If you take an introductory anthropology or religion class, chances are that your professor will at some point bring up Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth, boiling it down to “every culture shares these aspects of myth and all stories in mythology share archetypes that are common across time and space”.

And since the person telling you this is supposed to be an expert of course, you don’t/can’t question them.

However, the idea of the monomyth as it applies to myth (and the mythological creatures we see in urban fantasy series) tends to be incredibly Western-centric and therefore, the monomyth as Campbell developed it and as authors have adapted it, doesn’t apply to every single myth out there.

Case in point? The supposed universality of the vampire. Read More »