#MONOMYTH THIS

[prokopetz]

Some of y'all will call Joseph Campbell a little bitch, then turn around and act like TV Tropes has cracked a universal code underlying all human expression.

#media #tropes #media analysis #media criticism #media literacy #swearing #'analysing' media by decomposing it into checklists of tv tropes articles is just the campbellian monomyth for recovering superwholock fans

[m0r1bund]

Whatever I am today, I won’t be tomorrow.

the boys… I don’t know what to name them LOL but they have been a fun conduit for exploring Old Sond in my free time.

#monomyth tag

[c-rowlesdraws]

oohhhh, a new recommended 5-hour-long video about how the star wars franchise is overall repetitive and shallow... I too believe this, but, crucially: do I yet care enough about star wars to watch a 5-hour video about a star wars opinion that I already know I agree with going in...

#the video is - #the decaying monomyth of star wars #by jessie gender #my beef with star wars is that I enjoy the original trilogy but #the series consistently centering the same tiny group of people at the center of everything interesting shaping the galaxy #is genuinely limiting and frustrating to me #the new trilogy had so much promise but turned into SUCH a mess #also every year since i could think critically about movies I have loathed episodes 1-3 more and more #the original trilogy is the only good star war #cut it out from the rest like the perfectly can-shaped center of a pineapple #also rogue one is good

[foursaints]

bloggers who take the story of a wizard named "bartemius crouch jr" so completely fucking dead serious. there is nothing ridiculous about it whatsoever (to me). when he turned his father into a bone that was like a biblical parable

#hes like gilgamesh or aeneas to me ... going through gof with a fine comb like its the monomyth #before modern english was invented there was bcj hanging out in his thrasher hoodie #sidenote but do we know if there are any other barty mentions outside of gof. is that a thing

[aranock]

Just had someone claim that I maliciously stole ideas from a friend without acknowledgong them when said friend is litterally in the video, and I was in the video I supposedly took thing from, despite my not even once thinking about either thing as being even remotely similar. Like not even slightly an influence. Also I am pretty open about when something influenced me. I don't exactly hide it. Idk I feel like people are really stretching to find anything they can hate Jessie and I for this video with. Like really? Really?

Anyway just to be clear The Editor is not a ripoff of my friend Neil from The Leftist Cooks video on metamodernism, great video btw go watch it. I wrote the editor in because as I was doing the script editing proccess on Jessies initial script and came up with a new structure and worried that if I didnt draw attention to this people would maliciously misinterpret part 1 without getting to the part 2 twist. The Editor is LITTERALLY representing what I did in the script editing proccess for this video. Though there role and purpose expanded to represent more broadly what editing and editors do to works, reinforcing the points we make on art as collaborative and the importance of the influence of for example Marcia Lucas on making the original trilogy as good as it was. If there was any inspiration for The Editor it was chatting with my friend @wonderful101gecs about Pathologic and Brechtian Epic Theatre. I wanted to disallow the audience from suspension of disbelief and force them to reconcile with the world as it is and with how narratives are manufactured. Even then its pretty loose inspiration. The Editor was just a natural result of needing a purpose fulfilled and rounding out my layers within layers structure. Im not sure if it was Jessie or I that named them that, but we made them a named character because we worried at one point early on if we didnt do that people might get really shitty towards me. Like originally in the script it was just "Aranock" and as they became a character I pushed it further towards them being a sort of amoral embodiment of concepts masquerading as a villain who was masquerading as a Hero, pretendint to be the great person behind everything. Thus I came to "oh I need a second rug pull" and thats where layer 5 came from because I needed to really REALLY make the audience go "oh I need to question the narrative" and not treat The Editor as the great man myth. Layer 1, the animation, came from a desire to have a narrative layer below the documentary and video essay layers, below any meta layer. So yeah originally this was just a long very direct essay by Jessie about the making of and politics of star wars, my reediting of those become layer 2 and 3, with some small bits of those ending up in layer 4. Oh also some elements of what became the editor and of the script existed before I even began my youtube channel. Like I have been kicking around aspects of these ideas for over 3 years. The Editors opening monologue is almost all from something I wrote about a year before releasing my first video. So yeah I was not stealing stuff from a video by my friend that released last year, and frankly its really shitty that people assume that of me.

Also I'm tired of how frequently people have been specifying out just me to be shitty about. Attacking my voice for being feminine, being weird about my body. Really makes me feel great. Love being a trans woman making art on the internet. Love how y'all attack me if my voice sounds how you perceive womens voices should sound and you attack me when it doesnt. Im tired people suck, and its really weird that some of you want me to sound more "manly", but thanks for the validating my self taught voice training I guess????

#the decaying monomyth of star wars #Jessie Gender #aranock #video essays #fuck I am tired #god this month sucks

[moghedien]

the amount of people I see who think that there is one true, absolute source of all myths (but specially this happens when talking about Greek myths with people tho) is bizarre

like not just people who never really looked into sources or whatever and didn't really think about there being multiple versions of myths, but people who think that all of those sources came from like one definite True Source of All Myths that was just oral or something so its lost to time but there is definitely One True and Absolute way that all of these myths are supposed to be and they just got messed up over time

#this and also people who think that the monomyth is like literal truth that everything adheres to because of aforementioned True Source #instead of just being like an approach to analyzing story #this is such an evangelical christian way of thinking like genuinely if you approach mythology like this you need stop and to think on why

[yea-baiyi]

i’m sure people smarter than me have said this, but the odyssey is the sequel to the monomyth actually. in the hero’s journey the hero departs from home, from innocence, from safety, to fulfil his destiny. in homer’s the odyssey, the war is over, the destiny fulfilled. next comes the real fight, the unwinnable fight—to return to everything you left home to fight for.

in the first half of the poem, while odysseus fights tooth and nail to return home, his home fights with its last breath to give odysseus a home to return to. and time is running out. his wife penelope is down to her last desperate excuse. suitors have invaded his home, eating through his household and his wealth. his son, telemachus, almost grown, leaves home for the first time to find out if odysseus is still alive, if there is still a reason to keep fighting. having lost everything he had, over and over, odysseus is finally allowed to arrive in his homeland. at first he doesn’t recognise it. and he is cursed to look old and decrepit, so that none of his loved ones would recognise him.

for the second half of the poem, he has returned and miraculously, he has not been displaced or forgotten. but now he has to reclaim what was his. and removing the rot, restoring this place to the home odysseus remembers, is long and painful. instead of walking through the front door, he must sneak in through the back or risk being thrown out. not a single person knows him by sight; odysseus must prove his identity over and over, to every member of his household. he must retell story after story, share secret after secret, reveal every marking or scar upon his body, to finally be recognised by his own family. and then he destroys every last trace of the intruders—kills the men, kills the servants, wipes the slate clean.

by athena’s magic, he is restored to his former youth and glory as he reunites with his wife. the families of the slain suitors try to seek revenge, but zeus, lord of the skies, intervenes. odysseus, filled with his god-given strength, is home, and ready to fight to protect it.

it’s a complete sequel to the heroes journey, but what makes it part of the monomyth is the horrible truth about odysseus’ tale: that it’s impossible. that you will leave, and your home will change in your absence, and someone might fill your place; your family won’t recognise you, your wife met someone else, intruders have destroyed your home, and you will never be as young as you were. you will return and you will fight with every ounce of your strength and it won’t be enough to turn back the clock. it’s the terrible last chapter to every hero’s story that we don’t like to talk about.

and yet, of course, it’s the same story we tell over and over: we’ve won the war, now all we want is to return home, but home is no longer somewhere we can reach.

#the odyssey #hero’s journey #the monomyth #greek mythology #odyssey #homeric hyperfixation haze #sorry this has nothing to do with mxtx but i’ve been sitting on this thought about the odyssey for months #like. i’m sure this isn’t a new thought but. #you think of tolkien and the scourging of the shire #all quiet on the western front #narnia #all the chinese poets #i want to go home. but i am home. #think about how the odyssey ends at the very second athena declared the conflict over. #we don’t see odysseus reaction to it. we see him ready to fight. athena declares a peace. #but it is abrupt. as if athena is slamming the window shut. he won he’s happy that’s enough. #does he manage to live after that? we don’t get to know #i was sitting on this thought for ages. and then i read the greek tragedies. was helping my friend with a paper on home by toni morrison #and yeah this all clicked. got irresistible

[visenyaism]

the narrative: and then they returned to where they started, but they were too irreversibly changed and it was all too different than how they left it so they could never truly go home ever again

me literally every single time despite the fact that like straight up 80% of all stories in human history do this

#i’m sorry!!!! i’m sorry we can’t go back!!!! but the love was there #broooo fuck the monomyth wtf is return changed. what if that made me sad #when my roommate finishes nona and has to cope with returning to the ninth and it all is just TERRIBLE. wah

[vasquez-rocks]

Sorry to say this but Spock and Edward Cullen are the same character archetype

psychic powers and super strength

dark-haired and broody

simultaneously sexually repressed and violently horny

cold to the touch (depending on how you interpret Vulcan being hotter than Earth)

from a powerful family

died and came back to life technically

weird thing about blood (it's green / he drinks it respectively)

daddy issues

dating someone outside the ingroup, which causes Problems

coded as religious outsider (jewish / mormon respectively)

cool, collected exterior due to immense psychological self-control over raging desires

looks good in black

looooot more gore at the wedding than you'd expect

huge tits

every time a new sibling shows up you're like "wait, another one?"

#star trek #star trek tos #spock #twilight #edward cullen #star trek is the foundation it's the pattern it's everywhere #it's the monomyth to me

[kindaorangey]

in terms of viewing IWBFT through the lens of the hero's journey i think there's a very clear transition between thursday and friday of the known to the unknown like on vibes alone everything is off the rails and different from friday onwards and the central reason for that is that both jimmy and fereshteh lose their anchors (respectively, performing music as a source of happiness and hearing the ark's music as a source of happiness) and from then on the floodgates metaphorically (and literally!) open for all their personal problems. and then they re-cross the threshold from the unknown to the known on sunday. yeah

#iwbftreread #i am not immune to campbell's monomyth. okay. #iwbft #i was born for this #osemanverse #thunder rambles #described

[yurious-george]

haunting the narrative but you're still very much in the narrative. their perception of you drives the narrative but you never get to speak for yourself

#this post is about delores haze & sun wukong lmk. somehow #lolita #lego monkie kid #can't argue with a monomyth

[m0r1bund]

Tamahuaq (ahuaq) tam (ahuaq) tama. huaq. whack. tama.

tammy.

tam

#monomyth tag

[wellofdean]

Hello there! I've happened to read this post of yours and I just loved it! You've brilliantly articulated what I've been trying to explain about Supernatural, specifically about one of its most fascinating (at least to me) themes, that is the contrast between the nuclear and the queer family. In the post you've also mentioned "the backlash against the Joseph Campbell Monomyth-style mode of storytelling" and I got super curious since I've been trying to find some resources about alternatives to this type of storytelling. I was wondering if you could be so kind and share the names of some authors, or even some books/papers/articles about this "backlash". I just thought to take my chance and ask you but if it's not okay by you by no means ignore my request :)

thank you anyway for sharing your thoughts on that post, again it was brilliant! Have a nice day ^_^

Hello! Thank you so much for the compliment on my post!

When I say 'backlash against the monomyth', I am talking about conversations in the film school, and with other students, but some of them, as I mentioned, have gone on to make films that set out to subvert the Hero's Journey model of storytelling.

I personally love this piece:

Film Crit Hulk has a bit of a schtick that he's doing and yes, he writes in ALL CAPS, but he's kind of brilliant, actually, writes for some very serious publications, and this is a pretty brilliant summary of the kinds of conversations I heard and had in my University days and just after with members of the Lit and Crit fandom (which is what academics really are) and my then-aspiring filmmaker friends, and with people who were actively involved in shaping careers in Hollywood storytelling.

This is also good:

This is also really worth a read, and talks about the way the monomyth "displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced."

As for alternatives, I will now tell you about a book I absolutely love, and cannot recommend highly enough, and that is Jane Alison's book Meander, Spiral, Explode.

EXTREMELY worth the read. Absolutely wonderful.

I also really like Relating Narratives by Adriana Cavarero, which you can read online, here, which is about selfhood and narrative, and actually is not fully relevant, probably, but it's awesome, so I include it.:

Enjoy!

#down with the monomyth! #and some alternatives #Enjoy!

[1ore]

Tamahuaq (ahuaq) tam (ahuaq) tama. huaq. whack. tama.

tammy.

tam

#monomyth tag #1ore doesn't want to use her art blog #uncaptioned tag #this website update has taken everything from me

[gods-favorite-autistic]

Today my English teacher said puss in boots was an anti-hero archetype and like???? No he’s not????? How did you decide this????

#we’re learning about like the monomyth and archetypes and stuff #yesterday she showed us a vid ab it and it was like ‘the one thing you Harry Potter katniss everdeen and frodo have in common #is that you’re all human!’ #my literal reaction was to go ‘no??? frodo is very pointedly not human???? #like I get the point I get what they’re trying to say but also no??? pick literally any other character??? #madurday night live #puss in boots

[swordshapedleaves]

Thinking about how Palamedes is who would have been the main character of this story was normal. Like, he's the brilliant straight boy. He's the kind of guy every American white boy who likes reading fantasy novels is supposed to project on to in all their media experiences. Typical protagonist energy. He's even got two love interests to pick from in the lovely Dulcinea and the fierce Camilla.

But he's not the protagonist. His hero's journey ends at the beginning and he's just a ghost in a narrative. It isn't about him. It's about a big dumb butch girl and a horrible traumatized touch starved genius girl.

It's about growing up isolated not because you read too many books and maybe don't have good social skills, but because most of the adults in your life hate who you are and what you represent. It's *queer*.

Thinking about all the straight white boy protagonists I grew up rooting for and projecting onto. I see them in Palamedes. And I see them die to make room for Gideon and Harrow.

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth spoilers #obviously this isn't all sexpal had going for him #these are just some thoughts about the monomyth