#the hero’s journey

[shisasan]

Struggling or suffering is never good for the soul unless it teaches you how not to struggle, how not to suffer.

[valenteal]

One of the things I adore about Bungo Stray dogs is how it challenges our ideas about what a “main character” is. Atsushi is undeniably the protagonist, the story begins when his hero’s journey begins and follows it. It somehow manages to fit the hero’s journey perfectly and challenge it at the the same time by simply expanding the scope of the audience’s perspective. Atsushi is the protagonist and we watch every part of his hero’s journey unfold, but we also get immense insight into the mentor/shapeshifter’s backstory and plots.

It’s like if the Harry Potter books followed both Harry and Dumbledore from the beginning, with flashbacks to Dumbledore’s past. If that happened Harry would become, in the reader’s eyes, a piece on Dumbledore’s chessboard because we would see all his machinations from the beginning. That’s exactly what happens in BSD with Dazai. Instead of us seeing Atsushi as the main character who everything revolves around we see Dazai as the mastermind who shapes all the events of the story around Atsushi. Instead of seeing Dazai as a mysterious mentor figure with a dark past shrouded in mystery that gives Dazai wisdom of experience we see him as a flawed person with dubious morals who is trying to be good but doesn’t know how, someone who’s been hurt terribly and hurt others even worse. In turn, Atsushi’s character appears more naive and pathetic, his accomplishments and growth don’t seem like his so much as Dazai’s. He behaved exactly as Dazai anticipated because Dazai manipulated him and the situation for that to happen. It makes Atsushi a tool for Dazai, makes his accomplishments Dazai’s. But if the story was told to us omitting all of Dazai’s behind the scenes manipulations Atsushi would feel like any other protagonist. Dazai would feel like Dumbledore, helping from the shadows rather than pulling strings from them.

Anyway, I’m a lit nerd if you can’t tell and I think Asagiri is a genius.

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

You still have a journey to make and it will be a terrible journey. It will bring you home, yes, but it will take you further from home than you have ever imagined. You will travel in two directions at once. You will probably die. You do not enter the first forest for fun, for adventure. When you go there, do not expect to return.

Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss

[vintage-tigre]

[thefrankshow]

The Hero’s Journey

[eyeoftheheart]

“Campbell’s sojourn inevitably took him to the Perennial Philosophy. The sublime theme he found in the ancient Hindu and Chinese pundits, Sufi and Christian mystics, poets and philosophers from Walt Whitman to Aldous Huxley, was that deep within the human soul is a mirror of divine Reality. As above, so below. Tat tvam asi: Thou art that. The Kingdom of God is within us, here and now. Awakening to that mystical dimension where the very essence of the self is suddenly perceived to be one with the ultimate forces of nature is at once the secret and the transforming journey of human life. “You are that mystery which you are seeking to know,” Campbell concluded. This spiritual perspective, Campbell believed, is not only timeless but universal. He had as great a respect for the wisdom lore of the shamans and sages of antiquity as he did for the creative visions of contemporary artists and scientists. Accordingly, like many other perennial philosophers, Campbell had very little patience, if not disdain, for any individual or chosen people mythologies that excluded others from divine revelation or claimed to possess exclusive knowledge of what he vigorously thought to be the fundamental truths, the sacred constants, of all people. “Every people is a chosen people,” he insisted. Every deity is a metaphor, a mask, for the ultimate mystery ground, the transcendent energy source of the universe, that is also the mysterious source of your own life—and everyone else’s.”

― The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work

[ludditeheart]

Supernatural?

[incorrectpantheon]

Language, reading smut: Idk this is great and all but tbh there is simply nothing sexier than The Hero’s Journey

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[dangerousoperatoroperadonkey]

I need a video game where I’m not the protagonist. Where I’m not the leader, the hero, the promised or chosen one. A game where I don’t save the world. Where the world isn’t saved, or better yet it’s saved by someone else. Where I can choose to follow, or do my own thing, but the mark I leave is negligible on my own.

[teathattast]

[charlesoberonn]

[eyeoftheheart]

“The thing that saved me was the Upaniṣads, Hinduism, where you have practically the same mythology, but it has been intellectually interpreted. That is to say, already in the ninth century B.C. the Hindus realized that all of the deities are projections of psychological powers, and they are within you, not out there. They’re out there also in a certain way, in a mysterious way, but the real place for them is in here [points to heart].”

― The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work

[putridcowboy]

the most important step in the hero’s journey is the gay sex

[oshetart]

Someday, I'd like to show them to you.