Conversation

In the hero’s journey the nature of the change you return with tells you whether the story is overall shorting the current grand narrative or going long on it. LOTR is shorting the history of middle earth. The Matrix is shorting the current creative-destruction cycle at its peak.
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2x2: laughing-at vs crying-at, fate-of-world vs fate-of-protagonist Most comedies laugh at the fate of the protagonist, but most tragedies cry at the fate of the world.
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The normal Campbell hero’s journey is Euclidean in geometry. The world of departure/return is unchanging except for the narrative perturbation being dealt with. But most actual stories assume a non-Euclidean background tendency in the world that you can’t actually fight.
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Even in Star Wars, which has a heavy-handed cosmic dark/light theme, the actual big struggle of Jedi and Sith seems like a couple of wrinkles on an overall ascendancy of dark across 9 movies. The Mandalorian stories reveal the grain in the interregnum of the 2nd and 3rd trilogies
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I haven’t seen much discussion of this overall world tendency that’s present in all real stories. Structure theories only concern themselves with the curvature of the story rather than the world. Wonder why. It’s not like it’s subtle. In LOTR you get hit over the head with it.
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And afaict, Star Wars ends with Jedi culture dead, and Rey saving some books that may or may not help her reboot. She doesn’t seem to know enough to pull off shit like astral projection that Luke does.
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The Dark Tower series also emphasizes the world's trajectory directly and repeatedly ('the world has moved on'). It's an interesting question why this isn't addressed in commentary!
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Nope. Frodo enables the world to change by destroying the Ring, whose power is uncanny preservation/stopping time. Fantastic elements go West or vanish. The careful reader will note that Frodo's journey travels back through the history of English prosody before unmaking it.
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Philip Pullman has written at length about this "reality principle," notable in the work of M John Harrison as well. Tolkien is still Pullman's Covering Cherub, and his specific complaints about Tolkien are a sure sign of a writer struggling hard with a precursor.