The Heroine's Journey Breaks Boundaries

     

Meet Michael: First Male Demon of the Heroine's Journey

  

Can immortal demons experience the hero’s journey? Even more so, can male immortal demons experience the heroine’s journey? I personally feel that this is not not possible, and for the sake of my double negative, we should again turn to the TV show, The Good Place, featuring Michael, the main demon. After years of laborious research and watching many episodes of The Good Place, I have found that Michael’s narrative seems to follow Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s heroine’s journey rather than the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey seems more influenced by outside forces, whereas the heroine’s journey is internally driven and each phase seems to be initiated by self agency. 

Even at the beginning of the heroine’s journey, the heroine is in control. The first two stages are like prerequisites to her adventure, but both are summoned by the heroine herself. The first stage is the “Illusion of a Perfect World” in which the heroine creates a coping strategy to convince herself that she indeed lives in a “perfect” world. Although her perfect world is an illusion, it is one she created herself. The second stage is when her coping strategies fail, and her contrived bliss is shattered, much like how the magic dies when the magician pulls a gopher out of the wrong end of the hat. The heroine’s adventure hasn’t started yet, but we already see how the life she leads is dictated by her choices. This continues, as she is also the one to initiate the third stage of the cycle, “The Awakening & Preparing of the Journey.” The heroine begins her own “call to adventure” when she realizes that it is time to--as they used to say back in the day--“toughen up,” and fix this particularly sticky life of hers. This is unlike the hero in the hero’s journey who is thrust into the “Call to Adventure” by an outside force. 

 In The Good Place, Michael begins as a demon with demonic morals, but as the show develops, he learns what it means to be good, even if there is no promise of a reward. The ownership seen in the heroine’s journey is present in Michael’s narrative. Michael’s goal is to gain success as a first-time Bad Place architect--demons who design ways to torture humans in the Bad Place. The usual Bad Place torture is through physical means, e.g., making and stuffing humans into hotdogs, but Michael aims to torture humans emotionally through human incompatibility. He creates a fake Good Place within the Bad Place, chooses four humans who are stark opposites, and forces them to live together for eternity. Despite skepticism from his boss, Shawn, Michael believes that his fake Good Place is an ingenious form of torture because it’s more subtle than the human hotdogs and perhaps even more deliciously malicious.

 Michael’s confidence in his fake Good Place is like the “Illusion of a Perfect World.” In this case, he has quite literally created a supposedly perfect world to torture humans. In his own heroine’s journey, he is living through Satan-colored glasses, convinced that he is a brilliant demon who has designed a flawlessly wicked torture (both cool and evil). Unfortunately, the humans eventually figure out that he had tricked them, bringing us to the second stage of the cycle: the illusion fails the heroine. 

If one presses the arrow button of a remote and fast forwards a couple of episodes, we see that Michael ends up in the fourth stage of the heroine’s journey, “The Descent--Passing the Gates of Judgement,” which is a critical point of self-development for the heroine, for they begin to see themselves through a new perspective. For Michael, he experiences this inner growth when he takes classes to learn how to become a better person after defecting to the humans’ side. During one particular class, Michael is forced to think about death in order to understand why humans care about the consequences of our actions, which is the first step to becoming a better person; however, death is a foreign concept for Michael because he is an immortal demon, and he struggles to comprehend the meaning of death. To put it into his perspective, the humans have Michael think about Retirement, which is the equivalent of dying in the demon world, only there is a flaming hot ladle and multiple suns involved. Once Michael realizes that going through Retirement would mean he no longer exists, he goes into a state of shock and fear and has an existential crisis. His fear of mortality causes him to question the meaning of his existence, for he realizes that he is not as immortal as he had believed. He, a demon capable of bringing eternal pain to those in the afterlife, is as fragile as the mortal humans. Indeed, Michael experiences an internal conflict that the heroine is expected to feel in “The Descent” stage of the journey. 

I don’t know if Ms. Victoria Lynn Schmidt would appreciate my interpretation of her heroine’s journey, but I believe that the heroine’s journey can be for all folks, male demons too. Aw, happy ending.