Ygthkb

In many works of genre-fiction (I'm talking mainly about fantasy and sci-fi, but others genres can apply), and across many forms of media, the main characters ends up being special in some ways.

Maybe it's the abilities the MC has, maybe there is a prophecy, maybe it's something in his/hers birth or upbringing: it doesn't matter how, but often a character is, somewhat, "chosen". No one else could fill in his shoes because the MC is not-replaceable.

Sometimes this is played up straight. Sometimes prophecies are warped. Sometimes, the whole concept is subverted.

My issue: I dislike the whole chosen hero idea; I'm bored of it. Yet as I'm writing my novel I notice that, somehow, I'm falling into it (my MC will eventually get important thanks to the circumstances of her birth; she cannot, therefore, be considered an everyday woman).
So I'm finding myself in a contradictory situation - even hypocritical, if you may.

So, here's my more general question:

How do you avoid writing a chosen hero?

I realize that even when classic elements like manifested destinies and roboant prophecies are missing, you still kind of risk a "chosen" situation. We have the natural tendency to make our characters interesting - after all, we like to read about the struggles of extraordinary characters more often than not.

So, the real question is how to add quirks and characteristic to your characters without making the quirks overcome the whole characterization. Is there a point of equilibrium?

Related:

• the-chosen-one-paradox

Add other characters who also fit all the "not replaceable" chosen-one requirements. You could have several heirs, a highly trained merc squad, a prophecy which covers all first-born daughters conceived under a sickle moon, etc.

It happens that your MC is the person who's available to do the job, but if she wasn't there, someone else could potentially fit the bill. It may be that the other Chosen Ones are doing other, equally critical jobs, or the other heirs are getting married off, or the other daughters are getting killed off, or some of the Chosens might agree with the Big Bad! The point is that your MC happens to be in the right place at the right time to Do The Thing which the plot requires.

This was sort of done in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

when all the potential Slayers were activated at once to battle the season's Big Bad instead of there only being one (or a few).

and in the Harry Potter series:

Trelawney's prophecy could have equally applied to both Neville and Harry, and it was Voldemort who chose to go after the Potters.

If you put your red fish in a pond full of other red fish, it will seem less contrived that the fish you end up catching is red.

Being the chosen one implies that her fate was decided for her as opposed to deciding for herself how she is going to proceed.

Even if the circumstances of her birth are significant to your story, it's not in stone that she is required by Providence to do whatever Providence wants.

So simply change her motivation and you avoid that trope. She doesn't fight the Big Bad because she was born to it. She fights the Big Bad because it threatens all she holds dear or it violates her sense of values. She fights because she chooses to.

A possible answer I thought of:

Meet the Everyman

The Everyman (or woman) is a character who's the epitome of being normal. This is played quite often in media to make the audience sympathize more easily with said character; even brought to extremes in some cases (a funnily well done example may be the MC from The Lego Movie, who's so generically bland, yet good-natured). Other relevant examples are dr. Watson in BBC series "Sherlock", Sam in the Lord of the Rings, Bilbo in the Hobbit and so forth.

Imho, the Everyman probably negates the whole "chosen hero" concept, being probably it's polar opposite. How to write a good everyman should be an entire other topic for discussion, I guess.

Yet, I feel there are some limits to this option.

• First of all, it is a little difficult to write an Everyman in a setting unfamiliar to the reader. I talked about Sam because, I mean, he's a friendly, loyal gardner, yet he's still an hobbit and the Middle Earth isn't your typical place. Grandpa Tolkien did a great job in making him relatable, but well, he was Tolkien.




• By definition, the Everyman trope clashes with the whole "interesting background" I cited in the question. The more quirks you add to the character, the more it becomes less "ordinary". This doesn't mean that an Everyman has to be a blank slate, yet making it interesting is kind of a challenge.

Obligatory tv tropes link: the everyman

To answer this question, I think it would be useful to look at The Lord of the Rings. We are explicitly told that Frodo is "chosen" for the task:

Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, book 1, chapter 2 - The Shadow of the Past)

Yet we do not feel, at any point while reading the LOTR, that Forodo is "chosen", "irreplaceable", "the only hero who could save the day".

Why?

I believe three elements are involved:

First, many other characters in the same story have their own crucial tasks. Is Aragorn replaceable, could the Battle of the Pelennor Fields have been won without him? Are Merry and Pippin replaceable? Is Eowyn? If every character is "chosen" for a particular crucial task, then none are "the chosen". Frodo's task is one among many. While without his mission, everything else would have been futile, without any of the others, Frodo would have gained a rather pyrrhic victory.

Second, there is Sam. When Frodo is wounded by Shelob and captured by orcs, it is Sam who saves the quest. Sam is not merely a "sidekick" without whom Frodo could not have succeeded - he is the "backup plan". He could, if need be, finish the quest. In fact, it is never made clear just how far Frodo was "meant" to succeed. And Elrond explicitly says that Sam is "meant" to go with Frodo.

Third, Frodo himself is rather weak and incompetent, compared to other "chosen ones" in the genre. He cannot carry the quest on his shoulders. And he is very aware of his own limitations, even as he tries his best to rise to the occasion. The quest would have failed a hundred times over, had it not been for the help of others. That last one is particularly realistic. No man is an island. No one can achieve what they set out to achieve without the help of many many others. In which case, they are not all that special, are they?

I think in large part this is due to the fact that we're all the hero of our own stories, and so when we read a story about someone we adopt some of their story where it fits with our worldview.

I'm not sure if there's any really interesting way to write a story without at least some of this feeling. Unless your character is simply an observer, and not really a part of the story.

An example I can think of is Bean from Ender's Game. He was a fairly minor character in that book, but in later books he was the hero of his own story.

Maybe the reason that it's so tough is just the fact that every single one of us is who we are and nobody else - and while most things we could do could be replaced by someone else who could probably do them just as well, there's the undeniable fact that I'm the one writing this response and it's not anybody else - if it were someone else it would probably be different in some subtle way, and maybe not enough to matter.

I think if you want to avoid that feeling of chosen you'll have to be able to make your conflict such that they literally were just in the right place at the right time and happened to make the right decision... but that's kind of a sort of chosen, too, huh?