The Adventurer's Journey
The archetypal AD&D character progression echoes the Hero’s Journey, which YouTuber Maggie Mae Fish ruined for me by talking about problems with both The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Joseph Campbell’s wider beliefs. While the narrative archetype of the Hero’s Journey is a sturdy story framework, formulating it as a universal “monomyth” required ignoring great swathes of folklore and bending many stories to fit. He also relegated women to secondary roles and told female students that they could be the mother or caretaker of the hero but couldn’t ever be the hero. A thousand faces, all of them male, and all of them needing a lot of coddling. Maureen Murdock, a psychotherapist and former student of Campbell’s, took issue with his denigration of the role of women, ultimately resulting in The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, a book that lays out a feminine heroic archetype. While she does discuss many myths, her focus is more on finding ways for women to be more psychologically and spiritually healthy in a male-dominated world. Campbell himself didn't intend for his monomyth to be a story framework but a spiritual guide for men.
While it still has a lot of mainstream cache, to professional folklorists[1] his monomyth theory is a poorly conceived and damaging idea that invents universality where none exists. It fits the Odyssey and it informed Star Wars, but it’s much less descriptive for stories from outside the West. It also suffers from survivorship bias; there's an enormous amount of ancient literature and folklore that's simply lost to time. A lot of native culture was also brutally repressed and deliberately erased as well.
While there have been some great stories that deliberately used the monomyth as a framework, it's not nearly as useful to writers as people make it out to be. Despite that, screenwriting classes regularly cite it as the standard archetype of a proper story, and executives taking pitches expect to see it. In that context, it goes hand-in-hand with the standard Western three-act structure, which is also just one of many, many possible ways to form a narrative. A lot of the titles people cite as quintessential examples of the monomyth—most notably Star Wars—don’t fit especially well in the first place. Luke Skywalker doesn’t return to the moisture farm he left behind and has no Elixir for the people there. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! became perhaps the most influential screenwriting book of all time, and it provided a paint-by-numbers story template from the monomythic lineage. It became the norm in the 2010s, and while it was an improvement over the directionless writing of the 2000s, it soon became tired and same-y.
An even bigger issue is that Campbell was adamant that people shouldn’t try to change the world for the better. This extended to downplaying the actions of the Nazis and saying that no one should worry about that little tiff between Mr. Hitler and Mr. Churchill. He instead advocated for “finding your bliss,” figuring out a way to live that makes you happy. As with the Hero’s Journey, it’s not a bad thing in itself, but it ignores or denigrates other possibilities.
I haven’t seen any indication that Gary Gygax took direct inspiration from Campbell’s work, but The Hero with a Thousand Faces originally came out in 1949, thereafter becoming influential on storytelling in general. D&D fits Campbell’s ethos in that there are a lot of things in its assumed setting that are just How Things Are. While adventurers have a lot of agency, truly changing the world around them is at best something the DM can improvise. Half-orcs are hated and druids won’t let most races join their ranks, and if your PCs decide that those things should change, the rulebook has absolutely nothing to say about it. Again, that isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it is a choice, even if it’s likely an unintentional one.[2] When commenting on the game in magazine articles, Gygax often wrote as though things like class limitations and racial prejudices were unalterable laws of physics in the D&D world.
Not too long ago I saw a post about a D&D campaign where the PCs decided to overthrow the king and establish a democracy. What followed wouldn’t have used the D&D rules all that much—not unlike how the players in David Wesley’s Braunstein games made relatively little use of wargame rules—but apparently everyone involved had a good time. Some people online didn’t take this well, and one declared that if his players did something like that, he’d gleefully have the newly democratized nation get invaded and obliterated. Instituting a new system of government, one unprecedented in the typical D&D setting, should be a challenging endeavor with a real possibility of failure, but said poster wasn’t saying he’d make it challenging. He was enraged at the idea of the players changing the world away from the usual D&D cliches, and advocated for brutal in-game punishments. It’s a far cry from the days when players in Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign (who were all self-inserts initially) were using their Earth knowledge to make gunpowder and hot air balloons.
One of the many ways that Harry Potter has lost its luster for me is the realization that the characters only really fight to protect the status quo. The story presents Harry as brave, clever, and kind, but his greatest ambition is to become a magic cop. The Wizarding World has a lot of very serious problems, including the enslavement of house elves. Harry is happy to rescue Dobby from his enslavement by the evil Malfoy family, but Hermione’s attempts at improving the house elves’ lot are just a joke, something that even Harry mocks.[3]
J.K. Rowling’s worldview is that of a Blairite Labour voter. If you’re not familiar, UK Labour might actually exceed America’s Democrats in terms of being less conservative yet fighting with surprising ferocity against progressive policies, as anyone who doesn’t think Jeremy Corbyn is a demon from the pits of hell can attest. Rowling seemingly can’t even conceive of Harry’s triumph being anything more than defeating Voldemort and returning things back to “normal,” the normal where wizards keep little slaves and centaurs don’t have full rights.
I could go on with examples of this kind of thing in superhero stories, the entire self-help industry,[4] and so on, because it’s pervasive in Western culture, and certainly not unique to D&D. I think it’s good to be able to see yourself as courageous and bold, willing to fight for what’s right and strive for greatness. D&D, the Hero’s Journey, and Harry Potter have all taught people those things, but they’ve also ignored or outright opposed the possibility of fixing larger problems in the world. Changing the world is hard. It doesn’t lend itself to the kinds of storytelling we’ve grown accustomed to, and it defies the Great Man theory in that it always takes a lot more than just one person’s heroism. But it’s important, and we need to learn how to tell ourselves those kinds of stories.
[1] Campbell’s education was in English and medieval literature, and he was influential as a scholar of the works of James Joyce. We shouldn’t take credentialism too far, but Campbell’s work on mythology was very much outside the scope of his credentials.
[2] The popularity of 5th Edition and relative ease of homebrewing has led to some really interesting creations. One I especially like is the Oath of the Working Class, a subclass that essentially makes your paladin into a champion of common folk and laborers. Supporting strikes is one of their key tenets, and they have several support abilities to rally their comrades to fight. I’m sure there are a lot of D&D fans who would despise something like that, but to me it’s exactly the kind of creativity that embodies what’s good about the game.
[3] The movies cut that subplot out entirely and smoothed over several more bits that made the characters unsympathetic.
[4] Check out Ronald E. Purser’s book McMindfulness if you want to learn in detail about how capitalism has defanged Buddhist meditation techniques to remove any semblance of ethics or anything else that might threaten the status quo, reducing it to a way to help workers (and soldiers) tolerate problems rather than fixing them.
