 Action/Adventure: March 30, 2016 Issue [#7550] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: Sidekicks of "Chosen One" Protagonists Edited by: Cinn  
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A while back, I edited a newsletter on the use of "Chosen One" characters in action/adventure stories. That particular issue had lots of feedback and reader comments, but one of them stood out to me as interesting enough to use as the topic for a followup newsletter. Mrs. Nixie Clause  mentioned that it always takes more than one person to get to the finish line (paraphrasing, of course). It is a really solid point. The combined skills of the group are extremely important for adventure stories! In some cases, they are even more necessary than others.  And I have the perfect example.
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I am a big fan of Alan Dean Foster, who some of you might know as either a science fiction or fantasy writer (I tend to like the former). He is not a stunningly amazing writer, but he is an excellent storyteller. I could probably pull inspiration from his novels for every single Action Adventure newsletter I write (and I am sure that he will appear again in the future).
One of his series, and definitely the most famous, is the "Flinx and Pip/Humanx Commonwealth" series. Flinx is an empath, meaning that he reads other people emotions just like a telepath might read someone's thoughts. Pip is a tiny poisonous dragon that never leaves Flinx's side (or rather, never leaves his shoulder/neck). They're a strange (but fun) sort of pair.
On one adventure, the first in the series, Pip plays a particularly large role. After a long journey that required the special talents of each member of Flinx's group, they arrive on an alien planet and find a building-sized artifact that could be anything from a weapon to a musical instrument. What does it do?
One side character gets the machine running, and everyone tries sticking their heads into a helmet-looking part of the machine. As they slip into the helmet, colors running through the machine change. For some of them, the lights are dimmer than others, and as a reader, you just know that the entire machine will come to life the instant Flinx sticks his head into that helmet. The entire plot had been pointing to Flinx as the Chosen One. He was the only person who had supernatural mental abilities, and this was a machine with a helmet!
And it didn't happen. The colors were wilder for him, but it didn't accomplish anything. That is, nothing was accomplished until his dragon flew in there. As it turns out, that miniature dragon was an empath too, and a powerful one. It took both Flinx and Pip to get the machine working.
I've read the book twice, and for the life of me, I can't remember what happens when the machine starts to work. That wasn't what stuck with me. What stuck was that Flinx was not the one and only person in the universe who could make that machine work. In fact, if he hadn't had his pet with him, nothing would have happened at all.
Now, to what degree does a story work only because of the group as a whole? In my opinion, a story rarely works without them. Rare but not impossible, as another Foster novel proved, but that is a topic for another time. In truth, having the limelight split between two characters in the end was both genius and ridiculous for a "Chosen One" story. I can understand someone reading this and thinking, "But what is that? You can't do that!" True enough. We cannot all pull off that particular sleight of hand.
But we can make sure that our precious Chosen One could never have gotten to that final obstacle without the help of his or her group. Sure, Flinx needed Pip to start that machine, but without the rest of his group, he never would have gotten to that machine in the first place. It's something to consider.
Stay tuned for more about the characters who make up the Action/Adventure group. It is a broad topic that I'm sure will come up again.
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Who is the most valuable member in a group of adventurers?
I quite like that about YA fiction myself. Sometimes it's not worth reading a paragraph describing an action that amounts to "He ran."
I consciously have to try and work on it with every new story. From 