As Spencer McDaniel writes, The Hero's Journey may be a vox pop method of storytelling, but it's no #Monomyth:

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

The #Monomyth theory is far too blurry to claim any historical provenance. That's why it's nonsense. It promises to be a theory of everything for literature, yet when stood against the historical record, it's no more a crack at making the Philosopher's Stone; a minority of clichés that, today, could be found on TV Tropes with a thousand non-exhaustive sub-articles. Interpreting stories with it involves more shifting goalposts to get them to fit than it's worth.

It's more accurate to say that the Hero's Journey is a product of the last half-century, urged into relevance from the writers of Star Wars, who found the myth of the #monomyth to be, based on their own experiences, 'true enough.' The problem with this is that once you start judging literature only through what stories have in common, you grow cynical of the idea that literature builds upon itself.

As Rachael Lefler of Owlcation writes: "Why bother reading both the Aenid AND Watership Down if they're essentially the same book?"

https://owlcation.com/humanities/How-Monomyth-Theories-Get-It-Wrong-About-Fiction

I am not immune to the #monomyth. My Mum's read a lot of romance novels and thrillers in her time, from authors such as 'Sunday Times Best-Seller,' and I've found myself thinking, time and again, "What's the point if they're the same book with the same plot?" *Who am I to judge?*

https://brologue.net/2023/11/05/fantasy-for-mums/

If I wanted to write a story that Mum would read, following the Monomyth would be worse than useless. Lefler argues that literary connoisseurship is far more important to aspiring writers. If you want to write a detective story, there's no substitute for reading Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. If you want to write a story that stands out, that breaks new ground, you have to know whose shoulders you're standing on first.

In the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2007 edition, the late #TerryPratchett argued we should take literary connoisseurship beyond our preferred genre:

> "There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly “bad” races, magic that works like electricity, and horses that work like cars..."