#I bought some more books recently on jung... doing literal research for my silly fairytale gunsword diet anime show

[onewomancitadel]

I have been having a riveting discussion about Jungian storytelling in both Dune and R/WBY, and if you think I can't make a connection between those two series, watch me try.

Actually for the purposes of comparison, I think there's an enormous gulf between the two tonally, in terms of productions and intentions, genre, literally everything, and even the execution of Jung is entirely different. The Jung in Dune is part of Paul's tragedy and to characterise his magical powers/presience, and his increasing psychological development is part of his increasing descent tragically. The more spiritually/psychologically he is aware of things (as he's a male taught secretly by a Bene Gesserit, he's endowed with special knowledge of the anima for instance), the more his ego is subsumed. @seldomkeep needs to write a post on it so I can reblog it, and then I can write my post about multisexual imagery with the sandworms and Paul and Leto II.

I don't think Herbert was necessarily aware of Campbell by the time he was writing Dune (Campbell really came into awareness with screenwriting after Star Wars) but Paul embarks on an extremely twisted Hero's Journey (and the Hero's Journey is not just a checklist of big heroic acts, it's Jungian) where everything is bad and terrible because Herbert is criticising the Messiah. Before people said the monomyth was overwrought, Herbert was effectively saying the monomyth was overwrought. Lol

But then R/WBY by contrast is really using it as a way of tying together the fairytales/myth (the domain of Jung and Campbell) in the setting and to describe the relationships between characters, most prominently the wound of Salem and Ozma on the world (the symbolic anima/animus split) which is literally a universalised unconscious wound. It is actually quite literal in a fashion because different characters literally represent different parts of the unconscious, and integration of the Shadow is literally represented as community reintegration/redemption. But it's all actually very light and positive because all of it's meant for psychological harmony.

Same stuff, completely different tune.