They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it. I see advertisement as not separate from art and only harmful in its unintended collisions with it but rather an intentional as well as subconscious colonization and co-opting of the societal values around human artists that has culminated inevitably in AI wrecking havoc on what remains of our curiosity about human creativity.

Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.

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Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.

This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light"