We all love the chosen one: the hero or heroine who rises from an ordinary life to conquer evil and save the world. While we go about our (often boring) lives, we daydream about doing the same thing, don’t we? Just imagine: office worker discovers she can move objects with her mind and crushes her control freak boss with a file cabinet, or a bullied student turns her assailants’ noses into pig snouts. Of course, it’s not all roses. The chosen one always has to go up against the ultimate evil because:
1: She has rare powers, or a combination of powers never seen before. Maybe our chosen one lives in a world where magical powers are common, and she inherited powers from, say, five different archangels when only getting powers from one is “normal.” Or she has the ability to survive under the ocean in a flooded world due to some crazy experiments, like Sela from Jenetta Penner and David Bernstein’s Reckless. And (spoiler alert!) this means the Ultimate Evil is drooling over the possibility of finding and controlling said chosen ones.
2: He’s unlucky enough to be the main dude in a scary prophecy. Ah, prophecies. Our chosen one is set to kill the Ultimate Evil. And did we mention they’re inescapable, lest the world fall to darkness? Maybe our chosen one has a telltale scar, or has that perfect set of powers needed to slay the evil, or even was unlucky enough to be born under the wrong astrological sign on the wrong day.
3: She’s secretly royalty. Who’s better to unseat some vicious royal tyrant than another royal? Who else even has a shot? Of course, she needs to not know the truth behind her adoption or that her royal relative tried to murder her when she was two years old. (We told you this tyrant was bad.) This is what makes Cinder the chosen one in, well, Cinder.
4: A deity chose him to fight the Ultimate Evil. Or that same deity fathered or gave birth to the hero and is often content to sit back and let our hero duke it out with the underworld. This is especially true if that same god or goddess was forbidden from having children or cheating on their spouse. Poor Percy Jackson.
5: She’s secretly anything but ordinary and unappreciated. It doesn’t matter if she turns out to be an alien, an experiment gone wrong, or a unicorn shifter. (Has anyone written that yet?) The chosen one has to be anything but “normal,” even if she’s the first “normal” person in her society to develop superpowers and the elite class doesn’t like that.
While we might all dream about being the chosen one now and again, the reasons behind actually being the chosen one aren’t always pleasant or something we’d turn out to love. Okay, maybe being secret royalty or a unicorn shifter would be pretty cool to an extent, but as for the Ultimate Evil? Someone else can have that.
