Models, insofar as I understand, are structures defining simple rules for analysing a single work, and or comparing several works in tandem. Like metaphors, they are not an actual, objective representation of something. They're not meant to be detailed; if it makes comparison easier to work through in our heads, or in dialogue, as many argue the Monomyth does, then it follows that it's a good model, doing its job - and many follow that no further inquiry is required.

Comparing one story to another isn't the problem. The #Monomyth lens can shine a light on a thousand stories with a thousand supporting protagonists, young and male, who join the main protagonist after they've crossed the first threshold. The lens cannot tell you that there is one, and only one, Junpei Iori from #Persona3Reload ("DA MAN"). The best it can do is shrug and go "Idonfuckinknow, he's the Romeo to Chidori's Juliet, I mean, have you SEEN West Side Story? Same story."

For whatever reason, we seem to keep passing thought experiments - like the #Monomyth - down the telephone game, and arriving a priori at the conclusion that, given enough data (or stories), they can be proven a fait accompli. We do this in spite of Campbell's self-waiver above, an extremely safe, and conservative conclusion. We've done this before with #Hobbes and #Rousseau. The structure of conclusion is the same. Maybe there are angles we're missing.

Perhaps the most fetid and swollen elephant carcass in the room is that, even by the standards of what was politically acceptable in the 1940s, Campbell's politics were weird. Randian-weird. Hobbesian-weird. As Joel Christensen and Sarah E. Bond write in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Monomyth blends in and aligns with Ayn Rand's interpretation of ethical egoism in her Fountainhead:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-behind-the-myth-should-we-question-the-heros-journey

If Campbell's theories are a tuning fork, then what resonates when you strike it are the frequencies of rugged individualism, as Christensen and Bond write*; there's also harmonies with Hobbes; Great Men theories of history; it's libertarian in broad strokes. But let's be very clear: Campbell consistently repeated, time and again, that Monomythic heroes must always be male; they are destined to inherit power, supernatural or otherwise; they are born to bring order, and to rule.

> "When the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth, but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no."
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 299-300

If your protagonist is female, then forget the whole 'Woman as Temptress' step that comes next - she will be tempted here and now, and deep within her psyche and yours is the inability to think otherwise, because she is destined to be the chattel of the divine. What an incredibly *weird* way of framing it, Campbell!

Well, OK. What about stories where the protagonists aren't white--

This, folks, is Campbell's *opening.* It is his 'dark and stormy night;' his 'best of times, worst of times;' his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote*, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, "it's all the same."

This is cultural #imperialism. It is not amusing, it's wrong; and as a white, reasonably middle-class Scottish person, I strive to call it out as I see it. It doesn't matter what Campbell believed - these words have all the cadence of your extremely egalitarian Uncle Greg. He'd never speak ill of immigrants in public - met a few, 'imself - but at family gatherings, he'll regale you with patter like, "they should fuck off back to their own country and see to their own."

(As certain historians are wont to do of societies they cannot fully understand - particularly prehistoric ones, on account of any witness who could tell us what it was like being dead.)