Topic: The Monomyth

A young man goes on a quest for adventure. At first thrilling, the adventure soon becomes dangerous. He's aided by an old mentor. But forces of evil kill the mentor, leaving the young man alone to finish the quest. Through many trails, the lad succeeds and realizes he's become a mature, capable man.

Sound familiar? It should.

Most stories with some sort of "hero" follow this path, no matter how symbolically. It doesn't have to be a man, or even a human. The Mentor may or may not be "killed", but they are usually unable to help in some way partway through the story.

I thought it might be fun to see just how many stories we could come up with that follow this structure.

For example we have: Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Kung Fu Panda, & Harry Potter.

What else can you think of? (feel free to dispute the validity of any story someone suggests, as well).

Pretty much every Zelda game?

SPOILERS

• Inheritance Cycle (the book series starting with Eragon). A more classical example, with Eragon's mentor actually dying at one point in the story. BTW, the movie adaptation sucks.
• Dragon Ball/Z. While Master Roshi (Goku's mentor) stayed active throuout the most of Dragon Ball, by the time Piccolo came around Goku had most definately surpassed him, and the villains were out of his league (so he stepped down).
• Bleach. Ichigo has had many mentors throughout the series, and while they may always be comparable in power to him (or sometimes even arguably be more powerful), they almost never join the front-lines.
• InuYasha. Many of InuYasha's abilites have already been passed down by his father, he just has to discover them throughout the course of the series. An odd example where the mentor's abilities are being learned posthumously. Even stranger still, is that Sesshomaru (InuYasha's elder brother) is jealous of the power handed down to his younger brother (who oftentimes is unaware that said powers were handed down to him in the first place), so he often teaches his younger brother about the ability when he's trying to take it for himself, lol.

SPOILERS END

the Eragon books steal ideas from a few other books based on the 'monomyth' template, so it makes sense that it too would follow the same format.

Shows you how Hollywood just recycles the same couple of scripts, no?

it's just a template to follow, similar to how the first two levels of nearly every mario game are on land, then underground. harry potter and the matrix are two totally different movies, but they follow the monomyth, so would you say that they're just the same thing we've already seen?

The monomyth is as old as storytelling itself, the oldest recorded written (note that it was the first written epic, not the first epic) epic, Gilgamesh, follows this structure to a T.

There's also Cinderella (think of the Godmother's magic as the mentor, not the Godmother herself; and then you could say that the "mentor" dies at 12:00, and thus Cinderella is left on her own to finish the "quest").

pretty much this. there's actually a whole list of classifications for folklore and fairy tales (right here if you want to check it out), it's quite interesting to see them broken down into their basic descriptions IMO. :3

I totally agree with that!