A problem that has come up recently in movies that are sequels to beloved movies, but also in more long-running books, is the problem of how to write the heroes now that they’re older and have already gone through a character arc. The standard Hollywood approach is to just reset the character so they can go through the same arc again, since (approximately) the only thing Hollywood writers know how to write is the coming-of-age story which is sometimes called the Hero’s Journey, loosely modeled after Joseph Campbell. This sort of mistake is not limited to Hollywood writers, though.

The problem that all of these writers have is that they don’t understand that human beings have life stages. (As an aside, this is also why they tend toward stupid political philosophies that would work great if everyone was born, lived, and died in their twenties.) The Hero’s Journey as it is usually described is by no means a universal story for heroes, but it is an archetypal story in that it is (very approximately) the adolescent maturation process. This is why the call to adventure has supernatural aid to overcome threshold guardians and find a mentor; people must be called to adulthood by someone other than their parents, who erect a barrier (a minor barrier, if they’re doing it right) to ensure that the child only starts when they’re ready. Once they cross this, they must then find a figure who can teach them how to be an adult (using the preparation which their parents gave them). The descent to the underworld/death & rebirth is something everyone does when they are finally acting like an adult and try and fail and pick themselves up and learn to deal with real failure. Etc.

All of this is proper to the maturation process of an adolescent. That is where it stops, though, because the point of it is that at the end of it the adolescent is now an adult. This makes any attempt to do this with an older hero fundamentally wrong. (The desire to do this also explains why so many older heroes are portrayed as broken and dispirited old men; it’s putting them in the position to go on this kind of maturation process again.)

This is not to say that an older hero can’t learn and improve. They can. What they learn and improve at are things appropriate to what they already know. There are several possible areas for this, but they all involve a focus on others. The short version is that an older hero can learn to be a leader, a mentor, or a parent. He is someone who has learned to achieve what he sets out to do; now he must pass this on and help other people become people who can achieve things worth achieving.

In all of these variations of passing on what one has learned there are two key features to development as a teacher. The first is what would properly be called condescension, from its etymological root of “coming down to be with”. That is, he must learn how little an inexperienced person knows. You can view this in high theological terms of being an image of God taking the form of a slave, if you like, but even if you don’t, it is a truism of teachers that they must learn to (imaginatively) put themselves in the position of someone who is ignorant. That is, to teach someone, they need to be able to squint and see the subject they have mastered only dimly, as through a mirror, darkly. That is, they need to be able to imagine being someone who knows so little that he needs to be taught, while still remembering what he knows about the subject so he can teach it. In some metaphorical sense, if he is to save his pupil from ignorance, he must unite two natures in one person: the lower nature able to reach the pupil, the higher nature able to lift him up.

The second key feature in a master becoming a teacher is that he must love his student. I mean love in the sense of ἀγάπη (agape; Latin: charitas)—willing the good of the other for his sake. Condescension is a challenge of skill that the master faces; loving is what makes him vulnerable, and thus interesting in the story. Loving his student is also what will make the relationship between master and student complex. Since the master wills the good of his student for his student’s sake, this necessarily means that his actions are beyond the student’s understanding. It is exactly his mastery of the thing he’s teaching which means that he can see goods his student cannot see, and so his actions must be mysterious to the student. This creates work for both sides; the master must win the trust of the student while the student must have faith in his teacher. The student must act in faith because his teacher must do some teaching as well as winning of his trust. (I’m using “faith” in the ordinary sense, that is, believing what one knows to be true when the evidence for it is no longer present.) If all the teacher ever did was win the pupil’s trust, the pupil wouldn’t learn anything^†.

As I alluded to above, all of this holds whether the older hero is a leader, a mentor, or a parent. The exact responsibilities of each will vary, but all of them have these two overarching characteristics that will form the main points of interest in the story. A parent changing diapers is not interesting; neither is a mentor setting up the targets before the student practices aiming and neither is a leader doing paperwork so that everyone clearly knows what his orders are. Getting his child to be on time may well be the greatest challenge a parent faces, just as completing his paperwork done may be the lion’s share of labor for a leader. None the less, they are not interesting, and they are not interesting because they are easy for a human being to remember. It is the truths that we have difficulty holding onto that we enjoy being reminded of.

This, then, is how older heroes should be written. It is far more difficult to write than it is to write a coming-of-age story, for the simple reason that it is far more difficult to be a good teacher than it is to come of age. It’s not impossible, however, and if you want to write older characters well, it’s the only option^‡. All of the other options consist of writing characters who never grew up. They’re not interesting, they’re just sad. And people don’t really want flawed characters.

---

†This, incidentally, is what makes parts of The Karate Kid so great. Is doing household chores actually a good way to learn how to fight? Of course not. But it is symbolically perfect. Daniel does things whose relationship to his goals are completely unintelligible to him—except for seeming to be selfishness on the part of his teacher—and it is only through acting in faith and patience that he receives the benefit of Mr. Miagi’s knowledge. It would have been far more realistic had Mr. Miagi made Daniel strong through having him lift and carry heavy things which Daniel didn’t see the point in, but it would not have been nearly as symbolically intelligible. And The Karate Kid was a movie, not an instructional manual. The job of movies is to teach big truths in a short time, not to teach a large number of small truths in a long time. If you want to know how to actually get good at fighting, you’ll need to hire a teacher and spend years.

‡ I am assuming that the character is too old to still be a hero in the more direct sense. If that is not the case and he can still best opponents in direct combat—or whatever version of that is appropriate to the kind of hero he is—then it is also quite viable to tell the simple story of one of his adventures. Indeed, this can be quite fun, especially with people assuming he can’t do what he is perfectly capable of doing. An excellent example of this is the Miss Marple stories. People assume, because of her age, that Miss Marple has no idea what’s going on. In reality her wits are still sharp and she’s a better detective than any of the younger people around her, and her constant besting of them is quite amusing. The same thing could easily work for a wizard who only comes out of retirement when younger mages can’t get the job done. You can probably stretch this for a sword master, but only up to a point. I would trust a fifty year old fencing master to carve up a thirty year old swordsman, and I don’t think it’s stretching credibility too much for an especially talented sixty year old master of the blade who has kept in practice to beat a thirty year old mere proficient. I think this begins to lose credibility once the old hero is pushing seventy. That said, it is widely reported that Jack Dempsey, at the age of 74, knocked down two young guys who tried to mug him as he was getting into a cab, so you never know.