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The hero's journey... young person leaves hearth and home to become a fabled something or other. It really doesn't matter, we all heard this shit so many times we know it by heart. "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" and all that. (and yes, I am aware that the message is not directed at Luke... I can atomize hairs with the best of them)

But the guy who runs into a burning building and saves a child, he doesn't go through the hero's journey crap, unless the child is magical and part of the quest, of course. Or the youth who vacates his spot on the bus to make room for the Syrian woman loaded with groceries, sure the only thing he did was offer her a seat, but in a country where the bigotry and ignorance is vomited at these poor bastards, such an act of kindness can be interpreted as very heroic.

I'm not saying there should never be another hero's journey, but how about redefining what makes a hero and what constitutes as his journey? Are these people I mentioned above lesser heroes because they did not pull some scrap metal from a stone? Not heroic enough? How about the soldier who throws himself onto a grenade and saves his comrades? Is he a hero?

In the same train of thought, sitting right across from the hero is the villain... the bad guy... and of course, every hero needs a villain, Frodo had Sauron (although a more proactive villain is preferable in the penultimate struggle to throw a ring into a volcano... ok, bad example) Kirk had KAHN!, Robin Hood had the Sheriff of Nottingham, Heracles had his father's wife, Hera, movie Batman (the Michael Keaton version) had the Joker... sure Heracles doesn't butcher Hera, Robin doesn't kill the Sheriff, they don't because they, in essence, belong to the pulp version of narratives, campfire stories, which needed to go on. Hells, if you look at the comic book version of Batman, the Joker will always live on for the next boring evening at the campfire, and that's good as it is....

Now, if we take movie Batsy and Joker, of course the clown bites the dust at the end, it's the frickin' movies, and they need a happy end... kiss the damsel and whatnot... patriarchal crap if you ask me but nobody does... ask me that is. They didn't know if there was going to be a sequel, so they needed to tie stuff up with a neat bow. If I were to write a story based on this, set in our time, I would probably use some of the Dark Knight Returns beats, with some parents group hounding Bats because of his violent ways and all that, while the poor sod is just trying to do what is right... he'd fight the Joker, but instead of killing him, it is he who is taken down by ideologically fucked up cops and it's he who is locked up in Arkham... this way, when it comes to the inevitable sequel, we would meet an even more hurting Bruce Wayne who has lost his fortune due to being revealed as a vigilante, who now is an inmate of an insane asylum... how does he get out? What will he do when he gets out? These are the kinds of questions I find way more compelling than the old hero/villain spiel.

I know it ain't everyone's piece of cake, but, frankly, I really don't give a shit about demographics and focus groups... if the story is good, it is worth telling.