Thoughts on The Heroine's Journey
Victoria Lynn Schmidtt first published her version of the Heroine’s Journey surprisingly recently in 2001. I have a lot of issues with Schmidtt’s template, but one of my biggest is simply how boring it is. The heroine only experiences internal change, and there’s no opportunity for her to go on an exciting, world-saving adventure. If I had read books as a kid that followed the Heroine’s Journey, I probably would have abandoned them halfway through due to a lack of excitement, action, and interest. The Hero’s Journey has potential for high-stakes adventures, such as Luke traveling through the stars in A New Hope, Frodo saving all of Middle-earth in The Lord of The Rings, or Harry Potter saving the world by defeating Voldemort. All of these masculine heros stories’ follow the Hero’s Journey template, and their adventures are some of my favorite books/movies, but I don’t understand why a new and less interesting template needed to be created specifically for heroines, ...