[shantnutiwari]

There have been criticisms of this "model" for many years, but it has entered the public consciousness, so people assume it to be true. There was even a Simpsons episode where Homer goes thru the 5 stages in 5 minutes. "Everyone talks about it so iut must be true!" school of science.

I have a similar problem with the Heroes Journey, which if you are in fiction/screenplay writing, is considered the Bible, and criticising it is like being a heretic. So much so, many books on writing assume it to be true an starting point. But I always found it to be silly, and recently found a great article that points out its a nonsense made up list of common fantasy tropes:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journ...

[kthejoker2]

The first paragraph in that arti cle is deeply incorrect and sets Campbell's work up as a strawman, which you unhelpfully perpetuate here in this comment.

Campbell does not "fundamentally claim" anything about "all human stories" in Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He merely points out a commonly recurring pattern among a certain subset of stories (namely, stories about famous heroes) across multiple human societies and cultures, even those with limited cultural overlap.

In fact, his work is like an early version of TV Tropes, giving names to thematically repeating elements of such stories.

You (and that blog's author) should actually read the book before declaring it nonsense.

[UberFly]

It actually IS a valid starting point. Generally when 90% of the stories that humans tell each other fall under certain patterns, it's OK to categorize and label them. That's all that the Hero's Journey that Campbell describes is. You don't have to rebel against them just because they're established and labeled.

[slowmovintarget]

This is like people claiming music theory is unnecessary. Jazz, for example, is rooted in music theory. It goes beyond it in very specific ways, but with the actual work put in to understand why.

Understanding the Hero's Journey (or the Story Circle, or the 7-Point Story Structure), and why it works is a critical foundation for moving beyond it.

Understand the Jolly Good Suggestion of Demeter before you code something that violates it. You have to understand the rules to the depth of "why" before your knowledge is deep enough to legitimately go beyond the rules.

Find the box first. Until you do that, you can't think outside of it.