You’re Not Special: Why More Movies Now Subvert “Chosen One” Narratives

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From Fast Company:

Most children of the ’80s are well familiar with “Chosen One” narratives. They grew up swinging lightsabers in an echo of Luke Skywalker, and went on to witness Neo learn he’s the long-prophesied One.

. . . .

Looking at recent films like Star Wars: The Last JediThe Lego Movie, and Blade Runner 2049, Panels to Pixels sees a fascinating trend. The traditional narrative of the Chosen One is being subverted in favor of films where ordinary folks turn out to not be cosmically special and rise to a challenge anyway. In the video, the host ties this developing trend to filmmakers being more tuned into millennial mindset–their actual way of thinking beyond stereotypes of safe spaces and avocado toast.

. . . .

[Millennials] are disillusioned but hopeful–and they require a different balm for the soul than being assured they had the magic in them all along.

Link to the rest at Fast Company
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PG admits the video could be a bit shorter, but observed possible implications for fantasy and sci-fi authors.

In a counter-argument, PG notes the continuing mega-sales of Harry Potter and its many progeny.

22 thoughts on “You’re Not Special: Why More Movies Now Subvert “Chosen One” Narratives”

  1. “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Said by both Mark Twain and the Chosen One Narrative.

  2. Yeah, I have never been much of a fan of the chosen one narrative, The idea that only one person can possibly save an entire group or civilisation seems pretty arrogant to me, especially when it seems that the supporting characters play just as much of a roll if not more so in the story.
    The only exception to this I found is Harry Potter, but there, the author takes great pains to develop the supporting characters and makes it clear that Harry would not have gotten to where he was had not been for them

    • I somewhat agree with you about HP. The side characters are pretty well developed and somewhat have their own stories. But in the end, they only exist to support or challenge Harry in some way, and the final book insists “all is well” in a general sense just because things turned out okay for Harry, regardless of how terribly things ended for so many of the side characters. It’s still an extremely Chosen One-centric story.

      I think that these days, for a Chosen One story to really work, the other characters need to be not just fully fleshed out, but to have their own arcs and purposes irrespective of the Chosen One. Let them have parts to play, let those parts be important, and don’t kill them off as soon as they’ve played them, nor to give some angst to the Chosen One. Show that even if you’re not the Chosen One, you can still be important, your choices still matter, and you can get a worthwhile victory or happy ending. You’re not just a disposable seat-filler who gets killed when the Chosen One needs to stand heroically on his own or after you’ve given all your exposition. There can still be Chosen Ones, but the Chosen One needs to not be the only real character in the story anymore.

  3. I don’t think the Chosen One trope is going away. Might not be as popular now, but it’s pretty much always been around, and I think it will continue to do so, because everyone likes to imagine that they’re the Chosen One.

    I think part of the reason it may be less popular right now (aside from just being tired) is that people are less likely to automatically identify with the protagonist, and the message that Chosen One stories send is that if you weren’t chosen to be special before your birth or by some magical power beyond your control, you’re just a sidekick (or worse, random casualty) in someone else’s story. People still want to think they can be special. What I’m seeing now is that people want to think they have some control over whether they’re special or not. Chosen One stories say it doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not the Chosen One, you’re not the person who gets to save the day and have wild success.

    With all this talk of wanting more diversity and representation, I keep seeing that some people have trouble identifying with people who don’t look like them. I don’t really get that, myself, but for these people, if they’re a chubby, average-looking black girl and all the heroes of Chosen One stories are boys, slim people, pretty people, white people, etc., what those stories are saying to them is, “You’re not the Chosen One, and since you’re not, you’re stuck with a mediocre, meaningless life, and nothing you can do will change that.”

    There’s also the fact that being the Chosen One is more and more viewed as kind of drawing the short straw. Everyone else has agency and choice, but you, Chosen One, are stuck with your fate. You have to fight the terrifying monster and quite possibly give up your life to save the world, and if you choose not to, you’re selfish. So people are seeing the down side of being the Chosen One.

    And I think that (and the cliche-ness of that trope) is why it’s not so popular these days.

    • I agree that the Chosen One meme is not going away, Shawna.

      Beowulf and The Odyssey have connected for a large number of generations prior to The Millennials.

    • ” I keep seeing that some people have trouble identifying with people who don’t look like them. I don’t really get that, myself…”

      I see statements like this a lot, often from people who are relatively close to type most frequently portrayed as heroes. It always strikes me as similar to a person who was born rich not understanding why poor people spend so much time thinking and worrying and scheming about money, or a person who has always been healthy not understanding why their friend with multiple chronic health problems is always moaning about her health. It’s easy to feel that wanting heroes who “look like you” is shallow and trivial when so many heroes do, in fact, look like YOU. It shouldn’t be so hard to imagine how you might feel if they didn’t. Heck, even as a brown-haired, brown-eyed little white girl, I can clearly remember feeling like I would never be pretty or special because the princesses and heroines in the fairy tales I was obsessed with (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) tending to be depicted as blonde and blue-eyed – or occasionally with raven-black or fiery-red hair, but never plain old brown. I remember how much I loved Belle when Beauty and the Beast first came out, because she was a bookish brunette like me. I can imagine that if I had been non-white, gay, trans, visibly disabled, etc. those feelings would have been multiplied.

  4. Harry Potter was not the “Chosen One”, he had a chunk of Voldemort in his head that gave him the protection to survive Voldemort’s attacks. It was his mother’s love that protected him first; an “Old Magic.”

    He had to stand up and defend himself, because Voldemort was directly attacking Harry from the start.

    – The difference between Harry and Voldemort was that Harry had friends.

    – Who were his friends, outcasts like himself.

    Harry was kind to other’s because of the way his family treated him growing up. He wasn’t a spoiled heir of a famous wizarding family, which is why Dumbledore left him with his aunt.

    Kids love the Harry Potter stories because they see themselves in Harry. They like how Harry was still kind even when he got some power. If Harry were the “Chosen One” he would have kept the Elder Wand for the power, but he gave it up to just be a wizard.

    Harry is more like the Hobbits. Little people who survive hardship and are willing to do the right thing, even if it costs them personally. That “Hobbit sense” would prevail in the end.

    So Harry didn’t “win”, he was simply the boy who lived.

    BTW, PG, you are right that the video went on and on, well past the the point being made.

    You have to forgive Millennials for their self obsession, after all, they are the first generation to be born in The Real, rather than being created whole cloth like the rest of us.

    This copy Earth that we live in, came into existence 24 January 1984. It’s based on the Macintosh as “seed” a very popular model for creating copy Earths.

    Wiki – Omphalos hypothesis

    I’m having way too much fun with posts today. HA!

    • Not only was Potter’s mother the cause of Harry’s “chosen oneness,” it’s later revealed that Harry was not the only choice at all. It could have been Neville Longbottom, but it’s Voldemort’s actions that led to Lily Potter turning Harry into the “chosen.”

      I partly liked the fact that Voldemort fell into the trap characters in Greek myths were always falling into, of trying to avert a prophecy and making it come true instead. Because of his character [nature, values] he sowed his own destruction, which is a good lesson to impart in a kids’ story.

    • And he made some monumental mistakes and was rescued from dire consequences, not by his ‘chosen-one-ness’ but by his friends, usually Hermoine, and occasionally Ron.
      Which isn’t to say he didn’t step up to the plate whenever he could, but unlike Luke, for instance, who wanted to go fight in the rebellion before he knew about his ‘chosen’ status, all Harry wanted to do was hang out, eat treacle tarts, play quidditch, and avoid the Dursleys.

  5. What I don’t like about the Chosen One thing is when the CO wants nothing more than to be normal and escape his destiny – Alex Rider is a good example of this. It fails to convince, because lodged deep in all our psyches is the desire to be special.

    The ‘not being chosen but wanting to be’ sounds much more believable to me.

    • I tinkered with it by having the Chosen One reject the call flat out because she’s the youngest daughter of a medieval Chinese family (roughly Song Dynasty, so AD 1000 CE). She cannot be a Chosen One. And there are a lot of other people saying “Nope, too female, too young, too human, can’t be the One.” And she agrees with them, until events force her to *gasp* stand up for herself and grow a bit of a backbone. And even then, she’s pretty certain she’s not all that the hexagrams say she ought to be.

      It was hard to write. “I wish I were the Chosen One” would be much easier.

      • “It was hard to write. “I wish I were the Chosen One” would be much easier.”

        I rest my case. I think this is why honey traps work on men (Mordechai Vanunu is a classic case) – a beautiful woman making up to them is no more than, in their heart of hearts, they believe to be their due.

    • The ‘not being chosen but wanting to be’ sounds much more believable to me.

      I’ve only seen that angle dealt with in-depth in one story, the “Twelve Kingdoms” anime. The protagonist Youko was a cowardly follower, and sometimes whiny. Her classmate Yuka was feisty, read fantasy novels, and was up for adventure. When Youko is attacked by magical creatures, Yuka immediately understands what to do about it. A unicorn intervenes in the fight and whisks away Youko to a magical world, but accidentally brings along Yuka and another friend.

      Yuka assumes she’s the hero of the adventure. She isn’t, it’s Youko, who was actually born in the magical land and is supposed to rule one of its twelve kingdoms. Yuka’s unwillingness to accept Youko as the heroine and queen drives a chunk of the plot.

        • When I think about it (it’s been a while since I saw the series) Yuka might have been called by her last name, Sugimoto. That might explain it. I wouldn’t envy the editor of the novel version, though 🙂

          • To be fair to the author, it was originally written in Japanese, and in Japanese kana and kanji, the names Youko and Yuka look nothing alike. Similar situation with the protagonists Light and L in the Death Note manga and anime series.

  6. The “Chosen One” narrative used to be much less common in literature. In fact, the “ordinary guy/gal in an extraordinary situation” used to be the norm, if I recall my voracious SFF reading from my childhood, which covered everything up until the 70s.

    In fact, I remember thinking the exceptions, like Tarzan, with his very Victorian-style “breeding” giving him an innate advantage, as quite odd. But then, most SFF was not aimed at adolescents and their fantasies back then. SFF was viewed as a genre for grownups, smarter-than-average grownups in fact, with little concession to what we now call YA, unless the books were explicitly written for children or “youth,” as some was.

    Even then, the narratives were usually about ordinary boys and girls in extraordinary situations, sometimes surrounded by extraordinary people, but the narrator tended to be ordinary. I suppose that was to increase identification with every ordinary kid who read the books.

    Such books were also written in a era that glorified the common person rather than the “chosen one.” Ordinary Joes won WWII. Ordinary men and women put in an honest days’ work to make America truly great, back then. There was a thoroughly middle-class ethic that tamped down all these tendencies toward glorifying the genius, the wiz-kid, the Mary/Gary Sue (not that there weren’t elitist counter-narratives, such as the Lensman series).

    Now, IMO with the rise of the one-or-two-child household, wealth, and helicopter parenting, the narrative that every child is super-special has taken hold. First, it was aspirational–“Every kid wants to be extraordinary and destined for greatness.” Now, it’s affirmative–“Every kid IS extraordinary and destined for greatness,” they were told.

    So is this new counter-narrative a simple pendulum swing, a natural pushing-back against the parents who (in essence) lied to all the millenials by raising their expectations too high? Or is it something else?

  7. If Josh (see video above) is correct about the typical millenials, then they are puerile fascists. I suppose I should be more cognizant of their widdle feelings and amend my statement to say that they are puerile Peronistas (and be glad of the alliteration), but the truth is I don’t give a damn about their widdle feelings. I fight for individual rights, not group rights; individual justice, not social justice.

  8. The idea that only one person can possibly save an entire group or civilisation seems pretty arrogant to me,

    He’s been around forever, since long before movies and books. Campbell would call him the “Hero With A Thousand Faces.” He lives in every culture and time, and managed to easily survive from one generation to the next. He can handle the millenials.

  9. Sometimes it’s just the guy/gal in the right place that just happens to do what turns out to be the right thing to save the day/night/town/world. They weren’t heading out that day to be a ‘hero’, they may even walk away from the event not knowing they saved someone or prevented something bad from happening.

    One of my characters had this happen to him; when asked about it later he replied that he wasn’t a hero, just a guy doing what he thought was right at the time.

    .

    Never underestimate the awesome destructive power of a drunk, belligerent, brute-force-loving, pissed-off engineer.

  10. There’s room for all kinds of protagonists.

    There’s the right guy in the right place at the right time: DIE HARD.

    There’s the wrong people in the wrong place at the worst possible time. STARGATE UNIVERSE.

    Good writers can make any scenario work.

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