Luca is a classic example of a Hero's Journey story structure: It begins in the Ordinary World (the…
Everything that happens, particularly in Act Two, serves Luca's character arc as he grows in confidence and embraces his innate curiosty…
Luca is a classic example of a Hero's Journey story structure: It begins in the Ordinary World (the ocean realm of the sea monsters). The Protagonist (Luca) yearns to see what life is like above the surface of the ocean, his curiosity eventually taking him to live in Human Town (the New World). He returns home in the sense that he bonds with his parents and they come to understand and accept his own ambitions. Thus, while Luca does not actually head back home, instead going off to school with Giula, he has found a psychological sense of "home" in that he has embraced an authentic aspect of his own psyche.
Everything that happens, particularly in Act Two, serves Luca's character arc as he grows in confidence and embraces his innate curiosty about life in the Above World.
As Joseph Campbell observed about the hero's journey:
The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world… [Now] it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery.
All of the events in the Plotline are fundamentally about Luca's inner journey, discovering what is essential to his authentic nature. It has been there all along, evidenced from the beginning in his curiosity about life above the ocean's surface.
Indeed, all of the characters with whom the Luca intersects on his journey serve his personal transformation, as we shall see in a later discussion about the story's characters and its archetypes.
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