What's jarring to many people is it isn't the three act hero's journey of a noble savage. The "something" going on is that it isn't a copy of just about the only narrative in western mythos:

1. Departure - from a humble background the subject leaves amid struggle

2. Growth and Initiation - the subject discovers who they are building themselves into the hero they'll become

3. Heroic Return - the now hero makes a return to their beginnings to great success

Instead, Persepolis is a much more realistic story and each act is around three very different kinds of strife experienced by our hero and only in the very end a kind of coda where things go well.

My criticism of the criticism is that Persepolis is tremendously more realistic than the hero's journey and people are jarred by it because it doesn't represent their imagination of what real world struggle is like, the fact that it upsets people is one of those deep core societal issues because of the wrongness of the lens people see the world through.

I think you make a fine analysis, but I would just offer that real life can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant. I don't think her story is poorly written, and I think it is quite memorable.

For reference, I also really enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye, and there are some superficial similarities: a young person is scarred by events in their lives and succumbs to depression. (there are a myriad of differences between the two stories -- I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making one comparison)

Catcher in the Rye is probably best read as an angry teenager: you meet Holden Caufield and he's witty, cynical, funny, defiant, etc. You might fall in love with the character, but what you ultimately learn is that he's a miserable failure; he lost the battle with his depression and so many of the people he was cutting down were just normal, decent people trying to enjoy their lives.

Crucially, we never meet Holden when he is young, bright eyed, and innocent. The narrative structure shows us who he is right away, and we the reader learn that this is actually quite a bad thing throughout the course of the story.

Persepolis works a bit differently: we spend the first half of the book with innocent, bright-eyed Marjane and we fall in love with that character. The character we fall in love with is taken from us by the events of the story, by living unsupervised in exile, etc. It's nothing but sad. It's well-written, it's very memorable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling unhappy about an unhappy turn of events.

Persepolis absolutely DOES use the “hero’s journey” narrative archetype you’re claiming it avoids. The second part even ends by explicitly stating that she has grown into a different person, and is now ready to “face the world” when she leaves her family for the second time.

Indeed, the story is quite Western overall, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the author had already been living in the West for over a decade when she wrote it.

I kind of resent that "western" started to be used as synonym for "America". Specifically this particular schema along with insistence with happy ending is specific feature of American book writing and cinema. Non American literature is much more likely to go out of that schematic.

To whoever is downvoting this: it is not even a criticism. Just a description. When you discuss stories, Americans will frequently insist on the "hero story is the only one possible fun story" and simultaneously interpret bad ending as punishment for moral failure. French wont argue that all that often. And European literature is in general more likely not be that.

And second, using "western" as synonym for "american" wherever the author knows a lot about American and just assumes everything in Europe is exactly the same is something I noticed multiple times on HN.