The new Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit is a bona fide cultural phenomenon. 

If you haven’t seen the show, chances are you will soon. To make a long story short, The Queen’s Gambit is the story of an orphaned young girl, Beth Harmon, who learns how to play chess from the orphanage’s janitor. As she comes of age, she also ascends to the very top of the world of competitive chess and becomes a self-sufficient, if troubled, woman along the way. 

It is styled and acted to perfection. I devoured it in a few hours on the treadmill. 

And apparently, I’m not the only one: 

So here’s the question: Why do we love it so damn much? 

1. We’ve had no superhero films this year (#becausecovid). If you love a good old-fashioned hero’s journey, and you feel that soul-level resonance with the call to adventure, quests and the victorious return arc of that genre, the story of Beth Harmon does it all very nicely. 

I’ve long felt that superhero films are this culture’s way of talking about God. Through them, the masses get a taste of transcendence, meaning, immortality, higher and nobler values, but also the dark shadows and forces of humanity. 

This year, we got a lot of real-world superheroes, like the front-line medical workers and the grocery cashiers and the delivery people… and John Lewis and Chadwick Boseman and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. 

All of these people have caused this year to be a special moment in our generation, in terms of the way hero stories influence us and influence humanity.

Because as much as I love them, mass-market superhero films turn these meaningful, eternal topics into licensed characters, cheaply commoditizing transcendence and demoting these noble concepts to a two-hour block of so-called fantasy and child’s play. 

Without the films and with all these real-life heroics, this was the year we realized that the transformational acts and arcs that move human evolution forward are lived out every day by real people in real life, mostly in ways that will never make the news. 

These people inspire us to be better humans. And these stories — fictional or not — inspire us to create better worlds. The Queen’s Gambit might have just made you want to dress better. But it might have made you want to live in a world where men support and cultivate the genius they see in women, and inspired you to give some thought as to how you might help create that world. And it might have also beckoned to the genius within you to stop hiding and come out into the world.

2. The story itself was a supernatural force that demanded to be told… and didn’t stop until it was. If you’ve ever read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, you’ll recall her talking about how some creative projects have an almost supernatural force of their own and will hunt down creators who are receptive, compliant and willing to serve as conduits. 

For example, Gilbert tells how she herself had an inspired idea for a novel, then put the project on hold. Years later, another author published a nearly identical storyline to the one Gilbert had been writing, with shockingly similar specifics. Given that there was no earthly way the writer who ended up publishing the book could have known about Gilbert’s incomplete draft, it was as though the story itself was a supernatural force and would not stop until it found a writer who was willing to write it.

The Queen’s Gambit — the story itself — was similarly relentless in becoming a Netflix series. The story came out in novel form almost 40 years ago. Around 2007 it was being adapted for film as the directorial debut of Heath Ledger. After his suicide, the project stalled out. But the story was relentless, and ultimately found its way to the masses via Netflix, during the pandemic, at a moment of peak hunger for a smart, stylish story about a woman unleashing her unique personality and genius.

Everyone I’ve ever coached had some kind of creation that was trying to come through them. I personally find great peace in knowing that if we stop resisting, these great things will come through us. And if we don’t, we needn’t worry: They will come to life. And another inspiration will come to us and through us, all in Divine Order and Timing.

3. You’re a Ruler. Archetypes are ancient patterns of human psyche, emotion, and behavior that you can see over and over again in myths, stories, and real life throughout human history. Carl Jung listed 12 primary Archetypes, and you’re probably familiar with many of them as literary tropes, like Ruler, Lover, Rebel and Hero.

For example, when psychologists talk about your Inner Child, we’re talking about the child archetype within you. 

We all have some of all the Archetypes within us. And we all also have dominant Archetypes, Archetypes that influence us very little, and even Archetypes we suppress and repress for various reasons. 

We find resonance with characters in sacred stories, fiction, and history who share our archetypes. And we can often download incredible insight for our own, real lives from studying fictional characters and historical figures who share our dominant Archetypes or who typify the Archetypes we need to dial up and embrace in the context of a problem or situation we’re facing at the moment.

For example, if you are a born Alchemist, you might love Harry Potter. 

If you have a dominant Inner Child, you might love Peter Pan.

And if the Ruler archetype runs strong in your Divine Inner Coding, as it does in mine, you might naturally gravitate toward programs like The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit. 

Beth is not literal royalty. But she becomes the figurative Queen of her art. And like many Queen characters, she overcomes repressive influences, she learns to harness the power of her “court” and she ultimately builds her own empire by bringing her unique spirit and gifts fully online.

And she also struggles (spoiler alert). She struggles with fear, self-doubt, addiction, the death of her birth mother and, later, her adoptive mother.

Stories are powerful tools for our personal development and spiritual journeys. Very few of us are taught, specifically, how to distill and integrate wisdom from our daily lives and longer life arcs and the collective unconscious, so that we can rediscover the power we came here with. We were never taught how to do inner work. 

One way to do it is to use stories. We can learn from the characters’ struggles and triumphs, and use that wisdom to fulfill our dreams and actualize our potentials.

Archetypes are one specific tool you can use to do your inner work with stories. You can learn about the Archetypes. You can interview them. You can dial them up or down as needed. You can even “study” your Archetypes by getting intentional about watching and reading about characters you relate to or want to be more like. 

That’s why the sacred texts of all the holy traditions are 90% story and 10% directives. Because stories activate the generations of wisdom contained in the Archetypes, and help us access it for our everyday problems and dreams and lives. 

So yeah. Those are a few reasons why you might love The Queen’s Gambit. 

(And the fashion doesn’t hurt, either.) 

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: If you want to discover your own Archetypes and learn how to work with them, take my FREE Sacred Archetypes Quiz, here. 

The Sacred Money Archetypes are framed as helping you understand why you do what you do when it comes to money, business and career.

But the way you do money is the way you do everything.

So when you take the quiz, you’ll find insight and wisdom into your own inner workings on any topic. Try it and see.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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