This is K.M. Wylint and you are listening to the 543 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Arcotypal Character Arks

Part 10, The Heroes's Shadow Artypes.

Here in the 21st century, we often have a confused relationship with the Hero Archetype.

On the one hand, he is everywhere, and we love him and resonate with him.

On the other hand, his sheer omnipresence has inevitably highlighted his negative

counter-archotypes in almost equal force. This is because wherever we find a would-be

hero, we also find the potential for his regression into the coward and the bully.

This is not because the hero is any more flawed than any of the other primary archetypal character

arcs.

As we've seen, every positive archetype is partnered with a polarity of passive

aggressive shadow archetypes. But the hero's negative archetypes are particularly interesting

and cautionary simply because of the profound and implicit

pervasiveness of the hero's journey in the literature and film of the last century.

We are perhaps more apt to recognize the problems

inherent within the Hero arc simply because those problems are often the very

ones that stymies us personally and culturally.

In their classic examination of masculine archetypes, king, warrior, magician, lover,

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette point out the inherent, if comparative, immaturity found within the Hero arc.

There is much confusion about the archetype of the hero. It is generally assumed that the heroic approach to life or to a task is the noblest, but this is only partly true. The hero is, in fact, only an advanced form of boy psychology, the most advanced form, the

peak actually of the masculine energies of the boy, the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development.

Yet it is immature and when it is carried over into adulthood as the governing archetype,

it blocks men from full maturity. adulthood as we've already explored in the

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