Briar Bond 3/26 Blog Post 4, Large Scale Hero's Journey

 I don't know about you guys, but I love series. Be it books, movies, or tv shows, if it is long, in-depth, and a bit convoluted I am in. Because of this literary preference of mine, as I am examining my favorite stories to find essay fodder I have come across a new question. What does a hero's journey look like over a longer time frame and how does it change with each new installment? For the sake of this post, I'm going to use Percy Jackson as an example (spoilers ahead). The call to action is when him mom gets "killed" by the minotaur, that's easy. However, if we add in the remaining four books of the first series, doesn't it make more sense for the call to action to be the first time Kronos calls to him from Tartarus? 

The question here is, does a hero's journey expand over the course of a series to include the newer material or does the hero's journey repeat with each new installment? I think the answer is that one "hero" must be able to be on more than one journey at the same time. I'm not sure why, but this made me think about the spiral timeline structure Dr Redick was talking about in class a couple of days ago. Each installment of a series is its own rotation on the spiral, but they build on top of each other to form the pieces of a larger, evolving version of the hero's journey. 

I think it would be an interesting thought experiment to see if popular series could fit into the hero's journey structure in their entirety. Even more interesting would be to see how many smaller hero's journeys stem off from the primary one and inspect how they weave together into the fabric of the larger plot/world building.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kip Redick Example of a blog post 1

  I just had a few thoughts on what "wilderness of the soul" meant. In class we discussed that it meant uncharted territory within yourself and I thought of Freud's Iceberg analogy where most of the hidden unconscious is the part of the iceberg that remains underwater. There had always been a debate between psychology and religion in regards to what exactly a soul is. Some would say that the soul is the consciousness of the human brain, while others argue it is something spiritual linking us to God. But in response to the wilderness aspect, I do wonder how much of ourselves do we not actually know? I have always thought of myself as someone who knows exactly who I am, but since this class discussion I'm not so sure. Don't get me wrong- I am not upset about this, but I am certainly more curious. It's almost exciting to think about what else I could learn about myself, but also slightly nerve-wracking. What if I learn something new that I don't ...
Read more

Kip Redick Introduction

 Welcome to the Heroes and Mystics blog for 2026. Make sure to start the blog with your name and the subject of the entry (Just as I have done with this post). . Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections that relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has while reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or from informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The studen...
Read more

Kip Redick Example of a blog post 2

  Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experience o...
Read more