How to Become a Hero

Becoming a hero is the master plot of modern popular (especially Hollywood) narrative, manifesting in such diverse contemporary forms as coming-of-age tales, superhero origin stories, monomyth quests of refusing the call and returning with the elixir, and “emotional journeys” of self-discovery and stepping up. Yet despite the widespread claims of mythological prototypes for this master plot, classical myth itself is only sporadically interested in its heroes’ childhood and adolescence – and the handful of exceptions, from the Telemachy to the Achilleid, offer an instructive gallery of the narrative and ideological differences between ancient and modern notions of the narrativity of childhood and the agency of youth. Modern fiction for pre-adult readers and viewers has colonised this vacant space in a variety of ways, populating the adolescence of heroes with adventures which overlay classical myths and models with distinctively modern ideas of young-adult narrativity and the nature of heroic growth. Three notable extended cases include the Young Heroes series by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris (2002–2004), the live-action Young Hercules television series (1999), and Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series (1999), all of which offer sustained measurements of the distance between ancient and modern popular conceptions of adolescence, and of how modern mythical constructions of a classical hero’s journey differ from their ancient prototypes.