Hi all! Matt Harry, author of Sorcery for Beginners, is here today with a guest post, in advance of my review for its sequel, Cryptozoology for Beginners. Welcome, Matt! --Shreya Death to the Chosen OnesI’m sick of chosen ones.
I’m also tired of prophecies, once-in-a-generation types, and any story in which a person’s bloodline is what makes them special. Sure, I’ve enjoyed a good “chosen one” yarn in the past, whether it stars Harry Potter, Daenerys Targaryen, or James Bond. But now, I say enough is enough. I’m done with exceptionalism. Death to the chosen ones! I understand the fascination with stories of this type. For thousands of years, we’ve been told these tales. We’ve been taught that strong narratives have to feature “special” people at the center of them. Extraordinary people. We like to imagine ourselves as extraordinary, too. Any of us would love to get an acceptance letter from Hogwarts or a surprise DNA test revealing that we are secretly royalty. Great people, as we’ve been told time and again in both stories and real life, usually start off great in some way. One only has to look to history to see this in action. There are far more “heroes of exceptionalism” — queens, messiahs, demigods — than there are ordinary folks who became great. Average Joes achieving the incredible feels like a pretty recent phenomenon. There are several reasons for this. First, up until about fifty years ago, privilege begat privilege. The only people who had access to knowledge, weapons, quests, and transportation were those were already had access to those things. It’s pretty hard to read a prophecy if, like many people back in the day, you couldn’t read at all. So being part of the aristocratic ruling class made it much easier to distinguish yourself. Secondly, the stories we were told for thousands of years were mostly written by chosen ones, too — people who were familiar with the same privilege their heroes enjoyed, be it blood, education, or grooming. Of course they were more likely to chronicle these stories — the ones that supported and validated their own successes — than to highlight someone who succeeded despite the lack of these virtues. It’s easy to applaud triples when you too were born on third base. Finally — and this is the most insidious reason for the love of these stories — if there’s a chosen one out there, it lets the rest of us off the hook. “Only the seventh son of a seventh son can defeat the forces of evil?” we’ll ask, wide-eyed. “Great, then I can go home and play video games. Good Luck, O Exalted One!” Chosen ones make the rest of us lazy. And so, again, I say no more chosen ones. The trope is bad for stories and for readers. In my books Sorcery for Beginners and Cryptozoology for Beginners, I bent over backwards to ensure that the main characters were ordinary kids thrust into an extraordinary situation. They are the heroes of the stories not because of their lineage, or a prophecy, or an elite school, but because they saw an injustice in the world and wanted to fix it. Yes, they have some magic help guides and adult sorcerers to assist them, but even those allies don’t provide easy answers. In the world of my novels, magic is like physics or calculus — it can do great things, but first it has to be studied and perfected. I would encourage all my fellow authors and readers to demand the same. To reject story lines that celebrate exceptionalism or lionize great people who were already pretty great. I think elevating the ordinary makes for more exciting stories and I think it will encourage all us readers to engage more with the world. To become our own heroes. If we must have chosen ones, let us choose ourselves.
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The BaronessHey, I'm Shreya! I love to read, write, travel, and drink tea. Disclosure: I am an affiliate of bookshop.org and I will earn a small commission if you click the above link and make a purchase.
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