“Essentially, it’s my sneaky little ‘not all stories have to be masculine spear stories,’” Clark, who also wrote the finale teleplay, told me. It’s all mixed together, the good and the bad.” Which is that I killed someone … If time was more like an ocean, then you can’t just pick one moment out. Because if it is, it’s just the moments before, and the moments after the worst thing I ever did. “When you’ve done bad things, you hope that that’s not really how it is at all.

“You think of all the moments in your life as dots on a line,” she says. But even if she hadn’t, it would have been obvious during Marrisville’s going-away party for our gang, when Sonia delivers a monologue that finally persuades Yorick to let go of his loyalty to Beth and sleep with her. I know this because she posted a photo of it to her Instagram stories recently. Y: The Last Man showrunner Eliza Clark has read this essay. “Instead of heroes,” she writes, “they have people in them.” Sure, conflict remains, but it’s a means to a more truthful, universal end. Carrier-bag stories, by contrast, buck rugged individualism altogether. When we understand culture “as originating from the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing,” it makes sense that our approach to storytelling would prioritize conflict, too. Nobody was telling stories about gathering, so the hunters’ stuck. While everyone else was busy cooking and raising children and straight vibing, these men went looking for a fight and in the resulting tales fashioned themselves the main characters. People (men) who took big hunting risks didn’t do so out of necessity there was plenty of food. Early humans were mostly gatherers, so the first tools were most likely containers, or “carrier bags,” yet culture has taught us that the first human tools were weapons. She argues that while epic tales of heroism are indeed exciting, they’ve evolved from a narrow, patriarchal understanding of what it means to be human. Le Guin tears into our culture’s obsession with the hero’s journey. That quote comes from a 1986 essay called “ The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which Ursula K. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero.

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