What’s wrong with the hero’s journey and how can we fix it?

This video is excerpted from the Heroine's Journey Feminist Story craft Workshop Partial video transcript Hi again. OK. Part two. So what I want to do is I want to give a quick overview of what's wrong with the hero's journey and clarify some of our intentions here and give you a little sneak preview of how this course is going to be structured. So I'm basing it, I'm approaching this as a workshop on craft. I want to make you and me better writers and to do that, to become better story crafters, then we have to focus on the three elements of a story, which is plot, theme, and character. And I call that structure, armature, and archetype and I'll talk about the differences as we move along. But first, let's just look at the biggest problems with the hero's journey. So the hero's journey has been critiqued by a lot of different scholars and I'm going to include links without going into too much detail on the scholarly aspect of this. And I do have a thesis, a master's thesis, which I wrote about the heroine's journey that I will link, that you can read if you want to read more about the lineage. But what I want to look at right now is the two biggest problems with the hero's journey and the first one, and this is something that Augusto Boal pointed out, is that it provides an empathic catharsis, a violent and conclusive transformation that tends to replace any real action on the part of the reader or viewer. So you're angry at the system, you're frustrated. You wish you could fight back, you feel oppressed, and then you watch a movie about somebody overcoming that. And it's really big and explosive and violent and intense. And that provokes a reaction in your nervous system which simulates having reached some sort of heroic conclusion in real life. And so instead of actually being a hero in your own story then you submit and go back to work. So that's the first main thing that's really wrong with the hero's journey. And then the other thing that it does is it desensitizes us because of all this big explosive stuff. It desensitizes us to a whole lexicon of horrific experiences from rape and slavery and murder to all out genocide and the end of the world. And as we get more comfortable witnessing these pretend atrocities, then we disassociate from the very real atrocities were going on all around us, anything from just domestic violence next door to horrible war and genocide that's happening all around us. So it can be really easy to get overwhelmed by all of these problems and it's very comfortable to get lost in the imaginary world where people are solving problems like this using violence. But in the real world, we don't have that as an option, especially as women, we are definitely not going to be able to use violence to solve our problems. We will lose. So it's for us especially a bit of a hoax, the hero's journey, it's not giving us any real examples to work from. So, my goal here is to create a roadmap is to create a formula that can be used like that one has been used for centuries to build these beautiful stories that we get lost in that stay in our hearts forever and to experience this transformation, but to have it actually provoke real action and transformation in our real lives and to also have the place that you go, the special world that you get lost in, be a place where the message is not one of patriarchy, misogyny. So this is what I've been doing is building this road map, and to me what I see are the primary differences between a hero and a heroine. Now, this isn't really necessarily about feminine and masculine, and it doesn't need to be a dualistic approach. But it's, we're just, we're creating a subtext. We're weaving in. We're not eschewing the hero. We are unifying and evolving this thing. And to me this classic hero has always sought triumph and victory and glory. They want to win. And a heroine seeks understanding, self-awareness, and harmony, and transformation. They both seek transformation, but for different reasons. So, again, with the long game that she is on, the long game, the heroine is seeking to understand, unify with and to collaborate perhaps with the dragon as opposed to simply slaying the dragon because the dragon is perceived as a threat. So this to me is so beautiful. It's such a beautiful and subtle shift in the way I approach the telling of stories."