A Hero's Journey: Story of Two

Introduction!

Hello and welcome to another one of my action projects. This action project is for my class "Stories," where we discuss different approaches of writing a story. For this action project we're gonna be looking at how I applied the method of recognizing the "hero's journey" in a fictional and non-fictional character. The hero's journey is a common approach of writing a character's plot. I'll be showing you what these common steps are and how I'm going to approach them. 

For one, let me introduce you to my two characters that I'll be talking about in this project. My fictional hero that I'll be comparing and contrasting is "Miles Morales" from the Spider-man series, and my non-fictional hero that I'm going to compare is my grandmother. 

I chose Miles Morales because he's a character I expected to not do well or last long in the comic book world but I was wronged after reading up on his story. It was executed well and approached with a different style, and he's supposed to be the next spider-man. His story relates to my grandmother because they both enter this new place where they're unfamiliar, specifically Miles entering a new private school that he was forced into, and my grandmother who was taken to America because of a job offer that she didn't want to take but had to. Of course there are other comparisons I'll be making along the way on this project, and I'll make sure to discuss the similarities I find in what I believe to match up on her origin story in comparison to Miles Morales. Keep in mind that the connections I'll be making are more metaphorical than directly connected. If you expected my grandmother to be swinging around in a costume at night beating up criminals with powers she got from a radioactive spider, then you may or may not be wrong. 

Part one of the hero's journey.

(I'll be using MM for Miles Morales, and G for Grandma.)

Call to Adventure:

MM: 

Miles Morales is just an average teenager who wants to stick to his daily routine, up until he’s transferred out into a new private school where he knows absolutely nobody. His escape from this is to express himself through art with his uncle. He makes a getaway one night from his school with his uncle to spray paint on a blank wall. After he’s done finishing spraying, a spider bites him on the hand which transmits its abilities over to Miles. He wakes up to find his newfound abilities.

G:

My grandma lived in Puebla, Mexico. Overall they were poor, her mother had to work many jobs in order to keep the house they were living in. She never had plans to move anywhere outside of Puebla, up until she got a call from her mother’s friend that offered her a job in America.

Commonground here is they both didn't expect to enter an unordinary routine out of the normal. Miles Morales would've never gotten bitten if he didn't move to the new school and my grandmother would've never bothered leaving Mexico if not for that call.

Refusal of Call

MM:
Miles Morales discovers that his ability to stick to surfaces, turn invisible, and shock things is hard to control, and impossible to understand. He wishes to be normal and go back to his old school, stating in the movie "Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse" to Spider-man that he doesn't want this to happen to him, and wishes to go back. Spider-man responds with "You don't really have much of a choice."
G:
She originally attempted to deny the call to adventure by saying that she knew basically no English, knew nobody there, and didn't want to be somewhere she doesn't know where to go. She attempted to stay in Puebla and avoided even the thought of going to America because of the challenges and struggles that came with it.

Mentor

MM:
Miles Morales gets confused so he heads back to where the spider bit him, only to find out that subway tunnel is also a lead into Kingpin’s biggest experiment, which is a machine that can merge other alternative universes into one. Spider-man himself is there attempting to stop it, and ends up saving Miles after he gets caught up in the action from falling to his death, where he promises to teach Miles Morales the ropes. He gives him a “goober” which is just a data chip that he needs to use to deactivate the machine. This can be seen as the item that assists Miles along the way, as it gives him a goal to pursue.

G:

My grandmother got her whole plane ticket paid for and the ride to her workplace by the lady that offered the job named “Julia.” She was helped my grandmother step foot into America.

The Unknown

MM:

Miles Morales enters a world where his limits have decreased and must learn to cope in this new world where he’s not only given the ability to do more than he could before, but also learn exactly what it is he can do now with his new abilities.

G:

My grandmother entered America with only a first-grade level understanding of English, yet was assigned as a secretary in her job. Knowing absolutely nobody in America, she was put in a whole new world entirely, not only socially, but with her very job. She had no experience actually doing secretary things because she usually cleaned as her job.

Trials

MM:

Miles Morales has to learn the ropes quickly, regardless of how he feels about the pressure put on him by his other peers that want him to be better immediately. Fear of failure stops Miles from progressing forward, and his hate for the expectations people put on him is taken as if they expect it from him, rather than seeing the good in their want for him to be better.

G:

My grandmother faced the challenge of actually affording things, despite how hard she worked and it was because her boss Julia actually was taking advantage of the fact she didn’t know anything about minimum wage. So she was making a dollar a week, which was nothing when it came to actually paying things off in her daily life. The trial was making it through her daily life on nothing but pocket change.

Abyss

MM: 

Miles Morales is broken by the weight of the expectations set by his friends, the death of his uncle, and his breaking relationship with his father. He blames himself for what happened and loses the confidence to be the Spider-man the world needs.

G: 

Her boss was chased out of America by the government for tax evasion in Mexico, and once they came to her business and asked my grandmother where she was. My grandmother told them she didn’t know, which lead them to ask how much she was getting paid. Once she told them she was making a dollar a week, they told her about minimum wage. She ended up jobless with nowhere to go, the pressure of being on her feet in a new world she had no connection to had begun to get to her.

Rebirth

MM:

Miles gets a little pep talk from his father after being webbed up in a chair for not being good enough to help save his world. His father tells him that he doesn’t push him because he wants to be hard on him for the sake of being mean, but because he sees a spark in him that he finds great, and wants to keep that spark going to fuel himself for a better future. What Miles Morales kills inside of him is the belief that all the pressure put on him is to make his life harder, when it was meant to challenge him to be better. It makes him reemerge from his shell of disbelief and stress and approaches these challenges head-on, inheriting his ability to control his powers.

G:

My grandmother rebirths independent, free from the dependence of having a greedy hand guide her way through America, but rather leaves it to her friend (who was actually my grandpa’s brother’s girlfriend) to get her a job, and leave her to take it from there. She learned where she could make the most money with her talents.

Atonement

MM:
Miles learns to accept that he is not ever going to the Spider-man that once lived, but rather a new one with his own abilities and approaches. He accepts that although he carries a large title, it shall be his very own rather than him being a former shell of what once was.

G:

My grandmother lives with the fact that she will never return to the life she once lived where she worked for a penny and makes sure that she gets her money’s worth her time.

The Return

MM:

Miles Morales balances his life by taking on his educational life in a new perspective of how he sees the challenges that he once approached as a burden rather than an opportunity to present his true potential. Of course, when he’s not doing homework he’s out under the mask.

G: The escape of hard labor for my grandmother was shopping with friends, living her life and carrying on traditions from Mexico into America. 

Conclusion

Both of these characters wanted to live normal lives that took a sharp twist into a new dangerous world for the both of them. They both can be seen to having "false" or short-lived mentors, as Morales's mentor dies, and my grandmother's mentor "dies" in the sense that she ran away and out of her life. They both experience the same trials of expectations of fitting in with a society that is constantly pushing them to fit in, to do good. Both of them eventually break from all these expectations put on them, and shortly find themselves back on their feet after a reevaluation of the scenarios they are put in. They both end up accepting that their new life is for the better, and they're going to make the most of it, taking the challenges head on with no hesitation. Both of them had to balance both their "work" and their real life in order to truly be at peace with themselves.

Sources for images: Marvel Comics, Spider-man: Into the Universe.

A Trip to the Past, Present, and Future

Introduction.

Welcome to another action project for my steam class "Population." In unit 2 of population, we've been learning about the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin and natural selection. We also took time to study our own animals for a bit, I had personally chosen seagulls to write down data for. We were told to write about it's behavior and the physical characteristics of the animal we were researching, such as if you were able to tell if it was a female or a male based off of one look. In the case of the seagulls, it was literally down to a matter of size to determine its gender. After that idea was scrapped, we moved onto collecting two data sets. We did one of dogs and another of cats. I got lucky and ended up with the cat group out of random selection. At the time all we had to do was find the mean, median, mode, range, minimum, maximum, quartile one, quartile three, and the the interquartile range of that data plot. Along with make a box and whisker plot with it. I know like it sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't at the time. After that was settled, we were given three random places in the world that were either abandoned, isolated from humanity, or  deserted. Our objective was to look at our selected animals (we were given a random number of specimen to work with out of the whole data set) and predict which one of them would thrive in the environment we were chosen. Hope you find my choice of writing style entertaining and not an eyesore, and I apologize for the long introduction.

Rubber band Island and The Triumph of Cats.

About 10,000 years ago, a creature known as the “Africa wildcat” came into existence. Its physical traits are shared very closely with our domestic house cats today. Their main diet was feeding on rodents in the African Savannah, like mice and rabbits, which has carried on to how they ended up getting domesticated in the first place by humans.

Let’s skip up to present times; now we’ve got these cute and sometimes rude balls of fur that meow loudly when they’re hungry. Let’s say it’s 2019 and  a bunch of British dudes (because we're in the UK in this story) decided to have a party on a cruise ship with a bunch of cats for some reason. The British dudes went crazy partying through the night until a really bad storm occurs and the waves start crashing, everything is going to hell and the ship crashes, party boys go flying out of the boat, and they’re now on a small island known as the Mullion Island AKA “The Rubberband Island.” The British guys might be dead but the cats sure aren’t. Specifically 7 cats, just for clarification.

Runnin’ The Gauntlet

These specific amounts of cats are the population on the Rubberband island and now I shall begin explaining which traits shall be favored in this small island. The weather is cold, windy, and rarely will anybody be seeing a sunny day. Thin fur isn’t exactly a favored factor of the cruel Rubberband island. The only animals that these cats can eat are seagull as nothing else exists on this island. This means camouflage is going to be a highly valued trait in this island, the risk of being spotted by a bird is the difference between life and death for these cats. Black and gray fur is essential in an often foggy gray island with little sun. These are the physical traits that right now are severely valued in Rubberband Island. Now, the gauntlet begins and after deciding what the population needs as a whole to continue, we’re going to play around with eight chosen runners of the gauntlet. I’ll describe to you which traits are favored, and which will ultimately be the demise of some.

Here are the runners of the SOTF (survival of the fittest):
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h1zC3BodRhj48j8xYhaDJZlQze6P9BrsRr3ZziEdo7E/edit?usp=sharing

Carla -

Favorable traits: Carla has beautiful deep shades of brown, black and white in her fur. This allows her to blend into her environment more easily than a tabby cat. Her ears are in perfect condition, allowing her to most likely pick up a bird’s landing. Lots of fur allows her to easily deal with the cold temperature of Rubber Band Island.

Unfavorable traits: Carla is a fat cat, reducing her mobility in hunting; her pounce will be weaker due to her weight in comparison to her leg strength, meaning less distance is covered airborne. This would be a favorable trait when hunting airborne animals.

Bud -

Favorable traits: Bud is a small, nimble black cat. Just about everything that is suited for an environment like this where the little kitty is able to blend in pretty easily. Although a little less than Carla due to Bud being a black dot running around in brown color schemed flora. Bud’s small weight allows him to pounce highly into the air, making birds more easy to catch.

Unfavorable traits: Bud has a thin layer of fur that would cause this cat to freeze in colder weather, like the kind on Rubberband Island. Bud’s small body comes at the cost of him having small claws and teeth, only limiting Bud to most likely successfully only catching smaller seagulls about his size or smaller without it getting away. His fur could also be seen as a downside if he doesn’t hunt during the night as the black fur doesn’t fit too well into the environment he’s been put in, where the ground is an open area that is covered in short grass that’s brown and green.




Gertrude -

Favorable traits: Gertrude is also a black cat, just like Bud. The majority of his favorable traits are shared with Bud, such as being able to blend in, his agile build, and pouncing ability based on weight. Gertrude doesn’t share one trait with Bud though, which is his actual weight. He’s a full-grown cat, which allows him to eat bigger birds, overall favorable.

Unfavorable traits: Short and black fur is a downside in the environment with short grass of brown and green, and only is shown favorable when night comes around. Freezing in the weather doesn’t show favorable when on the hunt, as it slows down a hunter.





Mimi -

Favorable traits: Mimi is also… a black cat. Deja vu? Mimi shares the same favorable traits of Gertrude and Bud, except that she has a bigger coat of fur than the other two black cats. This allows her to surpass them in the sense that she will be more concentrated on the hunt than the weather, giving her a higher chance of succeeding on the hunt.

Unfavorable traits: She’s a fat black cat, which once again does not do well in the daylight on an island like Rubberband island. Not only is her fur easily noticeable,it actually increases the risk of her getting spotted, and her ability to pounce is lowered severely (weighing at about 15 pounds, although the average weight of an average cat is 10 pounds).




Gino -

Favorable traits: Gino has fur in shades of white, brown and black just like Carla; it works as a severely favorable trait in the sense that his mainly dark shades of color allows him to blend into the night and day, giving him a higher success chance of catching prey at either time of day. His fur itself is thick naturally, yet he carries an agile body that allows him to move quickly.

Unfavorable traits: Gino doesn’t share many downsides at all here. He only

Andromeda -

Favorable traits: Andromeda is a black little cat, like Bud, except a full-grown adult. Once again, it’s about the same concept that we’ve gone over three times now. Black fur allows for her to blend in at night, and her nimble build allows her to move quickly except one thing that stands out is her bigger ears in comparison to the rest of the cats. This may allow Andromeda to hear little things a lot easier than the rest of the runners of the SOTF Gauntlet.

Unfavorable traits: Thin fur, black fur doesn’t allow for easy blending at any period that isn’t the night or afternoon. Her even thinner than normal body type means she’ll freeze over quicker, especially due to her thin fur as well, slowing down her ability to hunt.

Bahama -

Favorable traits: Bahama is a gray adult cat, fully grown. His fur might blend in with the often dull shading of the day’s lighting in a cloudy sky, which helps him hunt more easily as his fur is more favorable than tar-black fur. This gives Bahama the same advantage of black fur at night, without the downside of the day. His fur is thicker than the black cats, which means he isn’t halting at any time to warm up.

Unfavorable traits: Although his gray fur is better than the average black cat, it still doesn’t stop him from not blending in as well as we would want for hunting circumstances. It’s a minor downfall that won’t halt him too much inside the gauntlet, but in Rubberband Island, a kill is the definition between life or death.

The Gauntlet Goes On..

Boom. Somewhere 500 years into the future, let’s pretend Earth is still gonna be alive and well, and this island is still under the empire rule of cats. The question I'm gonna be asking and answering for you is how these cats are gonna look like after years of living in this environment. I've already been hinting at the possible factors that will be neccessary to survive a climate like "Rubberband Island." So without hesistation, here's my best guess on what the cats of the future will look like after years of evolution on this small island.
For starters, they're gonna have a good amount of fur. No, not like a huge furball running around. Just right in between short fur and fluffy fur if that makes any sense. The reason why I'm saying that they're gonna have this balance of just the right amount of fur instead of looking like a ball of lint is because having lots of fur becomes a hassle to maintain, and also slows down movement when it's wet. Large amounts of fur also makes it easier to be tangled, causing minor inconviences for them, along with the factor of them getting parts of flora inside their fur.
My next guess on their evolution is that they'll have longer hind legs for leaping upwards to catch their seagulls. Pretty self-explanatory I think, but I'll explain why anyways. Let's say that the cat doesn't catch the bird while it's on the ground. What happens next? Bird flies away happy and alive, and the cat walks away hungry. The game changer here is that the bird flies away, but not for long because a aggressive furball is flying 10 feet in the air ready to slam dunk this bird right back on the ground, hence allowing it to feed once more.
My last theory is that these cats will develop longer ears than just any ordinary cat. Now I might be wrong on this one because I don't know enough about ears to understand how they work, but the bigger the better? Assuming that based on the size of the ears increases their ability to pick up sound. I'm not just pulling this out of nowhere, I'm just basing it off animals that can hear REALLY well. Take a look at bats and their big ears. There's gotta be some tie between ear size and hearing capabilities... right?
Now for a more visual representation, I masterfully sculpted a clay model of what I believe these cats are gonna look like in this future that I've predicted.

.
"Long Cat" 
Sculpted by professional artist "Diego Baldree" 

You'll notice that I really attempted to bring the life from this piece of clay, looking at this highly defined cat sculpted by only a master's hands. You can look at it and see how big the ears are, how thick the cat's body is, and how LONG those hind legs are. No, the cat is not supposed to evolve without any eyes, I just forgot about those being important in the moment of my beautiful creation.

Math Shenanigans 

Down here in the shenanigans of math you'll find all the data I had to use for the handful of cats that I was given to look at,  study, make my observations,  and theorize about. The data we worked with was to see if I could find the mean, median, mode, range, minimum, maximum, quartile one, quartile three, and the the interquartile range of my data plot. WHICH I did, and I will happily present it to you below.

In conclusion to all of this, I don't really think that cats would really survive for long on a place like Mullion island, mainly because I believe they'd end up with the same terrible fate as the very animals they eat. The seagulls around Mullion island are known to mistake plastic for food, which is why the entire place is covered in rubber bands because they think they're worms. Assuming this, then that would imply that what you're more than likely to find in their organs would be undigested plastics, which makes it harder for a cat to eat their prey when they're too busy figuring out what's meat, and what is plastic. That concludes the end of this project and I hope you enjoyed seeing me play around with the theory of evolution.