It looks like I’ve been using these terms in some bastardized hybrid of Campbell’s formulation of the hero’s journey and Vogler’s (which is the one I learned in school), so don’t take this as canonical, this is just what I look for:

For me, the “meeting with the goddess” moment isn’t the kinda trivial “this will be important later” exchange like Frodo meeting Galadriel, but an experience of pure joy in the midst of utter sorrow, so like when Moana’s grandma appears as a ghostly manta ray and reignites her determination. In romance stories, this is where the couple gets that perfect date where everything seems effortless and transcendent.

It can take many forms, but the important thing is just that this is a glimpse of what victory could look like, without having actually achieved it yet. It’s a chance for us to see the true, unbridled motivation of the protagonist in a way that doesn’t feel contrived like just stating it to the audience, and it usually has a stark contrast to the horrors that are currently going on in the overall arc of the story. It can be one of the most memorable moments outside of the climax of the fight against the “big bad”.

It’s usually either right before or right after the “all is lost” moment (well, the first one – the one before they really form their initial plan to take down the “big bad” and see that initial plan fail and have to pivot to something that incorporates their mastery of their original self into their new mastery of the supernatural world they dove into).

My take on “atonement with the father” is more conventional. It’s that moment where the hero says “I’m going forward with this journey even if you think it’s foolish, I’ve learned to love myself for exactly who I am in a way that you never could”. If you imagine a scene where someone says “Don’t you dare walk out that door”, and the hero does it anyway, that’s the atonement with the father.

It doesn’t have to be a literal parent or even parental figure. The important thing is just that it shows the hero recognizing that they had previously accepted some artificial constraint on who they were able to be, or what they were able to do, and they’re ready to move past that constraint.

Sometimes this is linked together with a “temptation” moment, where the nay-saying figure has an appealing offer like “Give this up, come home with me and take over the company like you always wanted” or whatever.

The most powerful ones, I think, are less about the authority figure and more about confronting something within the hero themself.

The reason that I like this moment in particular is that it has to be tied to something from their old life, before they started their adventure. So it sets up a contrast for later on, when they’ll have to incorporate something positive from their old life in order to defeat the big bad for real. Here, in this moment before the big battle, they’re discarding something about their old life – what will they choose to keep and emphasize later on?

In Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill rejects the abusive relationship with his father figure Yondu and later on embraces his friendship with his new buddies in order to defeat the big bad. It’s a nice little push-and-pull: he’s becoming more self-reliant, and careful in his social entanglements… but not to the point where he’s forsaking the need for friends and teamwork.

Anyway, those are the two moments I watch for. One that’s a starry-eyed vision of what their journey’s victory could look like, just at the moment where they need that boost. And one that’s a sober self-evaluation and rejection of past behavior. If they do it right, both of those moments should have some kind of echo in act 3, so most of the time I feel like if they nail those two moments the rest of the story is probably gonna at least be good if not great.