Subverting the Hero's Journey...

Okay, so what I'm asking here is, how would one go about subverting The Hero's Journey, and yet still have an interesting story?

X

edited 25th May '13 9:50:15 AM by XRay

Ignore the call.

Have the Hero sit on his ass.

Have him fail his quest?

Have the entire Hero's journey be accidental. "I was just traveling the mountain pass and ended up killing a dragon!" Some wacky comedy and highly improbable events leading to a factually true hero's story.

Start with the more important question: Why do you want to subvert it?

Wizard shows up at hero's home, "yo dude, you're actually the lost heir of the mage-kings of Floo", and shows the hero how to use these sweet magical powers he never knew he had. The wizard then sends the hero on his perillous quest towards Floo (which is hidden in the mountains), the Hero starts the journey, gets lost in a swamp, catches a disease, chickens out, runs home, and discovers the Wizard set himself up as tyrant of his home village, and only made up a bogus story to get rid of the only local kid who had natural magical talent and thus might oppose him (killing him directly would be bad for the wizard's magic).

I'd enjoy reading that.

I'm assuming that this is just entertaining a hypothetical, otherwise I'd have to echo Madrugada's response.

The Hero's Journey is a narrative structure, so if you want to subvert it, you'll have to appear to set up that structure, and then end up using a different one.

There's an essentially unlimited number of potential narrative structures, but most of them are stupid and pointless (for instance, you can put the climax at or near the beginning of a work, but you really shouldn't.) Most possible narrative structures will fail the "still have an interesting story" criterion, but there are still plenty of alternatives to the Hero's Journey which are interesting and usable. For instance, you can have a hero setting off on a quest, which is suddenly rendered unnecessary, so they have to find something else to do with their time, setting off a slice of life/comedy series (this has been done before, although without the setup to make the reader believe the story is going to be about the quest.) Or you could have the hero attain the goal they set out for, only to find another menace behind that, and so on, in serial format, for as long as the series remains popular (this has probably been done a lot of times already also.) Or you could have a tragedy, where the hero sets out to solve a problem, and ultimately discovers that they've only made things worse, and learns a lesson regarding the folly of doing whatever it is they did.

Those are just a few ways off the top of my head. There are probably quite a lot of others if you put your mind to it.

edited 27th May '13 5:16:44 PM by Desertopa

Hero goes on quest. Quest goes well at first. Hero knocks over directional sign by accident and is unsure where to go. Hero gets lost and is never again certain they are on the right path, and is eventually very certain they are on the wrong path but is incapable of tracing their steps back. Hero dies lost in the middle of nowhere, but not before hallucinating a Humiliation Conga wherein everybody who was counting on them chews them out for their failure. It is ambiguous whether anybody else managed to finish the quest later.

Now that's just plain depressing.

As stated above, have him fail his quest. Start as usual, he gets the call, sets out on his quest, but along the way he discovers something more important to him than being a hero, or make him outright incapable of finishing what he started, or maybe he just chickens out.

concur with Belisaurius, that's just depressing.

edited 27th May '13 8:32:52 PM by mbartelsm

I find this idea somewhat troublesome, because it infers that that The Hero's Journey is a model that stories and characters are based off of. It is actually the reverse; The Hero's Journey is an analysis of story structure.

edited 7th Jun '13 5:46:22 PM by shiro_okami

Agreed. Even if Star Wars has merit, George Lucas fucked that up, and led others to fuck it up by spreading his misinterpretation.

It's a structure in itself. It may not generally be a good idea to deliberately write a story to conform to it, but if it were an analysis which could be applied to any sort of journey without exception, it would be a pretty useless analysis. It's only meaningful to the extent that it describes a structure which stories could differ from, but don't.

Well, of course it's not an analysis for any kind of story, just an analysis for stories with a hero who goes on a journey, either literally or figuratively, hence the title.

You could have the hero become a Fallen Hero. Maybe the big bad's offer to join forces convinced them, or maybe the artifact they've been looking for has too much potential to simply be used to put things right.

You're kind of missing the point of The Hero's Journey.

Joseph Campbell studied a lot of stories from a lot of different cultures, and noticed that a certain structure and theme tended to appear over and over together. The Hero's Journey (or, as he called it, the monomyth) was something that had such fundamental meaning and appeal that it could be seen repeatedly cropping up in isolated cultures where the idea of a "trope" had never even been formalized, yet alone compiled on a website for them to copy.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces laid out that structure and explained what parts of it meant. What makes it interesting is that it's not as simple as "A hero goes on a journey". There are specific stages to the journey, which he gives examples of stories falling into. It's not just about some dude going out and having an adventure; it's a highly symbolic tale that represents coming into adulthood.

The hero's mentor turns out to be the principle villain, though is not necessarily the antagonist The villain wins and the hero is cast aside or is caught fulfilling a function that he has no desire to fulfill — a stifling, bureaucratic kingship, for example. (see: The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.)

Alternatively:

The hero actually sets out on a quest of his own initiative (no call to be heard and judged) and doesn't pick up any appreciable or long-term companions along the way. He gains skills of a sort, but they aren't enough to fulfill the goal he set out to achieve, and is battered severely in the attempt. He goes back to his hometown and opens a nice bed and breakfast.

The Hero does anything before the call (e.g. ignores it, jumps at it, tries and fails to avoid it, etc.), but ultimately they are dragged into the journey. We, the audience, expect this to be a high fantasy (or another specific genre), but right before the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits or The Hero sets out to go to City A on their journey through half the kingdom, The Villain, Big Bad, or Eldritch Abomination comes in and destroys his home town and kills The Hero's companions. On the antagonist's way out, however, they're killed (either by The Hero or by a random lightning strike or something). The story revolves around The Hero coping with the effects of the death of everyone he's ever known, blaming himself for the antagonist coming to his village or whatever. The story isn't The Hero's Journey but instead any other formula plot.

That may actually be more of a deconstruction, but the subversion comes with the setup.

Aside from the fact that The Hero's Journey was designed to explain the natural story arc of myths from around the world (as others have mentioned), Joseph Campbell himself discussed how the the individual parts of his Hero's Journey are not present inall stories. He even boils down his entire "journey" as a tale of intiation, separation (from the known world) and a return. The only turly universal part of the journey is that the hero must face what is unknown to them and develop from that. So the best way to subvert the tale would simply be to have the hero not return. They could be "consumed" by the world and refuse to leave, which still bears a resemblance to the "Refusal of the Return" trope, albeit a more permanent one. The best example I can imagine is a story of a person Trapped in Another World who refuses to return home at the end.

Of course, that being said, Campbell's Monomyth is only one of many, and David Adams Leeming has a version that analyzes the entire life of the Hero, from a Miraculous Birth to a Ressurection (and not neccesarily in metaphorical terms), and many modern stories don't follow that convention at all.

@ Bloodsquirrel: I'm not stupid, I do know that. I just didn't feel like going into that much detail in my last post.

This seems like a contradiction. If it includes the possibility of The Hero not returning, either by choice or force, even that wouldn't be able to serve as a subversion. Actually, the best subversion would probably be to have the character not be a hero, not go on a journey, and not learn anything, but that would be either boring or depressing.

edited 7th Jun '13 5:53:13 PM by shiro_okami

The subversion comes with the set up. If the journey is not set up to happen at all or ever, then it isn't a subversion. That's why my suggestion was to simply get The Hero's Journey to the point just before the move into the unknown and turn the story into some other formula. If there is no hero, no journey, no lesson learned, then it's just an example of non-use (not even an aversion).

Though Dun Dun describes what I meant fairly well, I suppose I should clarify what I meant in describing the "Refusal of the Return" step. Essentially what happens is that the hero decides to stay in the unknown but then due to events in the unknown world, or people from the known world coming to find the hero, the hero has a change of heart and returns to grant the "boon" (or knowledge) to the known world. I suppose the traditional use of this trope would count as a double subversion of sorts.

Is my post ten example a potential valid subversion?