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.