You're Not Just Special, You're Lord King of Special

In response to Tradition vs. assembly-line storytelling:

I love the Chosen One trope, especially when it is deployed, as it is, just after the revelation that the hero (and 95% of the time it’s  a hero, not a heroine) is part of an Elite Group of Special People.

You’d think that would be enough — to discover you have been recruited into the world’s foremost school of magic, or were secretly born a daywalking vampire, or are actually an alien of immense power disguised (even to himself) as an earthling, or have been recruited into the Green Lantern Corps.

You’d think that would be fantasy enough — that you the reader or viewer, living vicariously through the hero, are now inducted into this fantastical group of superpeople.

But no, because not two minutes after this first revelation of super specialness, you’re told you’re even super-duper extra-special even among the super-special, because there’s more, not only are we here to tell you that, despite all appearances, not only are you incredibly gifted and actually have a bunch of nearly godlike powers you Never Even Suspected, but you are in fact the Greatest of Them All, prophecized to bring down the Great Evil which threatens our planet.

Being a Green Lantern isn’t enough.  No, in our dreams, we have to be Overlord of the Green Lanterns.  To just be a plain ol’ Green Lantern would be miserable, I guess.

The Matrix apparently got embarrassed by this notion and tried to claim, after having read the Sacred Prophecy that Neo was The One, that Neo wasn’t The One at all, that Sacred Prophecy was false.  But it turned out that that was a lie, and that he was The One, and no one at all was surprised, because, come on.