Application of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey on Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone and Kentaro Miura's Berserk as examples of dark fantasy and anti-hero archetype

Heroes are common in literature and other media forms. Heroes have a long history from early classical texts to modern stories, and they appear in various forms and genres in traditional texts. Such examples as: Homer's Iliad, Geofrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, J.K Rowling's Harry Potter series and J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit can be considered as traditional text. However, there are texts that are dissimilar than traditional story structures. As there are non-standard story structures, there are also heroes that do not fit into the hero archetype. The non-standards in this sense are the Dark Fantasy sub-genre and the Anti-hero archetype. Both are quite different when compared to traditional hero archetypes and fantasy genre. However, there are questions regarding these topics about the difference from standard structure and their portrayal in popular narratives. Regarding these topic questions, texts like Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone and Berserk are good examples of the Dark Fantasy sub-genre and show remarkable Anti-hero characters. Both texts are beloved by fans in popular culture yet are not discussed or represented in academic studies. The purpose of this thesis is to study and discuss the qualities of the Dark Fantasy sub-genre and Anti-hero archetype in these selected popular texts. For this analysis, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey is going to be used and through this method the qualities regarding Dark Fantasy and Anti-heroes will be discussed.