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The Shape of Stories: How Myths Move Through Bodies and Worlds

The Emerald

CHAPTER

Hero's Journey Stories, the Primal Form

The danger of the universal is that it can ignore specificity and sweep everything under one rug of sameness. In healthy structures, this dialogue is like a circulatory system, a seamless flow between one and many - journey and return. I'm all for stories that re invision communal problem solving and that follow new and interesting trajectories in terms of character and plot and dialogue. And i'm all for revamping genderols and myths, which many myths themselves already do. But we're not going to get rid of the basic shape of heros journey stories: The primal, circular, energetic, crisis, departure, initiation, the helpers, the plummet into the abyss, the climax and the return

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