Gear Grinding: The Chosen One

I’ll confide in you for a moment; tell you an open secret. When I was in school and everyone had to line up to get chosen for team sports, I was usually chosen last. Anyone who knows me won’t find this surprising, but when it comes to being chosen for things I don’t come up first. In fact; I’d wager a lot of people who are reading this post were chosen later rather than sooner.

So, welcome to another installment to gear grinding; a series where I grumble about the over-used tropes that that make me gnash my teeth whenever I read them. On the chopping block today: The chosen one.

Why did I talk about my abysmal athletics history? To illustrate an example of this: in our lives we don’t have the opportunity to be chosen for greatness. Heck, the job-hunting experience is all about rejection, not being chosen, and every responsible adult is supposed to suffer that rite of passage.

What do I mean about the chosen one trope? It usually shows up in fantasy stories, and it has some variation of the theme where some powerful entity or god/universe selects a single individual to be the herald of a new era. The chosen one is often a pathetic young man who constantly bemoans his fate and has a group of people who glom onto him by dint of his chosen-ness. If you’ve read fantasy books or watched many shows or movies, then you’ve encountered this old fall-back. The wheel of time, star wars, the night angel series, and more that I don’t care to point out all feature this in their protagonist.

It’s not a new trope; it stretches back to biblical prophesy thousands of years ago. It’s a compelling idea, for sure, the idea that we are ascribed to greatness by universal order itself. But let’s get real, how many of us have saved the world, or the nation, or a city… or anything through the realization of prophesy? Few to none.

Therein is the rub, relatability. Just like I mentioned in my article about the king and nobility, none of us can relate to being a prophesied figure. Sure, a common theme in these stories is a rejection of the protagonist’s duty to prophesy to make them more approachable; heck, Jonah in the bible tried to run from his duty and was eaten by a whale, and that story is older than any extant nation. But, instead of trying to make an alien experience relatable, just don’t incorporate the contrivance of destiny.

Here’s what I want to see, people who are normal using the things they have at their disposal to do something extraordinary. Instead of having a number of scenes where the protagonist rages against his (and yes, it’s usually a guy) his fate, just have no fate. Then have the normal, non-prophetic protagonist save the everything.

So, in short, I don’t want to see stories about the chosen one, I want to see stories about people choosing to be the one.