A few months ago, I watched Just Mercy, the story of an unjustly convicted man on death row and the damn heroic efforts to get him free. It's a spectacular movie. In watching it, two things struck me, hard:
- how the convicted man's community rallied around him, never giving up, pitching in, taking the hits, each heroic in turn trying to get him free
- how the bad guys in the movie simply refused to be decent. They had the chance. They could have done the right thing any of a dozen times. But they just... didn't. It wasn't a grand conspiracy. They didn't even have to work that hard at it.
They simply didn't do the right thing when it was asked of them. That's all it takes. Chilling and brutal and aggravating as hell. But the converse is also true—heroism can be as simple as doing the right thing when it's asked of you.
So much of storytelling structure rotates around the Hero's Journey (who's taking care of the kids during all this journeying? Oh, you mean it's really a Male Hero's Journey? You don't say...), that taking the "chosen one" out of the story could easily feel like there's no story left at all. This is not true, of course, and this narrow view of "how stories are told" highlights the desperate need for more diverse stories, representation for the full spectrum of humanity, including feminine viewpoints, and much more. These stories are, by definition, the unexplored terrain, the fresh viewpoints, the people/characters who've put in the work every step of the way. These are the stories of the people literally keeping the world running.
It took a pandemic for some of us to discover who's an essential worker.
HopePunk already knew.
I love this aspect of HopePunk—this idea that we're all in this story together. The heroes are all of us, not individually (although when it's your turn, you need to do the right thing), but collectively. We are a social species. We live and thrive through cooperation. We are truly, empirically, in this together.
None of us are free unless all of us are free.
HopePunk has that stitched into its DNA, and I love it for that.
Stay safe, stay well, and keep doing your part, whatever that is today.
Sue
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