"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Sunday, November 18, 2018

A Few General Notes on “Chosen Ones”


A range of “Chosen-One”-adjacent spoilers, including for Fantastic Beasts:  The Crimes of Grindelwald and Star Wars:  The Last Jedi.

In genre fiction of all forms – books, movies, TV – there are plenty of good “Chosen One” stories.  Not someone who’s literally selected, like, say, Steve Rogers in Captain America or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but someone who’s foretold.  Promised.  Divinely/mystically/magically endowed.  And again, there are good ones.  I love Buffy the titual vampire slayer, Emma the Savior from Once Upon a Time, and Abbie and Crane on Sleepy Hollow.  It can provide a nice backdrop for some classic hero’s journey narratives – someone plucked out of obscurity to have expectations of greatness thrust upon them, initially refusing the call, being drawn into their purpose by a sage or a mentor who believes in their promise, wrestling with self-doubt but still forging ahead, ultimately triumphing over forces of evil that can be stopped only by them.  I mean, it’s a classic for a reason, right?

And I like a lot of these stories, especially the ones that lean into that “heavy lies the head that bears the prophecy”-type internal conflict.  But they can run into problems as well.  Particularly in genre TV, long-running shows can get bogged down by their mythos.  Because the more seasons a fantasy or supernatural show makes (and, frequently, the fewer ideas the writers have,) the more we have a tendency to learn that everything has been connected all along, and the threads of the prophecy or prophecies are woven through every major event that has ever occurred on the show.  I’ll cite Once Upon a Time again, because by the later seasons, it all gets to be way too much to me.  Not only do a zillion prophecies/Saviors diminish the rarity of original recipe Savior Emma, but you start to wonder if there’s any significant choice made by a significant character that hasn’t been legends in the making.  By the same token, I’ve definitely complained before about increasing incidence of prophecy on Doctor Who, which I maintain makes zero sense on a time-travel show.

Sometimes, too, having a Chosen One can be a way for character to have a lot of Win Because moments.  I get that way with Harry Potter sometimes, and not just because of the self-fulfilling nature of the prophecy involved in his story.  There are times when it feels like Harry is the hero simply because that’s how he’s been stamped.  I’m sure I’m not the only one to ponder what might have happened if we’d gone through the books following Harry’s story, with the building prophecies and expectations, only to get the rug pulled out from under us at the last second and discover that Neville was the One all along.

Because that’s a hero I like, too – the one who comes out of nowhere and shakes up where all the characters thought this was going.  This type of character doesn’t have a title as widely-used as Chosen One, but I like to think of them as the Spoiler, someone who wins the day despite whatever plans the movers and shapers may have had to the contrary.  I’m not specifically talking about Neville now, since there’s at least a bit of prophecy-potential there.  In a way, it’s very much a classic underdog story, although plenty of Chosen One narratives have an underdog flavor as well, with the hero having humble origins before discovering the wonder foretold of them.  But this goes beyond that.  I like it when the hero is someone none of the characters could have predicted.  I suppose Katniss fits in here, at least from the Capitol’s perspective – maybe Frodo, too, and the Rogue One crew.  But I feel like these are comparatively harder to find in genre stuff.  Again, especially on longer-running TV shows, you sometimes get a character who seems like a Spoiler, but somewhere around season 4 or 5, the ever-expanding prophecy swells to include them, and learn that they were actually Chosen All Along.  That always bums me out.  Call it rooting for free will if you like, but I enjoy watching someone who defies prediction.

It was the new Fantastic Beasts movie that got me thinking about this subject again.  I wouldn’t call Credence a Chosen One, but he’s obviously “connected,” and his story from the first movie doesn’t really call for that.  In fact, he’s more of a Spoiler there, with Graves thinking the Obscurial is Credence’s adopted sister but it turns out to be him.  In the new movie, though, we suddenly get this race to find what who his real, super-important wizarding family is – the Lestranges take the lead early on, but we learn right at the end that he’s a Dumbledore.  But I don’t need that for him.  I contrast it with my happiness to learn in The Last Jedi that Rey isn’t Luke’s daughter, or Han and Leia’s or Obi-Wan’s.  She’s the daughter of a pair of nobodies, with no Force legacy, no prewritten chapter in an ongoing saga of heroes and Sith lords.  I like that.  I like that she’s important without being Important.  While I’m fine with Chosen Ones every so often, I don’t only want their stories.  Now and then, I also like to hear about the ones that no one saw coming.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Not really thinking that Rey is all that interesting of a subversion of the "chosen one" status in the SW universe. The only reason why Rey not being a skywalker was a surprise at all was due to the audience expectations that she should be. In universe, there really is no reason for that expectation to exist.

    The first reason for this "in universe" is all her being a "chosen one" does is replace her having Skywalker Blood with being "chosen by the Force". Yes up to that point the narrative had neen entirely about the Skywalker Clan, a Clan by the way founded by Anakin who likewise had been "Chosen by the Force" in form of his immaculate conception.

    While Rey has 2 parents instead of one, she otherwise fits the same general mold of Anakin when you look at her past. Sure, she was a wage-slave as opposed to being a literal slave on a desert planet, but the two actually have a lot of similarities in their chosen-one-ness. Add on top of that that we don't actually have a reason to assume that she was any less immaculately conceived than Anakin. There are plenty of examples of "so and so isn't my real dad" in myth and fiction that we can point to as examples of why maybe Rey isn't the child of her mother's husband. Mary was engaged to Joseph, but conceived by the holy spirit, Zeus disguised himself as a general to sleep with said general's wife. There is no real reason to be 100% sure that Rey wasn't conceived by the force, especially in light of the now established SW lore that the force autobalences the light and dark sides by imbuing equivalent force power to the weaker half. Personally I think it's a silly contrivance used to justify Rey being such a mary sue from a meta-narrative perspective, but in narrative she's just another being that was granted massive power in the Force, because the Force willed it.

    again, the only real reason why this was a big deal to the audience was because George Lucas made Star wars using a very repetitive ring-like structure intentionally. His concept was that there were certain universal patterns of history that existed in the SW universe and the 6 movies he made in the main timeline reflect that.

    And by the looks of it JJ abrams was using that meta-narrative poetic repetitive logic as well. And then Rian Johnson said "nope let's not do that, and materially altered the structure of the SW's universe to no longer resemble that of a poem that reprised similar themes in different verses endlessly; because following the story structure laid out 40 years ago, and continued ever since ws just not something he was interested in.

    SO while I agree that OUT of universe Rey not being the connected to the skywalkers is a shocker, even before the new trilogy started IN-Universe there was no reason why her lack of connection to them SHOULD be a shocker, as Lucas's poetic narrative device even within old star was lore isn't particularly required to be something that is an actual fact of the universe.

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  3. Thanks for such thorough comments. I agree that Rey is definitely special due to things beyond her control (her connection to the Force, which, as you point out, wills Forces sensitivity upon whoever it wants,) and while she has all kinds of merits on her own, she did basically win the Force lottery. I also agree that there wasn't a particular IN-universe reason to expect her to be the child of someone important. This was a case where fan expectations definitely played a major role, all the theories and speculations that were thrown around between TFA and TLJ.

    This post hits on a few different things, and I kind of wound up using "Chosen One" as a shorthand for what's more like a collection of a few frequently-connected tropes. By the time I got to Rey, I'd come around to the idea of characters who at first seem to have come out of nowhere and are later revealed to have been connected all along, a la Credence in Fantastic Beasts 2. I didn't come out of the first Fantastic Beasts going, "Wow, I wonder what Credence's lineage is!?!", so I didn't really need him to suddenly be this foretold lost scion in the second movie. That's what I was contrasting Rey with - many people DID walk out of TFA wondering who her parents were, and I for one liked the reveal in TLJ that she wasn't some Name we already know.

    As I pointed out in my post, I'm not against "Chosen Ones" and think they should all be banned or anything. I just like having room in genres stories for different kinds of hero narratives, and I also get annoyed when Chosen One-type narratives are done badly, especially retroactively. But again, I was flitting a little between a few different related topics, so I may have appeared to conflate my point in places.

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