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.