I NEED A HERO:
Everyone loves a hero. It’s the reason people will shell out twenty bucks to sit through a three-hour movie in sticky, vinyl-wrapped chairs that haven’t been properly cleaned in God knows how long. It’s one of the reasons that guys lose track of hours, or even days, after a new Fallout, Diablo, or some other video game drops. It’s why my sons harangue me to read just one more chapter—then another—of a good book, and it’s likely the reason I almost always say yes. If there’s a story that’s deeper than the Hero’s Journey, I haven’t found it yet.
Deep stories serve a purpose. They grip us. They reach down right into our nether regions and grab us by the archetypes. When they let go, we walk a little funny at first, but we emerge slightly changed as a result. That’s because the Hero’s Journey is more than just a story to enjoy—it’s an adventure by proxy. It allows us to travel alongside a fictional character in abstraction and, somehow, to return with gold/wisdom/talismans of our own without ever having to step physical foot onto a proper pathway.
Humans need heroes. They always have. The Sumerians and Babylonians had Gilgamesh. The Greeks had Odysseus. Tolkien brought the post-war world the small-but-mighty hobbits and—when I was a kid—Rowling penned a staircase-dwelling orphan that happened to take us all to wizarding school, and save the world in the process. These stories didn’t find success so much as they filled a need—they satisfied a cultural hunger. Without them, a culture becomes emaciated, thin, weak, and easily pushed over in the direction desired by whoever is doing the pushing.
