Briar Bond 3/26 Blog Post 3, Do you need a hero to have a hero's journey?

 I finished a book a couple of days ago that got me thinking about the hero's journey. It's the fourth book in Holly Black's The Folk of the Air series (there will be mild spoilers for The Stolen Heir in this post in case anyone else likes these books). The world focuses on the courts of fairies, so by the time the reader gets to the fourth book they're no stranger to backstabbing, epic betrayals, and convoluted  revenge arcs. The thing is, in this particular book the main character is not really a hero. She starts out being dragged along onto the quest, tries to leave several times (unsuccessfully), and by the end of the book acts in a manner befitting an antagonist. If the book were not told through her eyes, it could be easily assumed that a member of the supporting cast was the "hero". 

So this leads me to the question, does a hero's journey need a hero? Can a villain also be the "hero" if you simply turn the perspective onto their plot line? I've since been experimenting with other villains/supporting characters, trying to see if I could assign points in their stories that fit the "hero's journey" structure. The thing that I have found is that any well written character can fit into the mold with a bit of creative thinking. So now this makes me wonder, if the "hero's journey" can fit onto almost any character, and is at its core just the growth trajectory of a character over the course of the story, could the "hero's journey" structure be relabeled as a developmental arc for any character? The sign of a well written character is growth, so hypothetically if enough care was taken to flesh out a cast any randomly picked character should be able to fit somewhat into the structure.

I'm not entirely sure how to complete this train of thought, but I think the key ideas are there. I'm going to keep thinking about this as we finish up the semester and see if I can come up with something that differentiates a hero from every other fictional character.

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