Wonderful essay here at LitHub by Ellie Robins. I was sold from this moment:

The truth is, there can be no such thing as a monomyth. Stories are alive, and like all living beings, they exist in ecosystems. In the living world, a monoculture always spells death.

TFW someone totally nails, with only three lines, an argument that you’ve finally whittled down to five minutes of kermit arms after ten years of thinking about it… *sigh*

But it’s good all through, beautifully written, and seems to be coming at something very close to Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory/critique of monomyth, to the extent that I was surprised not to see it mentioned at some point:

This is exactly what writers in once-colonized nations were doing when they began to write in the mode of magical realism. It’s a brilliant form of resistance. A hero narrative insists on a single protagonist in a stable world made as his mirror and aid—the monomyth, in a way, insists on a monomyth.

But magical realism says: pah. It says: the world is both this and that. It says reality slips, shimmers, and dodges; and stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite; and to reclaim this infinite possibility of the tongue and the pen is the ultimate act of liberation.

Really sings off the page. Er, screen.