The Heroine’s Journey: How Campbell’s Model Doesn’t Fit

Why isn’t the existing Hero’s Journey model already good enough to use for heroine-centered stories? In this post, we address the three main problems we see in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and its impact on storytelling, and how we hope to design the Heroine’s Journey model differently to avoid them.

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Journey of a Strong Female Heroine: Katniss Everdeen

What sets The Hunger Games apart from the rest of the field, though, is its lead character, Katniss Everdeen, and the skill with which Collins executes a novel trilogy centered around a young female lead. Where so many others have failed, or not even bothered to try, Collins not only creates a Strong Female Heroine, but also makes the story her Heroine’s Journey from impoverished nobody to national symbol. There are far too few stories of this kind in the genre – or anywhere else for that matter – even amid the prolific storytelling boom of recent years. For authors, screenwriters, and others struggling to figure out how to write better female characters and better female-centered stories, The Hunger Games has to be at the very top of the list to read, analyze, and learn from.

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Team Katniss: Collaborative Success in The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games novel trilogy, Suzanne Collins created another fantastic example of an heroic story centered around one principal character, without losing touch with the role that teamwork and collaborative success play in human nature. In a very real sense, the trilogy is not the story of the rise and triumph of Katniss Everdeen, but rather the success of Team Katniss.

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