Looking at the "hero" arch

We have spent several class periods discussing the different roles that characters play in movies/books and so on. One of the more interesting story archs in my opinion was that of the hero. I recently wrote a paper in my Advanced Composition class discussing this particular arch. We had your everyday guy who was told by an outsider that he needed to perform a specific task and he was of course reluctant at first. It wasn't until circumstances that threatened his "people" (I am discussing the character Doyle from the show Angel who in this particular case is a "half-demon", and in the episode a group of half-demons are being threatened by "pure demons") that he came to accept his role. He was aided through the episode by his companions until the end, where he had to make the ultimate sacrifice, his life, for the greater good. In my paper I broke down the arch much more specifically and pointed out the similarities and differences between Doyle's arch and the typical hero arch. The hero arch is one that I took for granted, never really paying attention to it in media. After the discussions we had though, it was funny how obvious the arch was in this particular episode.