I had planned to produce a video post this week, but a severe sinus infection has kept me from feeling up to it. I didn’t want a week to go by without a post, so here is something I’ve been thinking of: Fate and Destiny in heroes.
I started thinking about this after a romance novelist posted on her threads account that people who “didn’t like fated mates” had no problem with “fated” or “destined” heroes. And I’m certain for many, that’s true. It’s not for me. So, in this post, I’m going to talk about why I don’t like “Fate” and “Destiny” in heroism (hint: agency) and what I prefer (hint: frustration, annoyance, and reluctance).
Fate and Destiny: The Slayers of Agency
Fated heroes, destined heroes, fated mates, and destined mates. Whatever the genre has, whatever the genre calls them, these are tropes/archetypes (and now tropes are almost used synonymously with archetypes) that have been around since ancient myth. The heroes of mythology are often those “destined by the gods” or “fated by a prophecy” to perform their actions. (Note how I said “often” and not “all”) The same can be said for stories based upon those mythic structures, such as Anakin Skywalker being prophesied to bring balance to the Force.
And that gets to the crux of my issue: if you are fated or destined by some divine guidance, you don’t have a choice. You will perform the task. To me, that destroys the ultimate form of agency: the decision not to act.
Yes, the heroic myth has a Refusal of the Call option, but more often than not, when the call is refused, the character is then punished until they accept the call. The Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. Adonai called Jonah the Prophet to go to the city of Ninevah and deliver his message. Jonah refused because of all the horrible things he had heard about the city and its residents. Bad things continue happening (including being swallowed by a giant fish) until Jonah accepts the call.
So, with destined/fated heroes, we know they will ultimately accept the call and submit to the “Will of Destiny”. They will do the thing. We know that. They didn’t have a choice…
But they did.
The classical, literary antihero is one who does not do the thing. Madame Bovary is one of those characters who has a highly Romantic view of what life should be (but she’s the protagonist of a Realism novel, so we know she’s going to have that view shattered and become a “person in the real world…”). But she spends the novel living beyond her means, seeking passion, and cheating on her husband because the banality of everyday life (the realism of the world) clashes with her Romantic view of life. She refuses to change, and this refusal to change and “be realistic” leads to her suicide.
When you have a fated hero or a fated mate situation, the end result of the hero doing the deed/saving the world/whatever is spoiled. It’s a given. The only thing a storyteller can hope for is to make the journey interesting. The burden then becomes making the challenges on the way, the struggles, the travel so fascinating that the audience forgets that the ending is predetermined.
And, isn’t that the struggle of genre fiction? We know the amateur sleuth will solve the murder in a cozy mystery. We know the brave knight will save the princess or the farm boy will train to be a space knight/wizard and save the galaxy, or the main characters of a romance novel will fall in love and live happily ever after. The challenge is to make the journey there so interesting that we forget that we know how the story is “fated” to end. And when you set up the “destiny” or “fate” of the hero in the beginning with a prophecy or a proclamation of a deity, then there is an obligation to make it work out regardless.
See Anakin “destroying the Sith” and bringing balance to the Force (temporarily) even after falling to the Dark Side. That’s ultimately one of the two reasons why the prequel trilogy wasn’t successful for me. Given that this powerful space wizard-knight fell into darkness and was ultimately redeemed (Episode 6), the expectation was that there would be something more akin to a Faust tale where the hero was seduced by darkness as a quicker, easier way to achieve his noble goal of ending the dark side. What we got was more of a sloppily written Romeo and Juliet. The other was that blood purity = power thing, but that’s another issue.
But the ultimate issue I have is that when someone is fated or destined to be a hero or to perform a task, their agency is reduced.
Reluctant Heroism: The Mission, Should They Choose to Accept It
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it,…” is one of those secret agent cliches that I love when applied to heroism more broadly. It preserves a sense of agency. The protagonist can choose to accept or reject the call. Sure, if they accept it, then the story we expect will happen. If they do not, then we may get a completely different story.
But ultimately, the type of hero I love is the reluctant, frustrated hero. And that’s what I write. My heroes are those who care about the world, and they care about others. However, they don’t set out to become heroes. They don’t have a destiny to save the world. They get stuck with the task.
This type of heroism can be summed up as follows: The world is an inferno of dumpster fires. Someone needs to do something about it. However, the people with the power, money, and other resources to solve the problem are either doing nothing or perpetuating it, and the young (the typical age of the “fated hero”) are too stuck in their own quotidian lives, so fine! I’ll do it. I’ll save the world, become someone has to and no one else is. But I promise you two things: I’ll complain the entire time, and I will make the lives of any who get in my way or hurt those I care about miserable.
All of my heroes can be described by the preceding paragraph. However, I want to talk about the heroine of my A Tale of Two Crowns trilogy: Gwynarra Caoilfhionn. Gwyn has no desire to save an entire continent and to depose a despotic emperor. When we meet her, she is on her way home to the nation of Florescia, ending her career as an itinerant monster hunter and folk hero who saves the day. She wanted quiet and rest, but she has a soft spot for helping others who are suffering. Her defining virtue is “I have suffered, so if I can end the suffering of another, then I will do what I have to do.” And you can see how that gets her into trouble. On her way back, an individual claiming the name Ambrose von Harenheim (real name: Marius Bedyr) requests her assistance protecting citizens who are suffering from supernatural occurrences.
Without getting into spoilers, she agrees to put her desires on hold to help these people, and this brings her into conflict with the villain who is slowly masterminding a takeover of the Atharian Empire, and he believes Gwyn is the only threat to his power. She gets paired with a member of the empire’s secret police (who previously slaughtered her family), hoping their conflict will lead to Gwyn being killed, so he can paint the secret police as fanatics who killed someone beloved by the people (and remove them from the power structure of the empire). Instead, this leads to giving Gwyn the motivation to stand and oppose him (even when it ultimately creates an international incident).
There was no outside/divine force declaring she would take down the Atharian Empire. At every step, she had the choice to walk away, but her decision to accept this challenge was rooted in a character trait that made refusing the call to this adventure a betrayal of who she was at her core. But she retained her agency. There are a dozen points in the trilogy where she could have walked away, and the story would have ended. Would those endings be as satisfying? No. But they would have been logical points to end the tale.
And for me, that’s what removing the “fated” nature of heroes offers: a narrative where the multiple sources of tension include places where it could end without satisfaction, but the story continues, by the hero’s own decision, until a truly satisfying conclusion is reached. The hero’s obligation to adventure is to themselves and their values—not in submission to some outside force or entity.
Agency and autonomy matter to me as a person and as a writer.
And should you wish to read any of the books I’ve written, you can find links to them at the Cursing Raven Bookstore (at a price $2-3 lower than market price for paperbacks).
cursingravenbooks.com 