Chosen one free genre stories?

[137beth]

One of my all time favorites is Into the Woods by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim. If you are unable to see it live in a theater, then I would highly recommend the 1991 film version, which was recorded live with most of the original Broadway cast.


I would not recommend the 2014 film version if you aren't already familiar with the source material. While most of the cast of the 2014 movie deliver strong performances (i.e., everyone except Johnny Debt), the filmmakers cut substantial portions of the script, which got them into trouble with some plot points not being explained very well.


If you prefer science fiction, a more recent (and probably not as well-known) example is The Nether, a play by Jennifer Haley. It is set a future where the Nether (the succesor to the internet) consists of fully-immersive 3D virtual reality environments. The play's strongest points come from the emotional depth of the characters' interactions, though: it's not really "about" technology.

A much older example would be Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

[2D8HP]

One of my all time favorites is Into the Woods by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim. If you are unable to see it live in a theater, then I would highly recommend the 1991 film version, which was recorded live with most of the original Broadway cast.....

Is the '91 film the same one that was broadcast on PBS (IIRC it had Bernadette Peters)?

[ufo]

Battleship Potemkin was mentioned, I’d recommend generally checking out early Soviet fiction where writers would put a lot of effort into depicting communities and movements as characters in themselves. Creators in this era did some very important work in dismantling the Myth of the Strong Men in History and deconstructing ideas of select individuals being inherently more valuable than others (by virtue of being “chosen”).

[Dienekes]

How about Worm? Main character is just one of thousands of supers, who by no means has the best power. All her exploits involve mostly her ability to make up plans on the fly.

Closest you get to prophecy is one girl who can give the probability of things happening in the future.

[Prime32]

Log Horizon? It involves a large number of people being transported to a fantasy world and given great power, and most of the story is about them trying to build a society and maintain good relations with the natives. There's a few people with superhuman abilities above the rest, but they're treated as a scalpel rather than a silver bullet; most victories come through creative thinking and large numbers of people working together.

[Anonymouswizard]

The first thing that springs to mind is Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga (the books are Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained). It focuses on those in positions of power because they're the ones who control the story, but there's this sense that nobody's doing something someone else couldn't. A couple of characters adhere close to being chosen, but in one case it was actually just being freed and choosing to do what they did, and another spends 90% of the story affecting nothing because he's not even in the same part of the galaxy as every other human.

For more Hamilton, Night's Dawn is very good about this most of the time, but spoilers.

Spoiler

Show

We have two characters who muddy the waters.

First is Quinn Dexter. Quinn at one point comes to see himself as the Devil's chosen one, and manages to put forth a very good case for it being true. Due to a mixture of intelligence, luck, hard work, and manipulating everyone, he almost manages to enact something that looks near identical to his religion's belief about the end times, as well as being the most powerful possessed in the story (after managing to regain control of his body through being much more evil than his possessor). Every time it looks like he might be beat he manages to worm his way out via luck or some clever trick until he's blindsided up the intervention of a being with godlike powers he wasn't aware existed mere moments after he's completed his plan.

The second is Joshua Calvert. Unlike Quinn he doesn't want to be a chosen one, he just wants to be a starship captain. However he possesses freakishly good intuition that explicitly runs in the family, and pulls off a couple of astonishing feats (sending the command in the exact tenth of a second required to not damage his ship being the first), and is the one who eventually manages to find the god who solves everything. It's not so much that he's destined for greatness, but he has all the qualities expected from a chosen one down to the ability to be right (acknowledged in universe). It nearly feels like the universe has a family of chosen ones running around.

Really Night's Dawn is better for showing how to put a deus ex machina into your story and have it come off as satisfying and not as a cop-out.

Note though that these are both epics, and as such feature highly skilled characters in positions of power affecting the plot. The difference is that there's very little sense of the universe bending out of the way for these characters (even Joshua most of the time), more that people are playing events to support them or gambling on outcomes.

[Legato Endless]

Epic storytelling is dependent upon societal stratification - good luck trying to tell an epic about hunter-gatherer tribes.

Quest for Fire says hello.

In fact, the earliest epic we have - Gilgamesh - is traced to an early, highly stratified society.

Except it's not the earliest. It's the earliest surviving narrative of its type. You're mixing the idea that we happen to have had written records from a certain type of society with the idea that narrative could only play in that setting. Furthermore, not every hero receives a justification for why the hero is in the epic itself. Indeed, a number of such affairs have their justification edited in later, or those stories where the justification is the gods' seemingly unmerited favor. The hero, no matter his face, is much older than the justified rational for his existence.

[sktarq]

well....have you tried the works of Christopher Moore?

Both the bunch set in San Francisco Bay area in roughly modern day stuff and his wilder stuff.

He very much plays up the working shlub, the Beta Male, the girl with no plan and no self esteem, etc who also just happens to a vampire, works for the apparatus of death, is a finder of genie lamp, or perhaps is the lord and savior's best mate. And being that that is what they are. finding the supernatural generally makes them reach for a baseball bat, the front of a car, or illegal firecrackers purchased from a 3 fingered Chinese man in the back of the dry cleaners.

It gets funny. Very funny.

the Emperor of San Francisco is a recurring character. . . and he may be the original and immortal but he isn't aware of it if he is.

When there is a chosen one narrative, they are not the main characters they are the people around the chosen one. Having their own stories and their own arcs.

[DomaDoma]

This isn't strictly what you asked for, but I think it would come under the same sphere of appeal:

You know the unexpected-heir-to-the-throne story? Well, in The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, there's no adventuring first. It's just "oh hey, you're Emperor now, try not to die."

The protagonist is the son of a political marriage his elven father was never exactly invested in to begin with, and so he and his goblin mother were sent to a manor in the middle of nowhere while the emperor got himself a better model of wife. He is fifth in line for the throne and only prepared for the court insofar as his equally-exiled and fairly spiteful elder cousin needed something to talk about while stranded at a manor in the middle of nowhere. Which is to say, just barely.

And this is a seriously stifling Imperial court, reminiscent of the Heian Period, formal to the gills. The occasional emergence of cordial informalities comes as a physical relief. You are introduced to the prominent personages just as the protagonist is - in rapid succession, and not a few of them hate him, and meanwhile there are a thousand duties to carry out. It's like being thrown into the rapids and trying to study the geography at the same time. Oh, and the thing where the emperor and his four heirs died in a flaming airship crash - not happenstance.

But, as overwhelming as all that is, this emperor has his share of street smarts. His relegation and the good influence of his mother have made him a deeply compassionate man, and his respect of rank and faction is strictly on an if-I-really-must basis. And it turns out that some in the court can be trusted, if one first figures out how to navigate it.

Great story. Recommend 100%.

[137beth]

Is the '91 film the same one that was broadcast on PBS (IIRC it had Bernadette Peters)?

Yep, that's the one