idea) but hey, I'll put it on my list of things I could maybe attempt sometime in the way off future.
*I have now googled this for my personal edification, and the commentator may have meant that swimming was not a leisurely or encouraged activity in the pre-industrial age, given that pools didn't really exist, and so only boatsmen and other sea-adjacent people learned to do more than wade. This was definitely not clear from the way she said it, though, nor was it clear from the context of the discussion.
It's a reasonably scholarly series, if a little Masterpiece Theatre-esque in its presentation. Entirely Eurocentric (which is acknowledged, so fine) and sometimes lacking in nuance, and one of the commentators straight up said that no one knew how to swim in the pre-industrial age, which...what.* Nevertheless, not a bad survey of a lot of myths I didn't know, and it focuses on recognizing the historical context and use of myth alongside (and in place of) historical record for the purpose of teaching and enforcing social/cultural structures, which is very very much my jam.
But anyway, it got me thinking about Hero with a Thousand Faces, and whether there have been any direct inversions of the whole hero narrative, and what that might look like. And I think it might be quite cool as an experiment to attempt a reverse hero's journey, as an examination of female versus male narrative.
The hero's journey is coded male, and that's only been reinforced by pop culture's adoption of Campbell's model, e.g. Star Wars, The Matrix, and roughly 80 billion other things. A big part of that male arc after the call to action is the learning, gaining all the skills necessary to confront the big thing at the end, before returning to a new and better status quo back home. But what if the process is one of unlearning bad things? A heroine's journey could be the shedding of hierarchy and social trappings and coming out the other side with a call to action not to herself, but to her society. Could be cool, if it's done well enough.
Don't know if I'd write it personally (indeed, it seems likely that someone already has done it - it doesn't strike me as a particularly revolutionary idea) but hey, I'll put it on my list of things I could maybe attempt sometime in the way off future.
*I have now googled this for my personal edification, and the commentator may have meant that swimming was not a leisurely or encouraged activity in the pre-industrial age, given that pools didn't really exist, and so only boatsmen and other sea-adjacent people learned to do more than wade. This was definitely not clear from the way she said it, though, nor was it clear from the context of the discussion.
