Often, the mentor will perform another important task – getting the plot moving. Then, before the Wicked Witch of the West can claim the ruby slippers, Glinda gifts them to the hero instead. She describes where Dorothy is, and explains that she’s just killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz appears soon after Dorothy enters Oz. The mentor will also gift the hero with equipment, because a level one hero never has any decent weapons or armor. This mentor will describe how the new world operates, and instruct the hero in using any innate abilities they possess. The hero has to learn how to survive in the new world incredibly fast, so the mentor appears to give them a fighting chance. Some heroes from stories that stick closely to the hero’s journey are Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. Other heroes: any protagonist fits the hero role. While he’s still a cop in essence, his adversaries – and the tools he must wield against them – are nothing like he’s previously known. Waiting for him is a world where aliens are hiding among everyday people, and a galaxy can be as small as a marble. A cop at the top of his beat, he is suddenly taken behind the masquerade of everyday life. J is the heroic tour guide in Men in Black. Together, the hero and the audience will master the rules of the new world, and save the day. This new world will be so different that whatever skills the hero used previously will no longer be sufficient. During the journey, the hero will leave the world they are familiar with and enter a new one.

It’s critical that the audience can relate to them, because they experience the story through their eyes. The hero is the audience’s personal tour guide on the adventure that is the story. There are many way to categorize the cast of the hero’s journey, but most central characters fall into one of these eight roles: 1.

Thinking about your characters in terms of their archetype will allow you to see whether they’re pulling their weight, or if they’re useless extras. What archetypes really do is tell us the role a character plays in the story.

In fact, it’s best to avoid stereotyping by steering clear of the demographics people associate with them. An archetype doesn’t specify a character’s age, race, or gender. Even if you’ve never heard of it before, you’ve consumed this “ monomyth” in works like Star Wars and Harry Potter.Īlong with a specific plot structure, the hero’s journey has a repeating cast of characters, known as character archetypes. That formula is now commonly referred to as mythic structure, or the hero’s journey. In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell demonstrated that many of the most popular stories, even over thousands of years and across cultures, shared a specific formula.

Bone vol 1 by jeff smith