This came up somehow in my RSS feed, though I couldn’t tell you from which source. Oh well. It’s about Campbell’s monomythic Hero’s Journey model as being not so universal after all. I don’t especially have a horse in that race, but I liked this part of the article most:

“Indian narrative forms are radically different from Western forms,” Seager writes. “Watch a Bollywood movie. One moment the film is a romance, then a thriller, then a musical, then a martial arts movie — confusing for a Western audience but totally natural for an Indian audience.” He defines these narrative forms as “eminently comfortable with complexity, non-linearity and the non-binary nature of being.” Where hero’s journeys deal in dualities, with the protagonist abandoning one worldview in favor of another, defeating the dragon or being defeated by it, Indian stories — shaped by Hinduism and Buddhism — do not typically present their conflicts in the framework of a choice.

The traditional starting point of common narrative forms (especially in Hindi) is a religious/spiritual ritual invocation that establishes an emotive and spiritual sensibility for what follows. The ensuing narrative is most often dendritic in nature, offering multiple diegeses (worldviews) exploring that original invocation, designed to accommodate many differing perspectives and worldviews. “Closure” is a re-invocation or adaptation of the opening invocation. And so the “end” is a new beginning.

This reminds me a lot of both the structure of The Lost Direction, and the AI lore books more broadly as being sort of like the outward branching dendritic structure from that central core which TLD represents.

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