Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey and the De-Masc-ification of Female Love Interests

 Ever since we first talked about Maureen Murdock’s template of the Heroine’s Journey, there’s been something that bothered me about how centered it was in said character’s perceived “masculinity” and “femininity”. The way the template is written makes it easily interpretable that in order for the main female character to really complete her journey, she is bound to regain said “rejected femininity” in the end, even if she genuinely does not want to be feminine at the beginning of her story. From my experience, the shojo romance genre is notorious for using this type of plot-line for their female love interests, and I wanted to talk about how this version of the Heroine’s Journey can be seen as dismissive of other types of presentation. For this blog post I’ll be mostly referencing the character Haruhi Fujioka from Ouran HighSchool Host Club, OHSHC for the sake of not having to type out the whole thing each time.

(quick disclaimer that I haven't read/watched OHSHC in a little bit so if some of the details are off sorry)

OHSHC begins with Haruhi already “separated from the feminine”. Her first appearance is more masculine as she’s cut her hair from getting gum in it,  and doesn’t dress as formally as the other Ouran students due to being on a scholarship and not having as much money. Haruhi is thus assumed to be a boy, and then when she breaks a vase belonging to the host club music room she is told she has to join said club in order to repay her debt. 

While Haruhi’s birth gender is revealed by the end of the first episode/chapter, she quickly adapts to her new Identification of the Masculine, and “gathers allies” by making friends with the rest of the members of the host club (pictured above) as well as some additional characters in the cast. Her road of trials consists of the various hijinks she is put through during the majority of the anime/manga for its more lighthearted side of the plot. At first glance, Haruhi seems to fit Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey quite well, which is fine, but my problem with this template in relation to Haruhi is what it means for characters like her and what they represent to go through this journey.

Like I said earlier, Haruhi is a character who doesn’t really care much about what gender she is perceived as through her presentation, with one of her most famous quotes on her wiki page being “It's better to be recognized by who you are than be recognized by what sex you are.” Despite this, once her birth gender gets revealed Haruhi is increasingly put in situations where the fact that she’s a girl takes on a looming focus on the scene. It is also very often suggested to her that she wear more feminine clothes by other characters, despite her general nonchalance about her appearance. This trend is even further pushed when Haruhi becomes an object of romantic affections, as a lot of the time whenever we see Haruhi in more feminine outfits it's when she’s a target of romantic fanservice. By the end of the manga Haruhi has even grown out her hair and we see her dress femininely a lot more. 

Haruhi never really seems to be explicitly uncomfortable with dressing feminine, and yet, why is this trend of her presenting more feminine an issue? I believe the biggest problem here is the framing. 

This is what Haruhi looks like at the end of the OHSHC manga, she’s finished her Heroine’s Journey, gained back her femininity, and importantly, is in a heterosexual-seeming romantic relationship with her boyfriend. She’s not the only one to have gone through this transformation, as I’ve seen many female characters become less masculine-presenting as they eventually found their happy ending with their male love interest. This brings up some implications, the main one being that the heroine can only be happy, happy in a hetero relationship no less, when she has become feminine again. While it is obviously untrue that the only way to be happy is to be feminine in a hetero relationship, the over representation of the trend could affect the way some women present socially for fear that things may not go well for them if they don’t eventually circle back to that femininity. In short, it could be construed to be an ostracization of GNC women. While Murdock may not have intended for this to happen, her template’s focus on the heroine regaining her femininity, even if hypothetically said heroine didn’t really have an interest in the first place, may have been an influence to this trend.