Specifically, The Hero's Journey. Scream all you want about how Hollywood reduced it to Save The Cat, but this is now empirically-proven practical psychology and you're a fool to not be familiar with it- not if you want to actually get somewhere with your fiction. Professor Geek's video below gets into why SJWs aversion to this is part of the reason their fiction fails.
Yes, you can do this in seemingly non-epic stories. It happens routinely. Yes, you can do this with Iconic Heroes. This too happens routinely. The trick? It's done to a secondary character.
Example: Dredd. Judge Dredd is one of the most solid of Iconic Heroes around. The world doesn't change him; he changes (restores order to) the world. The dynamic character change one associates with The Hero's Journey typically applies to another in his stories, and in the aforementioned film that's Anderson. You came to see Dredd be Dredd (same as his comics), but if there is a major secondary character (like Anderson) then count on that character getting the big character-defining arc instead.
Now go back to yesterday's Geek Gab episode. I mentioned this sort of thing in the chat when the issue of how to deal with stories wherein the character you're there to see (like Dredd) has to be a very focused professional just to do their job (e.g. being a Judge in Mega-City One) as intended. The same principle applies; you put the drama-llama chores on the secondary character. Go watch those big franchise films with Iconic Heroes again (like the classic Bond movies) and you'll see this used often when they want some sort of dramatic arc in the narrative.
For my work, at present, this is the role that both Creton and (in a different mode) Gabriela play; Ramsey and Sibley are Iconic sorts, so they aren't there to be changed by events- they exist to refine their being through expressing their core ethos upon the world, which (in varying forms) is to restore order when chaos disrupts it.
>The trick? It's done to a secondary character.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's one of the things that struck me when reading Morcock's writing advice: The value of sidekicks. They get to do the things the things the hero can't, won't, or doesn't need to to. They can get scared, they can have misgivings, etc and express things the hero wouldn't.
Another good use of sidekicks for the character development would be Captain Harlock.
As for the Heroic Journey and the Campbell monomyth, I know some of the pulp rev ground dismiss it as formulaic, but it's timeless as myths for a reason. It works.
Bradford,
ReplyDeleteIs save the cat an updated version of Lester Dent's formula?
xavier
It's a dumbed-down and essentialized Hero's Journey formula for scriptwriters, down to when in the runtime your script should hit that point. There's videos on it at YouTube and the book is for sale on Amazon; judge for yourself how well the author turned a notable pattern into a MadLib template.
ReplyDeleteBradford,
DeleteThanks for the correction.
I'll check out the you tube videodorant
xavier
My wife believes the suckage in sjw writings is caused by them using the heroine journey instead of the hero's. She showed it to me and i can definitely see it in the new star wars series and rey.
ReplyDelete