"It is as the prophecy foretold! You are the chosen one, the heir who will bring freedom and blah blah to the blah blah blah blah blah..."

Luke and Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars mythos. Neo in The Matrix. Some dome headed kid in The Golden Child. Danny Rand in Iron Fist. To a certain extent, even Hal Jordan, Kal El and Billy Batson. The idea of some great power tapping one innocent, big-eyed shmuck as the latest universal savior is a story older than Jesus. I, for one, am tired of it, and I'll tell you why.

If you've been reading Greg Rucka's brilliant run on Detective Comics, you've probably noticed the backup feature called "The Jacobian," which has been going on since probably the Ford presidency. It started out as, logically enough, a detective story. A private detective named Jacob, living on a boat and well served by a series of "hunches," accepted a case from a woman dressed like an escapee from Ishtar, looking for her husband and suffering from a vague sense of amnesia.

Anyway, as the story...well, went on, you found out that Jacob has been brainwashed numerous times, his client was indeed his wife (as well as being as old as Adam and Eve), and that he was "the chosen one," a being who could "live outside the moment" and was "born with complete understanding" on a superhuman level that gives him "complete mastery over all creation." While stumbling dumbly through the adventure, Jacob learned to speak to undersea mermen, breathe water, become a superhero and all brands of madness.

It's a trick that was barely new when unknown actor Mark Hamill stared across the deserts of Tunisia in 1977, and ignited the world as the last-Jedi-to-be. Lucas, like Joseph Campbell, was a huge believer in the power of myth, and worked hard to integrate the idea of a chosen scion (in western art, mostly male, mostly white, mostly dumber than a box of hair right up until they become a total ass-kicker) into his films.

Twenty-three years later, we've seen it go high tech with the Wachowski brothers, seen it go kung fu as a partner to super stereotype Luke Cage, watched it transform a boy with the purest soul in the world into Earth's Mightiest Mortal, and so on.

And that becomes just the problem: we've seen it before. We've seen it in so many permutations, good and bad, that when someone stares meaningfully at the audience and declares, "I am the chosen one!" the average fan can almost mouth the words along with him. It's become such a creative crutch, such a genre cliché, that it is robbed of the specialness such a possibility could once create in fiction.

J. Michael Straczynski's current rumblings aside, what made such a great figure out of Peter Parker was that he was just like a lot of other people, and a strange and wonderful accident happened that made him something more. Same with Barry Allen, or Ethan Crane in Alan Moore's Supreme, or many other figures in genre history. They had to struggle with their own normalness to accept great power and great responsibility and become heroes that are larger than life.

I just wish to challenge the creative minds in the world to find another way than "a chosen one" to convey the power fantasies they write. I also wish to challenge the audiences to look for more in their entertainment, since this is like inviting Jesus into your house to kick somebody's ass every month, and like Scott McCloud said, an ice cream sundae is fun once in a while, but every day it gets really tiresome. Let's find some wonder in plain, clear storytelling and maybe create more areas of canon you can understand without a flow chart.