The Chosen One
As literary cliches go, the person of great destiny, foretold in ancient scrolls has got to be one of my least favourite. I just don’t like that kind of egocentric unique specialness. Usually the Chosen One has to do very little training to succeed. I prefer the archetype of someone who has to work for their success with the aid of many friends and uneasy allies. I like the idea of the main bad guy being beaten by someone other than the sword wielding young man with the anicent magical artifact that only works for them and is tied into their secret origin that makes them super special and way better than their earlier crummier life had ever hinted it could be. It’s almost bad as the lottery for being a well of bottomless hope. The Chosen One, rather than being a hero that one can aspire to become to with hard work and hard choices, is a hero that one can simply become with just hoping really, really hard on your birthday candles. Ugh.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Well, that goes a long way toward explaining why I don’t think much of most literary fantasy but really love LotR. Everything I’ve tried lately focuses around some secret origin that ends up springing the unlikely hero free from their sucky life and into a new, awesome one where they are super powerful. Ugh. And yet, you don’t see someone trying to switch it up by giving the hero an awesome life and cool powers in the beginning, then taking them both away and revealing that their life is always going to have to be sucky instead as the story develops. And the villain can only be defeated by the hard, unpleasant work of an ordinary person. And there’s no epilogue that gives them their cool life back.
As for the comic, I was expecting the townspeople to have made up all that about the prophecy and be trying to swindle a new passerby in the last panel. Whoops! I guess they’re screwed, unless there are a lot of people who fit that description (There might be! It’s gotta be easier than dealing with the minotaurus rex themselves!).
August 21st, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Yes, but what about Ash from the Evil Dead series?
I really like your comic, and just started reading it. I found it from the Abominable Charles Christopher. Your artwork makes me think of Bill Plympton somehow 😛
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:35 am
The online game Kingdom of Loathing has–as one of the people/creatures to fight–a “Protagonist”, with the following description: “This is a 12-year-old boy who has somehow become one of the most powerful warriors in the world. He’s on a quest to both save the world and somehow redeem himself from a past he doesn’t remember. Perhaps getting a little bit of a smackdown will jar his memory.” Which also doesn’t include the generic “Burly Sidekick” or the “Spunky Young Princess”.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Ancient scroll Appendix B, Section 3, Subsection d, Line 8
Build a wall and put ballistas on it.
June 13th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
The Chosen One was perhaps the worst thing about The Matrix, too. (One forgives the nonsense about human batteries because it’s irrelevant to the plot.)
May 1st, 2011 at 6:02 pm
I demand more Minotaurus Tex in future comics.
May 20th, 2011 at 11:18 am
Oops, make that Minotaurus Rex (although I suppose yoiu could put a cowboy hat on him)
April 27th, 2014 at 11:06 pm
I’ve never liked prophesy in fiction in general. Unless the creator is clever enough to have a non-obvious plot about the interpretation, it just means that technically all of the supposed danger is completely fake because the outcome is already set. Plus, its just a dull and cheesy way to make a story look cool, and it didn’t work even when it was original, and that was literally thousands of years ago.