Has Veronica Roth Successfully Deconstructed the Chosen One Trope?
Tropes are popular for a reason, but there’s a wealth of lessons to be learnt outside their confines
Think of the word “deconstruct”, and elaborately crafted five-star restaurant dishes immediately come to mind, taking apart the ingredients of a much-beloved recipe, and creating a collage of flavours and textures that are completely unique.
But splitting something into its constituents and reinventing a phoenix from the metaphorical ashes is not merely restricted to food. This technique can be used to reimagine and redefine any time-tested classic, as Veronica Roth aims to do so in her latest adult fantasy novel — Chosen Ones.
Now if you were anything like me in high school, you might have owned a Mockingjay pin, taken multiple what-faction-do-you-belong-to quizzes, and scribbled Okay? Okay on your arm all the time — a little embarrassing to admit, but an integral part of my teenagerhood all the same.
Fandom was not just a community; it was a way of life. The rising occurrence of young adult fiction centred around teen girls and their heroic battles with dystopian regimes, illnesses, and the patriarchy was a welcome respite from an overabundance of predominantly male-centric The Lord of The Rings-esque high fantasy — interesting yes, but not very relatable to the average reader.
Fighting to keep your loved ones safe, overthrowing an oppressive regime, and choosing between two carbon-copy individuals only differentiated by their hair is no mean feat, and books like Divergent, The Hunger Games, Matched, Delirium, The Selection, and Uglies fueled a generation of Tumblr-obsessed and side-swept French-braided young girls who defined themselves by what ‘Faction’ and ‘District’ they belonged to — and every minute of it was awesome.
However, the concept of a “hero’s journey” is not radically new. From the Iliad and Ramayana to Star Wars and The Avengers, the seventeen stages detailed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces are ubiquitous.
It’s popular because it works — because we wait with bated breath for the hero to defeat the villain so we can finish our popcorn and go home satisfied; because we have no control over our own lives and so it’s nice to see abstract reflections of it have satisfying endings; and because it’s boring to watch an ordinary person wake up at 7, take a briefcase with them to work, come back home at 6, and live an altogether normal life.
But That’s Where These Stories Tend To End, With the Villain Defeated and the Hero Triumphant in Victory. What Happens Next?
This is what Veronica Roth chooses to explore in the Chosen Ones. Her five titular “chosen ones”, who defeated the Dark One when they were teenagers, are now in their late twenties and early thirties, and they all deal with the trauma of their adolescent years in different ways.
Sloane, whom the narrative centres on, has miserable nightmares and crippling PTSD. She is unable to move on and pursue new goals, much to her fiancé Matt’s chagrin. Matt, charismatic and charming, is the natural leader of the group, and he appears to be the only one whose past hasn’t negatively affected his future. However, racism is still very much rampant in a post-Dark One world, and even his glorified status in society doesn’t offer him complete protection, something he is always conscious of.
The other three characters — Esther, Ines, and Albie, aren’t explored in as much detail, but they do deal with depression, addiction, and familial conflicts. Ines, in particular, also faces racism, and there are people who continue to attempt to downplay the roles she and Matt played in the fight against the Dark One in favour of the white characters.
It’s a dull, dreary picture, but it is more realistic than the future portrayed in stories like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the epilogue of the Divergent series.
The rest of this book transplants these characters into an alternate universe and gives them a new villain to defeat, all while exploring the dormant tensions that suffuse their interactions with each other, as well as the sometimes-admiring and other times-critical populace.
The Premise of This Book Is Very Interesting — What Happens After “Happily Ever After”?
Sloane is a strangely likeable main character, combining Katniss’s devil-may-care attitude with Harry Potter’s heartbreaking adoration of a paternal figure. To no one’s surprise, the mentor turns out to be a manipulator who ultimately was just using her to pursue his own end goal. During the first half of the book, we learn about Sloane’s relationships with her friends and her fiancé, as well as her realization that her childhood mentor was not who he appeared to be.
Although this confidante and guide had died many years ago, she remains obsessed with finding out his real agenda, and whether he had any affection for her whatsoever. It’s incredibly sad to read his clinical accounts of their encounters when she uncovers them, and understandably enough this sends Sloane into even more tangled webs of despair and depression.
After the death of another close friend, something she feels deeply responsible for, she is summoned to an alternate-universe Chicago, expected to combat her prophesied mortal enemy all over again. However, past mistakes have taught her to be more careful while assessing a situation, and as she delves deeper, she uncovers shocking information that forces her to play double agent, seemingly betraying her friends as she figures out how to topple the real villain instead.
Although engaging, a lot of the twists in this book were predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless. My major issue with it was the zigzagged pacing and the third-person narrative, keeping you at a distance, somewhere you’d rather not be when reading about a character as deliciously complex as Sloane. Rather than inhibit her shoes and make her decisions alongside her, we are blindsided and supplied information on a need-to-know basis.
Also, instead of providing us with a nuanced look at the Chosen One trope, this reads more like a generic YA novel. This does make sense to some extent as the characters are still very much stuck in the events that happened in their teenage years, but on the other hand, this also makes the writing not as complex as one would expect from a book targeted at adults.
The most powerful moment in the story is arguably when Sloane finally has an epiphany about how she had never really lived her life, never used the money and fame she had accumulated to fulfill any of her wishes, and never travelled or had fun or pursued a worthwhile goal. This is a key takeaway, about how our lives can rush past us when we fixate on something, and we end up missing its best moments.
However, I would have really enjoyed learning more about the complex, somewhat co-dependent relationships among the main characters, as well as if more was done to break the ideal of the storybook hero we have ingrained in our heads.
While Sloane has a lot of darkness and depth to her, Matt appears to be the golden boy of the entire operation. However, looking deeper into his character and his ability to completely compartmentalize the parts of his life he no longer wants to relive, a coping mechanism that might come back to bite him later on, would have been very interesting, and I hope it gets explored more in the future books of this series.
I did enjoy the beautiful descriptions of magical architecture in the parallel world, full of floating buildings, mismatched time periods, and gleaming turrets. It was very inventive and lushly described, many steps ahead of simply using magic to keep buildings off a map.
It was also interesting to not only look at the impact these events had on the main characters but to also read about the changes that resonated through the society around them, which had faced extremely horrific and traumatic things too. There were plenty of positive, although misguided, people who elevated the chosen ones into a mythological, almost god-like position. There were also people who ended up looking at the Dark One himself as some sort of hero, co-opting his insanity and penchant for destruction into whatever their own agenda was. So, basically, it still is 2021, just with some magic thrown in.
This book clearly emphasizes that empathy and love cannot “fix” any and all traumatic experiences or immediately improve someone’s mental health, and that getting better is a journey external agents can only offer comfort in, not guide you out of the dark altogether. Sloane brings this up when she thinks about her fractured relationship with Matt, and the idealized version of her he has in his head:
“And maybe that was the entire problem with them — he didn’t see her; he saw who she could be with a few adjustments, and all she wanted was to stay busted and be left alone.”
The path to overcoming trauma and learning to be at peace is probably more interesting than a how-to tutorial in defeating the bad guy, and could be the actual “hero’s journey” we need right now as we learn how to overcome the trauma of a year spent in isolation and full of loss, and move on with our lives.
Chosen Ones highlights and pokes fun at a lot of common tropes existing in YA dystopia and fantasy, but unfortunately often falls into the very traps it critiques, diluting the visceral realness expected from a book that’s supposed to have removed the “young” from its genre description. Focusing more on interpersonal conflicts and personal growth, instead of long-drawn-out magical training sequences and convoluted fight scenes, could really make the next book in the series stand out.
But until then, I’m going to be re-reading my copy of The Hunger Games till the ink rubs off on my fingers and the pages fall out of the spine. After all, who said YA books were only for teenagers?
