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Books of the moment: HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES and THE HERO’S JOURNEY Written by Joseph Campbell This man,… http://t.co/q5L4DJQvVk — Jennifer Morrison (@jenmorrisonlive) April 7, 2015
<script src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” async=”” charset=”utf-8″></script>*pats self on back*
It’s been a funny week. My entire English class this week has been focused on heroes, starting off with (you guessed it), “The Hero’s Journey.” By far my favorite English lesson this year.
[adrotate group="5"]Keeper of Thor’s Hammer, Will Scarlet’s Genie Bottle, Emma’s Gun, Emma and Henry’s Moment at the Castle, Cora, and the infamous Family Tree!
Corbin, I hated English in school, which is odd since I’m a voracious reader and have been my whole life. I always got good grades in it and enjoyed most of the literature we read, but I hated being told what to read and when to read it. But I will admit as an adult I’m glad I was pushed. But at the time I would have taken double Math or History to get out of English class. What’s even more odd is my favorite type of test to take was essay, the very thing I despised doing in English class. When I entered college the only thing I did know was that I was never going to be an “English major”. 😛
As for J.Mo mentioning that book, that’s kind of eerie. it’s not an obscure book, but it’s not on most people’s current reading list, unless you’re a student like Corbin. Maybe they really are stalking this forum like we’ve discussed in the past.
Keeper of Rumplestiltskin's and Neal's spears and war paint and crystal ball.
Maybe they really are stalking this forum like we’ve discussed in the past.
LOL nah. I mean, yes. ABC does stalk us (Hi Sally!) but Campbell is the most popular way to understand mythology of the heroes journey.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Law, Chaos, and The Great Balance: Or, What Is Going On With Emma and Lily?
I want to pick this back up based on some more thoughts that have passed through my brain, some comments made by other posters (particularly @Nevermore) and other threads started, like Fate, Free Will and The Author and the kind of conversations had there.
I want to continue to look at Emma Swan through a literary lens. We’ve looked at her role viz a viz the Bible, specifically the New Testament Savior Jesus Christ and more broadly at Campbell and the Heroes Journey. For the next phase, I want to stick with a more modern reading of our ONCE text and look it in regards to Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” character and the series of books that make up this mythos. For this, you need not have read Michael Moorcock (though, you should at some point in your life) because I’ll give a brief overview.
Overview
If I asked you to name the biggest name in fantasy literature, most of you would probably say Tolkien and that’s absolutely right. Tolkien cast one heck of a shadow with his LOTR and Hobbit books and every fantasy writer since has had to stand in that shadow and decide if they will play nice or if they’ll try something new. Moorcock was one such guy who decided to break the shadow because, on the whole, he’s rather anti-Tolkien. He saw Tolkien as safe and reinforcing the status quo and writers who follow in Tolkien’s footsteps are merely repeating the same safe tropes and cliches laid out by the modern granddaddy of fantasy writing.
The reasons I mention this in the beginning is because it’s important to know that Moorcock’s stories of Law and Chaos and the Eternal Champion try to distance themselves from that long Tolkien shadow by taking well worn tropes and messing them up. Aragorn, the Promised King, and Frodo, the little hobbit, reach the end of their heroes journey and, literally in the case of the latter, end up back where they started, wiser and having seen the world but with the status quo reinforced and the world righted.
That’s not how Moorcock saw the world. He saw the struggled between Law and Chaos as eternal. It never ended. There was no Big Bad that you could defeat. It went on for eons with neither Law nor Chaos ever getting the upper hand, and if one of them did it was the job of the Eternal Champion to try and “fix” it so that there was a harmony, not one above the rest. Moorcock recognized that while we might associate Law with “good” and Chaos with “bad” one gaining victory over the other would lead to a static environment (Law winning) or “total formlessness” (Chaos winning). As such, the Eternal Champion never really fought for one side, but rather for cosmic balance between the two forces. This meant that the Eternal Champion was less “good guy in a white hat” and more “morally grey guy who is straight up anti-hero and does questionable things because abstract concepts like good and evil are just that…abstract.”
Allow me to explain. The most famous of the Eternal Champions, IMO, is Elric of Melinbone and White Hat Good Guy he is not. He’s not exactly a bad guy, but he, as the Eternal Champion and as Emperor of his civilization that is faltering and failing, is often forced to do things that would make us raise our eyebrows because of our “heroes don’t do that!” mentality that stems from the way stories are told and have always been told–ie, heroes do good, villains do bad.
In order to save myself some time and finger typing, I am going to quote Wikipedia on what kind of guy Elric is:
Physically weak and frail, the albino Elric must take drugs (special herbs) to maintain his health. In addition to herb lore, his character becomes an accomplished sorcerer and summoner, able to summon powerful, supernatural allies by dint of his royal Melnibonéan bloodline. Unlike most others of his race, Elric possesses something of a conscience; he sees the decadence of his culture, and worries about the rise of the Young Kingdoms, populated by humans (as Melniboneans do not consider themselves such) and the threat they pose to his empire. Because of his introspective self-loathing of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him odd and unfathomable, and his cousin Yyrkoon (next in the line of succession, as Elric has no heirs) interprets his behaviour as weakness and plots Elric’s death.
As emperor of Melniboné, Elric wears the Ring of Kings, also called the Ring of Actorios, and is able to call for aid upon the traditional patron of the Melniboné emperors, Arioch, a Lord of Chaos and Duke of Hell. From the first story onwards, Elric is shown using ancient pacts and agreements with not only Arioch but various other beings—some gods, some demons—to assist him in accomplishing his tasks.
Elric’s finding of the sword Stormbringer serves as both his greatest asset and greatest disadvantage. The sword confers upon Elric strength, health and fighting prowess but must be fed by the souls of those struck with the black blade. In the end, the blade takes everyone close to Elric and eventually Elric’s own soul as well. Most of Moorcock’s stories about Elric feature this relationship with Stormbringer, and how it—despite Elric’s best intentions—brings doom to everything the Melnibonéan holds dear.
That Yyrkoon figure, by the way, is Elric’s main enemy. He’ll be important when I come back to OUAT in the end so keep him in mind. And yes, Stormbringer, is a nice way to break the overly used trope of “hero and his magic sword” because the sword itself is actually an agent of Chaos. While the Eternal Champion is more concerned with balance, Elric does, I think, fight more on the side of Law, though obviously with some serious dire consequences, like the toll it takes on him by using the sword.
What I find interesting when we look at Lily and Emma is that they have a shared connection, the darkness that the Apprentice put into baby Lily before sending her to our world. Elric and Yyrkoon have something similar in that they have “brother blades” that come together in battle in a very literal clashing of the gods (Stormbringer vs Mournblade). Now, obviously, we won’t have blades in OUAT but we do have light and dark magic and the understanding that both came be found in the same person, just like while Yyrkoon might be a “bad guy” he is also seen as the better ruler for Melinbone by its people because of Elric’s quirks. Or: an agent of Chaos can be seen as preferable to Law while the Eternal Champion can toy with chaos in order to bring about balance.
Ok, what am I getting at: well, first, OUAT is slightly more hopeful than Elric’s story. In the end, Stormbringer is his downfall.
In Stormbringer, Elric learns that the representatives of Fate, which serve neither Chaos nor Law, recovered Mournblade from the netherworld. They present it to Elric and explain that the runeblades were designed to be wielded by those with Melnibonéan royal blood as a check against the might of the Dead Gods of Chaos. Elric gives Mournblade to his kinsman, Dyvim Slorm, and the two men become embroiled in a confrontation between the gods. Elric summons others of Stormbringer’s demonic race (also in the form of swords) to fight against a number of Dukes of Hell, brought to the Young Kingdoms by Jagreen Lern, theocrat of Pan Tang.
Ultimately, Elric’s reliance on Stormbringer proves his undoing: after the utter destruction of the Young Kingdoms in the battle of Law and Chaos, just as it seems that the cosmic Balance has been restored, Stormbringer kills Elric, transforms into a humanoid demon, and leaps laughing into the sky, to corrupt the newly-remade world once more. The sword-spirit says to the dying Elric “I was a thousand times more evil than thou.”
Back to ONCE
I think it rather plays out like this:
Emma Swan, is Elric…the Eternal Champion. She is capable of using Chaos to bring about the happy endings if that is what is needed but mostly fights on the side of Law. She is striving for harmony between the parties of villains and heroes because she can see the value in both, whereas the heroes often see the villains as morally bankrupt and the villains see the heroes as the source of all their problems.
The Stormbringer figure here is the Dark One’s Dagger–something that seems to feed on the souls of those that it curses. It almost literally is eating Rumple’s soul (and maybe his heart) and while Rumple’s choices are still his own, he is almost weighted under the influence of the dagger (which is not to say his actions are excusable and that he isn’t the Temptation in this story, but that there DO’s curse and its physical and psychological effects must be brought up).
just a note in passing, but it’s reported that when Emma sacrifices herself in SB at the end of S4, there is a storm brewing, I do believe. Get it? Storm. Bringer. Cheeky
Lily is a Yyrkoon-figure and mostly fights on the side of Chaos, perhaps seeking to overturn the balance between heroes and villains (if she should learn about her true parent someday and the steps Snowing took to put Darkness into Lily). She’s the antithesis in the sense that she’s chosen a side, but you can understand her motivations given her earliest moments in the…egg.
What we are going to see are the forces of chaos meet a mostly-force of law in an epic battle for the souls (read: happy endings) of everyone. The result of which, if OUAT is going to try and be mold breaking, wondering what happens to Emma AFTER she’s completed her heroes journey. There are stages in between the “sacrifice” of the hero and the finale master of two worlds, the HEA–something we all know this show will end with.
Emma’s role is more than just savior, it’s the bring the balance between the heroes and the villains. To ensure that they both get their happy endings, that one set getting their HEA does not mean the other loses theirs, something that has been thought to be the case since the very pilot of this show in which Regina told Snow that THIS (The Original Dark Curse) was her Happy Ending.
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"Emma’s role is more than just savior, it’s the bring the balance between the heroes and the villains. To ensure that they both get their happy endings, that one set getting their HEA does not mean the other loses theirs, something that has been thought to be the case since the very pilot of this show in which Regina told Snow that THIS (The Original Dark Curse) was her Happy Ending.
^-^ Yes to so many of these points and theories! Actually, I wanted to throw something out there from a slightly “lighter” register than the Moorcockverse, and while we’re on the Gaiman topic (sort of) — I don’t know if anyone here is familiar with Good Omens, which was a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and is an absolute delight), but it’s another one of those examples where there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek playing with the concepts of good and evil. The story follows, among others, two apparent opposites — a “demon” and an “angel.” The rub is that the two have been around on Earth for so long (sent by their respective parties to watch for signs of the Apocalypse and to either bring it into being or prevent it), that by the time the events of the novel take place, they are thoroughly humanized, which is to say, they’re neither all good nor all bad, and mostly bumble through things without any more insight anyone else does. And actually, the whole book is about the idea that evil isn’t born, it’s made: but it looks at what happens when someone who’s supposed to be evil by birthright just doesn’t really end up that way. My point with the analogy is that there are a couple of neat things about the narrative that might actually apply to OUAT. First, characters can never fully anticipate the results of their actions, and even if they act “out of good” or “out of evil,” the consequences in fact rarely line up with their original intent. Second, there’s this separation between good and evil “in theory” and good and evil in practice. And third, in the end, the point, like in the Moorcock example, is the perpetuation of the world in a state of balance.
Anyway, just a thought.
I don’t know if anyone here is familiar with Good Omens, which was a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and is an absolute delight)
I am 🙂 (put a gun to my head and Gaiman is probably my favorite author of all time…)
First, characters can never fully anticipate the results of their actions, and even if they act “out of good” or “out of evil,” the consequences in fact rarely line up with their original intent
Yes. Regina cast a dark curse but ended up with a hole in heart.
Snow told Cora about Daniel thinking that if she didn’t Regina would lose her mother, only to cause Regina to become her greatest enemy.
And third, in the end, the point, like in the Moorcock example, is the perpetuation of the world in a state of balance.
And that idea of the world in balance could apply back to OUAT and Emma as a figure who manages to connect the mythic and the human world. They were separate realms with some major differences but with Emma, in her Eternal Champion mode, the worlds can exist together without having to destroy the other (going back to the EF = losing SB; going to SB = changing or fundamentally altering the EF)
"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"
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