Becoming The Main Character

Achilles, the greatest warrior in Greek mythology, knew his fate: stay and fight at Troy and die young with eternal glory, or go home and live a long, forgotten life.
He ended up with the glory and the early grave. Then, in the land of the dead, he told Odysseus it wasn't worth it. It's one of the most powerful scenes in Homer's Odyssey, and Christopher Nolan left it out of his film.
This episode goes back to the Iliad and the Trojan War to find out why Achilles ended up there. He thought he was making reasoned choices, but his passions were deciding for him the whole time.
Most of us live the same way: sure of what we want in theory, hedging in practice, and letting our worst days settle the questions we never answered. Achilles shows what that costs, and what it takes to make a choice that's truly your own.
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Becoming The Main Character is a podcast that asks: what if fiction was so much more than just "fake" stories? What if every story was a simulation in the matrix? A chance to understand more of the world without having to live the experiences ourselves?
Here at BTMC, we examine the greatest fiction ever written through a lens that pays attention to the character choices and how they ultimately lead to our heroes and villains getting what they want or being defeated.
Subscribe and follow along!

In a continuation of our series on why mythologies and folklore are useful to the identity of a culture, we continue diving into the stories that have cemented themselves in the American mind.
Even if these particular stories are unfamiliar, their essence will resonate with the stories you think of as foundational to what it is to be "An American", the same way the stories of Hercules or Perseus defined what it was to be "Greek".
This episode is fascinating as you realize how much the idea of the frontier was a building block to our identity as a country even now, when the frontier wilderness has all been mapped and populated.
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Becoming The Main Character is a podcast that asks: what if fiction was so much more than just "fake" stories? What if every story was a simulation in the matrix? A chance to understand more of the world without having to live the experiences ourselves?
Here at BTMC, we examine the greatest fiction ever written through a lens that pays attention to the character choices and how they ultimately lead to our heroes and villains getting what they want or being defeated.
Subscribe and follow along!

We've been floating down the river having a pretty good time so far, but the events of the last chapter have sobered Huckleberry Finn up a bit to the uglier side of life.
But we're back on the raft with Jim, with more people to meet, more life lessons to be experienced, and more dangers to be faced.
Let's settle in to the rest of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn------------------------
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Becoming The Main Character is a podcast that asks: what if fiction was so much more than just "fake" stories? What if every story was a simulation in the matrix? A chance to understand more of the world without having to live the experiences ourselves?
Here at BTMC, we examine the greatest fiction ever written through a lens that pays attention to the character choices and how they ultimately lead to our heroes and villains getting what they want or being defeated.
Subscribe and follow along!

What happens when you take a story that is controversial enough to be frequently banned from libraries and mix it with an author who doesn’t care what you think about his writing?
You get Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.
But why is a story about a boy floating down a river so scrutinized?
Some reasons are obvious, but others are less so. All I know is I found the character of Huck to be a great study in choosing what matters to you.
So come on in, the water is fine...for now.

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Becoming The Main Character is a podcast that asks: what if fiction was so much more than just "fake" stories? What if every story was a simulation in the matrix? A chance to understand more of the world without having to live the experiences ourselves?
Here at BTMC, we examine the greatest fiction ever written through a lens that pays attention to the character choices and how they ultimately lead to our heroes and villains getting what they want or being defeated.
Subscribe and follow along!

Why does a culture need its own stories? Can't it just borrow someone else's?

The USA is too young to have formulated a mythology like classic civilizations did, and yet from our early years we still ended up creating fictional stories that are inherently ours.

Why?

In this special episode to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation I grew up in, I explore a couple of reasons for this, and I share examples of stories so baked into our belief system of what it is to be "American" that we largely consider them to be true.
Because, as I'm discovering, it's not enough to have a belief system...it needs to be ours.
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Becoming The Main Character is a podcast that asks: what if fiction was so much more than just "fake" stories? What if every story was a simulation in the matrix? A chance to understand more of the world without having to live the experiences ourselves?

Here at BTMC, we examine the greatest fiction ever written through a lens that pays attention to the character choices and how they ultimately lead to our heroes and villains getting what they want or being defeated.

Subscribe and follow along!