This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 536 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Arcetypal Character Arks Part 3, The Hero Arc. The Hero.

Heroic stories are so important and so prevalent throughout the history of storytelling

that the word Hero itself has become all but synonymous with that of

protagonist. That the hero arc is in fact but one of many important archetypal character acts does not lessen its importance within the cycle.

The hero's journey came to popular consciousness in the last century

with Joseph Campbell's exploration of the monom myth in the hero with a thousand faces.

The ideas in this book were famously utilized to create one of our most influential modern myths, George Lucas's Star Wars.

Later, the ideas would be more explicitly codified as a tool specifically for writers, most notably in Christopher Vogler's the writer's journey.

Writers, viewers, and readers alike have clamorously embraced the hero's journey for the obvious reason that it resonates and

resonates deeply.

However, in more recent years, the hero's journey has come under scrutiny for a number of reasons including

over-emphasizing masculine agency at the expense of feminine agency, creating

problematic social narratives around violence, savorism, and even narcissism,

and indicating that it is the only, or at least the best, model for structuring a story.

These are all valid criticisms, but I find most of them arise out of

the simple problem that the hero's journey has been asked to hold the spotlight alone without reference to the other equally vital archetypal character

arcs that can be seen to define the human life.

The Hero Arc is primarily a character arc of youthful initiation, although it can be taken or retaken

by people later in life, particularly if they failed to properly fulfill the ARX lessons in their younger years.

The Hero Arc is one of the two youthful ARCs belonging to the first act or approximately

the first 30 years of the human life.

...