The Mythcreant Podcast 459 – Chosen Ones: Classic or Cliché?
The prophecy has spoken: We must now destroy the discourse and bring balance to the podcast. Whatever “balance” is supposed to mean. This week we’re talking about those special protagonists chosen by the gods, weird aliens, or an amorphous destiny. Such characters get a lot of well deserved criticism, but do they have any redeeming qualities? It’s time to find out!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: Welcome to The Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: All witness the prophecy written in the stars! That one day a podcaster of no note will lead our world to victory against the silent scourge. Also, the prophecy specifies the podcaster will have a first name of Oren, a last name of Ashkenazi, and will be born in March.
Oren: Okay, well…
Chris: I think this is a sign that you are the chosen one, Oren. Let’s put you in charge of all the audio content in the world. I’m sure it’ll go fine.
Oren: But I have only ever done simple farming podcasts. A simple farm-pod-boy, as it were. Are you certain, Chris?
Chris: Maybe after we give you a mentor who will train you and give you a magical microphone.
Oren: Meanwhile, we’ll be like, there are a lot of other people around who probably could have benefited from that training a lot more, or were maybe just ready and didn’t need it. It’s fine. Don’t worry about that.
Chris: This time we’re talking about chosen ones. And that level of relevancy today, they can be surprisingly contentious.
Back in 2015, I talked about them in an article Ditch These Five Character Archetypes. And at the time I was complaining about how the trope was used to prop up characters that were otherwise irrelevant and hadn’t really earned anything.
The character that most qualifies in my mind is Jen in the original Dark Crystal.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: It’s just, he’s raised as a last gelfling, but it turns out there is another last gelfling and she has to do everything for him.
He doesn’t know how to travel or get anywhere. He knows math, but that’s hardly important. There is one scene where he reads the prophecy and she can’t read. So that’s something. But other than that, she can talk to animals and she has wings and he doesn’t. And there’s just no reason that he has to complete the prophecy.
At one point he even throws their precious prophecy item, the crystal shard, away… [laughs]
Oren: Whoops!
Chris: … and then she has to go and find it for him.
Oren: Oh no!
Chris: So anyway, that was, I think, my main complaint.
However, since then I’ve seen enough just ridiculous anti-chosen one takes to back off on that to some degree.
Doesn’t mean that a typical chosen one is perfect and should just be used in the story as is. I mean, if you love it, go for it. You may get a few negative reactions. But at the same time, we’ve seen takes where it’s like all main characters qualify, so we shouldn’t have main characters anymore because they’re all chosen ones.
Oren: Yeah, what is a chosen one is a fascinating bit of sandwich discourse.
You have your obvious examples where there’s literally a prophecy and it literally is choosing someone because fate has arranged it. And then you have weirder ones where it’s not really a prophecy, but the character has unusual parentage or is the inheritor of a special power. And then you get people who are basically any protagonist with an unusual ability as a chosen one now. It’s like if they aren’t the most boring everyperson you can possibly think of, if they have any unusual background or history, chosen one.
Chris: Katniss is a chosen one.
Oren: Katniss is a chosen one.
Chris: I don’t still don’t understand. She has skills she earned herself through years of hard work.
Oren: Katniss is just a source of weird takes.
My other one that I loved was someone was trying to do a video about how rich people versus poor people are portrayed in film and media. And was trying to make the argument that poor people are portrayed as unintelligent and ugly, and rich people are always pretty and smart.
And was using Katniss as an example. Jennifer Lawrence from the movies. And it’s like, wait, hang on. Are you saying that Katniss is rich or that Katniss is poor and is thus an example of a person who is not smart and not attractive? Because it could be either one. I don’t know which one it is. And they’re both just mind-blowingly wrong.
Chris: I think of a kind of the stereotypical classic chosen one as, again, a farm boy usually. Or it could be another young character of newest significance.
But I think that the farm boy is so iconic because, again, originally a lot of these were boys. Of course, there’s a lot of chosen ones of other genders today, but the classic one was usually a boy. And even today, if there’s a random side character, side child in a story that’s a chosen one, it’s usually a boy still. If you have a team of characters in a show and they pick up the chosen child, it’s almost always a boy.
Any case, and then there’s a prophecy that declares this person of no significance is a savior. And then everybody reveres them because they are in the prophecy. And then they do the thing in the prophecy. I would say that’s the straightforward chosen one situation.
Oren: Yeah, the reverence is important to that, right?
An interesting little subversion of that I have seen is the chosen one doesn’t have special skills and is somewhat of no consequence. But instead of playing it as, wow, you’re so cool, you’re gonna save the day. It’s more of like, oh boy, you have this huge responsibility and you are not prepared and sucks to be you. And that can work. It can also feel forced, but it works okay in the Prydain books.
Taran is an assistant pig keeper who has no particularly useful skills. Now it helps that with Taran, we don’t know that he’s prophesied as a chosen one until pretty late in the books.
Chris: Yeah, I feel like that’s revealed in the end.
Oren: Yeah, so you could argue that he doesn’t count.
Chris: He technically is, but we don’t know that.
Oren: Yeah. And then you have characters who are partway there, like Sisko from Deep Space Nine is a chosen one. And he has some reverence. Some of the Bajorans are like, you’re pretty cool, Sisko. But overall, I’d say it’s pretty mild and he doesn’t get powers from the prophets or anything. If anything, the pah-wraiths give their champion powers and the prophets are just like, don’t look at us, man. What do you want from us? Which I always found very funny. Sisko is also in that camp. He gets some candy for being the emissary, but not as much as he could.
Chris: Yeah, definitely the classic chosen one is chosen, so you have a relatable character, because they’re a character of no note, and we don’t have any outstanding traits that they know of at first. I always think of Garion.
Oren: Yep.
Chris: From the Belgariad, where he has a silver circle on his palm. And so you know that there’s something special about him. But he thinks, oh, it’s just a birthmark. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean I have a super special power that will make me a savior. So, there’s some sign, but again, we don’t reveal that he has powers until later.
Oren: Yeah, this is your really classic chosen one. The one who has not only a straight up prophecy chosen by fate, or some equally powerful entity that says they will save the day, but also they get special powers that no one else has, or at least no one else has to the same degree.
And they usually don’t start the story with those powers. They develop them pretty quickly as the story goes, though. Garion is one. Rand al’Thor from the Wheel of Time, Neo from the Matrix, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He’s a little unusual in that he’s not the main character, but he still fits the archetype.
Chris: He definitely is a chosen one. He is clearly, unlike Garion, for instance. Garion is clearly designed to be the audience stand-in character, the blank relatable character, in a way that I don’t think Aragorn is. Aragorn still got some candy, and so he’s still a wish fulfillment character to some degree. But I think that there is a certain combination of starting with a character that’s super relatable, and then giving them all the wish fulfillment. That’s been very attractive.
Oren: Aragorn is interesting, because in the movies, he doesn’t have what you would call a special power. He is of a special bloodline. But you could watch the whole movies and not realize that Aragorn is supposed to be quite old. He’s super long lived. But in the books, not only is he super long lived, he has magic healing hands, which kind of come out randomly to show that he’s the true heir in the third book, because why not?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty funny.
But yeah, I would say that all the things that we just said, if you play all of that straight, and you don’t make it unique in any way, I do think that’s going to feel somewhat cliché at this point. But there’s not that many stories at this point that are doing that whole shebang without any changes.
And there’s a number of different ways to mix it up. You can make the prophecy evil, which I have seen before. It was a reveal then, but it was an interesting one. You can make the prophecy wrong. You can make a side character or the villain a chosen one, something that unfortunately Mistborn did not do.
Oren: So close. I was so excited when I thought that’s where we were going with that story.
Chris: I thought that the chosen one’s gonna be evil, but no, that was just an imposter who killed the chosen one. So disappointing.
Or I like to personally like a protagonist that has an ability that’s very niche. So, it’s not very powerful and therefore not super glorified, but it just happens to be the right ability for the current situation.
A good example, even though I don’t actually like this book, is Lirael. This is a sequel to Sabriel by Garth Nix. Unfortunately, Lirael is not nearly as good as Sabriel. And in addition to having the ability, she also gets a lot of stuff.
But the one ability of hers that I think is neat is that she’s born in a line of seers who would usually see the future, but instead of seeing the future, she sees the past. So objectively, it’s not any more powerful than seeing the future. Some people might say it’s less, because we have other ways of seeing the past. But for this particular situation, it’s important.
Oren: From a storytelling perspective, it’s way more powerful because it is so much easier to give a character useful information by seeing the past than it is by having them see the future. Because if they can see the future and get useful information, that breaks the story so quickly that you almost never actually give them anything. It’s always, oh, your vision is clouded, or oh, who knows what you saw? It was too vague to be sure. It’s always stuff like that. Whereas in the past, it’s like, yes, I have the power of exposition vision. Bwaaah!
Chris: I was a little annoyed that she also got to be the Abhorsen, like Sabriel. And we have this other character. She gets all the goodies and the other character doesn’t.
Oren: Poor Sameth.
Chris: But in any case, I like that idea.
So yeah, if there’s various ways to mix it up, and if you do something a little different, then I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Oren: We can get into what I call the Schrödinger’s chosen one, which is a kind of character who could or could not be a chosen one. And whether or not they are called a chosen one generally comes down to A) how they are referred to in the story, and B) whether people like them or not. Because chosen one is enough of a cliche that people often use it as a pejorative.
For example: consider Buffy and Aang from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Avatar the Last Airbender. They are both inheritors of a special power, and they both have a special job to save the world. They are the exact same level of chosen one. The Slayers are called chosen ones in Buffy, but there’s not actually any specific prophecy about Buffy saving the world. It could be any Slayer. And Aang is told he has to go fight the Fire Lord, but there’s not a prophecy that says he’s gonna win. He’s just told that’s his job.
So, they are the same level of chosen one, but Buffy is routinely referred to as a chosen one. There are think pieces about how Aang is totally not a chosen one, or subverts the chosen one.
Chris: [laughs] Subverts the chosen one.
Oren: Even though they are the same thing.
Chris: There’s so many stories now where people have different powers and then the one special protagonist has all of the powers.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: That’s real popular now, and Aang is a fairly early example of that. So, the idea that he’s somehow a subversion is very funny.
Oren: If you’re at that level of chosen one, you have a big boost to candy from doing that. You need to be aware of how much candy you’re giving your protagonist and think about that and balance it out somewhat.
With Aang, they do an okay job, not the best job. Aang’s not a bad character, he’s just notably not as good as the other characters he hangs out with. And in Buffy, they overdo it sometimes, where they’re like, Buffy has it too easy. We’re going to have all the other characters get together and do a public criticism session of Buffy.
Chris: Oh man, yeah. Whedon just loves putting Buffy through. Ugh, sometimes it gets bad.
Oren: Yeah, I guess that’s supposed to, I don’t know, make Buffy’s life suck so it doesn’t feel like she’s getting too much candy from being the Slayer. Of course, the writers on that show were definitely not using that terminology, but same thing. And I think it’s a bit of an overcompensation at some points. It’s like, this is just deeply unpleasant to watch.
Chris: Yeah, most of the time she doesn’t even actually get any spinach. She’s just really unhappy. She’s just miserable. She’s still candied.
Yeah, it can be tough because if the character doesn’t have enough candy, again, sometimes they just, why are they the hero? Why is this story about them? And it feels extra, like they aren’t deserving of having special powers or whatever makes them a chosen one.
Emmett in the Lego movie, the Lego movie is funny because at the end they’re like, oh, but he wasn’t the chosen one. Everyone is the chosen one. It’s like, hmm. And we do the same thing where we have a woman, just like for Jen and Kira in the Dark Crystal, have Wyldstyle, who’s right there, clearly much more qualified to be the chosen one. And why is it Emmett? Doesn’t feel like it should be Emmett.
Oren: I keep thinking whenever you say Wyldstyle, it’s like, you mean Trinity? Oh, wait, no, hang on.
Chris: Certainly, we want some humility in our characters. It’s definitely harder to like them if they just have tons of candy out of the gate.
Hopefully they have some traits that are strong points besides just a magical power that they happen to have. Ideally, they have a magical power. And also, they’re such a nice person that they are the one who will use the power in the best ways, in the most moral ways, because they have such a good heart or whatever. Some reason why your character deserves to have that. It’s helpful.
Oren: It’s really interesting to see how the Wheel of Time TV show is trying to handle this. Because I mentioned at the top that Rand is arguably the most chosen chosen one who has ever chosen oned. Other than Garion.
Chris: Garion’s very classic.
Oren: Garion is a little bit more of a chosen one just because he’s so generic when he starts. Whereas Rand is also generic, but not that generic. Rand is at least a little mouthy. That’s as deep as the characterization in Wheel of Time ever gets. But it’s something.
So, the show, I think the writers realized that that story was already going out of fashion in 1990. And in 2021 and 2023, that’s gonna get you laughed out of the writer’s room.
So, what they’re trying to do, I think, is to really emphasize that it’s a team sport. They’re really trying to emphasize that, yeah, Rand is the Dragon Reborn, but he needs all of his friends to help him win. And the real power was the friends we made along the way. And also all this magic.
Chris: But they also want to make the fans happy.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The story puts so much on Rand. He’s so powerful. Look at how powerful he is! Look at the dragon! The dragon has the most powers! So powerful.
Oren: But consider that he Indiana Jones’d that one guy who wanted to sword fight him. And I don’t know, I feel like a lot of the season was worth it just for that moment.
Chris: So in the book, does he actually, I’m trying to remember, because he does sword fight because he’s got the Heron Sword. Over time, he develops those skills, right? He doesn’t come out of the gate just being super good at the sword.
Oren: Yeah, no, he does learn to sword fight in the book. I forget exactly how he wins that fight, or what happens. I think he does channel, but he does sword fight the guy, right? It’s a much more drawn-out sword fight when that one Seanchan guy, Seanchan or whatever, I don’t know how to say that.
Chris: Okay, so does he win? Or does he lose?
Oren: He does win. But I think he uses his powers to win. So it’s just a sword fight that the story didn’t need. Rand’s already gonna have a big fight. He doesn’t need to have another one with a mini boss before he can get up there. That was just a funny reference to me, especially since the show’s interpretation of the Seanchan, they are pretty goofy in the books.
And in the show, they are, if anything, even goofier. And they have these super long nails, which only makes sense if they aren’t also supposed to be fighting, but apparently they’re supposed to fight. So…
Chris: Yeah, the thing that occurred to me when I saw how long the nobles’ nails were, were they were even a point of honor. Where when you dishonor yourself, your nails get cut off, and you have to grow them back before you can be seen in court again. The obvious thing, we’re like, okay, that is clearly a sign of leisure, because a working person couldn’t have nails that long. So clearly the reason why they’re a status symbol is because that means that they don’t have to work. But no, they fight apparently. So yeah, that would be a big liability.
Oren: At least they think they can.
Chris: They try to.
Oren: We’ve never seen any of them fight, because Rand just annihilated him with magic, but he seemed to think he could fight.
Chris: Look, either your nobility keeps super long nails… When I’m talking about long, I mean a couple feet. That’s how long we’re talking about. Either your nobility keeps two foot long nails, or they fight. They can’t do both, that’s a contradiction.
Oren: One thing that’s interesting to me in this whole chosen one discussion is the special parentage. Because not all chosen ones have that, right? A lot of chosen ones don’t, but it’s definitely associated with it.
And I think that at this point, having special parents is probably worth some candy, but maybe not that much. Especially in the United States, where we have this whole cult of the bootstraps thing going, which has its own problems, but as a result it means that we have an almost instinctive dislike of characters who are shown on screen to be getting their stuff through nepotism. Now, of course, we have lots of nepotism. I’m not saying we don’t. It’s just a cultural value. But at the same time, authors really seem to like it.
Chris: I think it is a way of sneaking in more candy, because the assumption is if your parent is really cool… There’s unfortunately some kind of eugenics in here. The assumption is if your parent is really cool, and they’re your biological parent, that should make you more cool.
It was weird in Picard when they were almost doing the reverse, where Picard now has a son, and his son is super special. It felt like a weird way of trying to give Picard some candy, by giving him a special son.
Oren: Just very strange. It also felt like normal narrative nepotism, where we were expected to care about Jack because we care about his parents. Jack does almost nothing to endear himself to us.
Chris: Honestly, if he actually seemed like a kid instead of being in his 30s, maybe it would have worked better. Then he would have seemed a little bit more hapless, somebody to take care of. But yeah, I just… Man, the actor they chose. Just too old. Bothered me all the time.
But yeah, I think that’s what it is. I think there’s some level of just flattery and some wish fulfillment about having cool parents, and that being revealing of your own potential.
Oren: And I think you can subvert that a little bit. You can have the Steven Universe storyline about how your mother was special, but also, she made you to be a weapon sort of thing. And that’s a little bit of a subversion there. A little bit. Not a lot, but some.
Chris: It was nice that it was the mother that was special, because in so many stories, it’s always a father. It’s nice when it’s both. That’s the other thing, is that having both parents come from a special line provides a convenient explanation for why your main character has so much more powers than anybody else. So, I do think that’s another reason it gets used. But if you’re going to do it, can you please pile the candy on the mother? I would appreciate that instead of the father. Assuming you have a mother and a father.
One movie that I do think has a neat subversion is the classic Willow movie from 1989. Because in that one, it sets up Elora as the chosen one, and she’s just a baby. And the movie has this whole opening about how the evil Queen Bavmorda needs to get rid of this child who’s been prophesied to defeat her.
This child with a special birthmark. We didn’t even talk about birthmarks, other than Garion and his silver birthmark. Pendants are another classic one.
But yeah, so she’s trying to hunt this child down. And then Elora’s not the main character in the original movie. It’s Willow, and he’s trying to protect her. And then at the end of the day, what happens is that basically Willow defeats Bavmorda, not the baby. The baby kind of causes it in that a ritual to get rid of Elora goes wrong. But it’s really Willow that creates that effect by being clever.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a fun little self-fulfilling prophecy where Bavmorda is destroyed by this baby because she is trying so hard to kill this baby.
Chris: But Willow, who is actually the main character and who is a farmer. Not a farm boy, farm adult, although he was so young. I did not realize that Warwick Davis was only 17 when he played that role. He acts so mature, you can’t tell.
In any case, he’s the main character and not the chosen one, right? And that’s one of the reasons why it was so strange when they did the sequel show, where suddenly they made it so much more about Elora.
Oren: Yeah, that one was just weird. That dissonance was there a little bit in the first movie too, at the end, where they’re implying that Elora is going to be in charge now. Why? Why would anyone follow Elora? She didn’t destroy Bavmorda. She had nothing to do with that. And then we try to do a sequel and it’s, I guess, Sorsha is still in charge and now Elora is important and back, but it’s still called Willow. They didn’t change it. It’s not called Elora, a Willow story.
Chris: Yeah, Elora didn’t actually need to be a major character in the show because she actually wasn’t as important in the original movie. Willow was. And so again, I would have expected Elora to be queen and then her to send Willow out on a mission and that mission to be the story.
Oren: That seems obvious in hindsight.
Chris: It’s pretty obvious, but then we had to do something to make it so she’s the chosen one again. We have to take away her chosen one status so that then we can reveal that she’s a chosen one.
Oren: She was actually double chosen the whole time.
Chris: Yeah, that was pretty awkward. I can see how the writers looked at that and were like, oh, we have this chosen one. Clearly, she’s the main character. But no, it was actually more interesting the other way.
Oren: Yeah, and Warwick Davis is only in his 50s. You didn’t need to have the hot young cast take over, right? Warwick Davis was perfectly capable of still being your protagonist. And I know because he was in every episode. It wasn’t like he wasn’t available.
Chris: Yeah, and again, so many actors that they’re bringing back these days are really aging out and are sometimes having trouble in their action roles. But Warwick Davis, again, was only 17. So, he’s still quite young. Should have taken better advantage of that.
Oren: People are always talking about how they really want more fantasy stories about middle-aged characters going on an adventure. This is the perfect opportunity for that. But instead, it was like, no, it’s about Elora and these other young kids. And they’re all here for some reason.
Chris: It was interesting in the latest Matrix movie how they decided that they would try to fix the gender imbalance by making Trinity also a chosen one. I almost think it was to make up for the fact that she spends large portions of the movie just not involved. She’s damseled, we might say. But yeah, there was part of that where at the end we’re like, actually, Neo and Trinity are now both chosen one, and we need to bring them together. It almost felt like a bit of an apology.
Oren: Oh, like a force dyad. Everyone loves force dyads!
Chris: Okay, you’re gonna have to explain the force dyad.
Oren: Do I? That was just a part in Rise of Skywalker when Palpatine was being like, ah, yes, Rey and Kylo Ren, you’re very important and you need to be together. And the force said so and he called them a force dyad, which just means two of something.
Chris: Okay, so if a couple characters communicate psychically without their shirts.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a force dyad now.
Chris: That makes them a force dyad. Okay, got it.
Oren: Sure. Well, why not? Nothing in Rise of Skywalker means anything. It’s all just nonsense.
Chris: But knowing Disney, they’ll keep adhering to how every part of it is canon forever.
Oren: Yeah, I’m waiting for the late next TV show to have goddamn force dyads. Clearly the force dyads were the chosen ones the entire time.
Chris: What’s important is the force dyads we met along the way.
Oren: Alright, now we’ve reached the end of the prophecy and I guess I won. I’m gonna go and retire and back to my pod-farm-cast.
Chris: If this episode was entertaining, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: Have you considered that perhaps you were chosen to support us on Patreon? Ooh!
Chris: Oh, yes, that’s right. It makes you very special to support us on Patreon.
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing Patreons.
First, we have Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.