Character Archetypes- Is the Hero's myth really a way of contemplating death?

Character Archetypes - Is the Myth of the Hero Really a Way of Contemplating Death?

The protagonist of most games and stories for that matter can be described as the hero, as long as they are moral and a force for good. The hero is the person who solves problems or a person who performs heroic deeds through a difficult struggle. This concept or trope has a long history dating back even before the earliest hero myth we know of: The Epic of Gilgamesh in 2800BC. This concept seems so integral to a story that it is impossible to write a story without at least a protagonist and an opposing force, even in the intro of a story we expect a hero.

Since this trope appears all over the world in different cultures and even in isolated areas this could be an archetype, something part of the human subconscious (Jung. C). Indeed even before The Epic of Gilgamesh there were many hero myths passed around. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about conquering death. Initially through heroic deeds, then physically by attaining eternal youth which Gilgamesh loses when his elixir of youth is stolen by a snake,

“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.” - The Epic of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh has the realisation that he cannot escape his fate and that he can only live to the fullest. The only immortality he can hope for is by how his name will likely be remembered for centuries to come. This human aspect in fiction recurs constantly as the fear of death and the desire for life is innate in everyone even the modern Harry Potter explores the subject intensely. I believe the Hero Myth is a way for people to contemplate death of distracting oneself from death or to overcome death, in the many senses that you can attempt to master it.

 In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell presents the concept of the Monomyth which contends that every hero story has the same pattern of a “hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” I think that the concept of a Monomyth is flawed due to the fact that too few stories actually fit in that pattern which Campbell describes and how the stages are vague like how the statements a fortune-teller might ask are vague so that as many people as possible would agree to them for example your fingerprints are like no other, you have an arm on either side.  

However I think there is something significant in the ordeal stage how the character experiences death. In all of the hero myth stories, the tale has their hero risk their life and overcome a challenge thereby overcoming death temporarily. Many stories explore this further in: Lord of the Rings, Gandalf dies and comes back stronger and even as far back as Norse mythology Odin impales himself on Yggdrasil only to come back with magic. Campbell described the last stage of the Monomyth as “freedom from death”, having overcome the ordeal the hero no longer fears death and is thus free from death. If the hero character is an archetype, this would be a part of the human psyche that the hero character and Monomyth evokes.

Feeding this back into games, since almost every game with a story includes the Myth of the hero, logic would follow that many games are really about escaping death. Typically this is correct as at the ending of most games your character survives, you having guided them through the story therefore overcoming death, an ending that wasn't game over. If this wasn't the purpose we would stop playing on our first defeat screen, but we want to see an end where our character survives. Even in a game where the controllable character is an avatar for the player, we simulate overcoming death. I think there is something in human nature that wants to do this for survival purposes as small children often imagine play fighting and pretend to die like swordsmen practicing sparring.

This makes it interesting when you have games with respawns which make a mockery of death. Games in which deaths happen so frequently and with so few consequences cause death to have less meaning as a concept. There are many games which joke with this concept.

 ‘Thanks for using this Hyperion New-U station! Please die again!’ –Borderlands 2

Eventually players with enough practice and experimenting with fictional death can attain mastery over it in the game and therefore be able to go through the games challenges unharmed. Contrasting this, some games have perma-death where your character dies forever. In Fire Emblem if party member dies, they don’t come back therefore the team can diminish in size if the player is not careful.

Many games experiment with death by using multiple endings, such as games like The Stanley Parable and Zero Escape. Death is as integral to most video games as the characters are. Perhaps we’re just playing them to escape it. 

References

Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Gilgamesh., and Sandars, N. (1972). The epic of Gilgamesh. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Hull, J. (2015). Not Everything Is A Hero’s Journey - Narrative First. [online] Narrativefirst.com. Available at: http://narrativefirst.com/articles/not-everything-is-a-heros-journey [Accessed 19 Nov. 2015].

Jung, C. (1970). The collected works of C. G. Jung. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Tropes, T. (2015). The Hero - TV Tropes. [online] Tvtropes.org. Available at: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHero [Accessed 19 Nov. 2015].