What's the Western 'Journey to the West?'
Seems like Journey to the West is referenced and copied so much in Eastern cultures without any fear of it getting old or going stale.
Is there something similar for Westerners? Is there some Shakespearean story we keep re-imagining again and again without shame?
The Canterbury Tales
You see the theme a lot, sometimes quite literal, like Hyperion, sometimes just a group on an adventure where each member has a story, like LOTR. Also in movies like The Breakfast Club, Love Actually or Snatch
Hyperion is so fucking good, I recently re-read the entire series again.
Canterbury Tales also has some amazingly good stories despite it's age. I guess some things are timeless!
If by “western” you mean “everything west of China”, then the Shahnameh.
If you mean “European/Mediterranean”, then Homer.
If you specifically mean “western Europe”, then yeah—probably Shakespeare.
If you're okay restricting it to Britain, someone mentioned King Arthur.
Anything can be Shakespeare if you look hard enough
Hamlet is a favorite to repackage, I felt like I unlocked a cheat code to understanding media after I read it as a kid
Chronicles of Riddick was Macbeth.
I never thought about it until you said it, but yeah.
The Illiad and the Odyssey for sure. Pretty sure Homer is just the concept of a person that we think might have written them because all those stories were primarily told orally and told slightly differently with each recalling
The Odyssey for sure, for a given value of "west".
The Arthurian legends come to mind.
King Arthur isn't "one story" though. King Arthur is closer to 1100s-era fanart / fanfiction culture.
EVERYONE was making King Arthur stories back then. And guess what? They contradicted. That's why we have Excalibur vs Sword in the Stone (sometimes they're the same sword. Sometimes they aren't. Its a big contradiction because there's no singular author).
The Chinese Great Novel "Journey to the West" is truly one story by one author with multiple millennia of copycats. Meanwhile, King Author is basically a millennia of copycats without anyone knowing who the original was to begin with. Very different fundamentally.
The odyssey
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The plot of Hamlet gets reused again and again.
Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you're thinking of?
Black Panther is clearly Hamlet in reverse.
Even got the spirit of ancestors / ghost scene, kings, wrong princes, duels and lots of killing.
Tolkien. Copied over and over again. Essentially invented the fantasy genre.
The heros journey.
Its been copied so much no one really knows what the original was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey#/media/File:Heroesjourney.svg
I'd like to throw Goethe's Faust into the ring. Someone being seduced by the devil while they think they're playing the devil to do good deeds is a classic trope.
