“They’re inside the house! The Call is coming from inside the house!!!“
Please do not TvTropes on my Christian forum
“I can’t be the chosen one, I’m not anyone special, I’m just me, just regular ole plain boring me.”
Starts to use chosen one powers.
Onlooker: “He’s doing it… He’s starting to believe…”
“What, this? No, everyone can do this, right?”
Gifted kid burnout sounds accurate.
Me every Skyrim run. I did one run without dragons because they only show up after the first story mission
Is there anything to do in Morrowind beyond climbing the first tower and shooting everyone with a bow and arrow till they come kill you?
I hate being pigeonholed into being the Dragonborn. I’m a Bosmer, for fucks sake.
What was your run then if you didn’t do the story?
Just an illusion necromancer that terrorized the world lol, plenty of side quests. You can even have an unlimited zombie army on vanilla using the ritual stone instant cool down trick, although zombie mammoths and giants tend to get stuck a lot
Huh, that’s good to know
this is exactly the entire plot of the Dark Profit Saga (Orconomics is the first book, 3 books total) and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read!
it’s written in a sorta Terry Pratchett-like style, with a modern twist, set in a typical medieval fantasy world, where the elites figure out that they can bet on the outcome of a dungeon raid in advance and invent a stock market based on the profits of raiding monster lairs!
there’s lots of plays on typical fantasy tropes it’s also full of amazingly silly acronyms: the monster races are known as F.O.E.s (forces of evil), the “civilized monsters” are known as N.P.C. (non-combat c…i wanna say creatures? i forgot that one…) and tons more!
it is glorious!
highly recommended read for fantasy nerds!
It’s also the plot of Forego Quest (a short novelette included in the book Dragons Banker). the hero is not just the chosen one, he’s THE chosen one, as in, the chosen one of every prophecy and myth. His body is covered in different birthmarks from hundreds of prophecies, he stumbles on unique magic weapons to defaet a dark lord at every coner (they sell for a nice profit), every inn he enters, the maid is suddenly super pretty and starts going on about actually being a princess in distress or some such. And he’s having none of it.
i quite enjoyed that one, and as a novelette it’s short enough to not overstay its welcome.
The main book was ok, had some nice ideas but nothing too spectacular. It’s about some magic kingdom intoducing bank notes instead of gold and a dragon hiring a banker to convert its hoard of gold into this new currency without being noticed or crashing the market.
thanks, i might check it out!
Thank you for the recommendation.
The author is J. Zachary Pike if anyone is wondering.
Isn’t this a main trope in the final season of Game of Thrones? “I don’t want it!”
I there are a few examples of stories where the Hero not only refuses The Call, but works against it and I love them.
What stories are those?
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The Hellboy comics are a great example, him refusing to be the prince of Hell is the reason his horns are shaved off
I mostly watch anime, but Madoka Magica does it. The nornal “Saturday Morning Cartoon” trope has some foreign being asking a child for help. One of the things this show does it acknowledge that maybe kids shouldn’t trust the first person asking for help. Towards pretty quickly, you figure out the character who’s asking for help doesn’t have the girls best interest in mind.
The MC of Cross Ange has several transformations through the show. First refusing “the call” from her commanding officer, then answering it, then realizing their CO is more interested in revenge then justice. It’s a pretty graphic show.
Goblin Slayer is framed as a standard JRPG/Table Top session, but the MC knows that if he leaves his “starter town” home, it will be over run by goblins. Also pretty graphic, but like Cross Ange, the first episode is the worse. BTW, despite being modeled on rpg tropes, there’s no rpg mechanics and the MC tends to do things not by what his class would dictate that would make a GM grown.
Not quite “Refusing the Call”, but in Reign of the Seven Spellblades, you realize that the MC came into the story with their own agenda. It’s an average anime, but if you find J. K. Rowling’s story telling annoying, you may like it.
I forget which season, but one of the Red vs Blue seasons starts with one of the characters becoming genre savvy and literally refusing any phone call coming in because they’re lazy.
It has a terrible ending, but Devil is a Part Timer also fits this description, partially
Next time I get the bug to watch some anime I know what I’m checking out :)
[off topic?]
UnLunDun by China Mieville skews the trope by having the spunky sidekick get elevated to True Hero status when the Chosen One buggers off.
I read this recently and was surprised how much I loved it.
If you liked him, try Tanith Lee. He called her one of his inspirations.
Followed by The Call Is Coming From Inside the House
But who was phone
The audio drama podcast ‘Absolutely No Adventures’ is a good example of this trope. Very fun.
There’s a 1990s-written paperback by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough called The Godmother that employs this trope.
A bit dark in tone but a decent read overall.
is sat
#noChildKeptBack
I’m sorry – are you criticising my grammar?
How else would you phrase this?
“Is sat” is uncommon in American English. It would more commonly be “is sitting.” Are you from the UK?
Yes.
And I have used “is sat” my entire life – which is quite a long time.
Yup, it’s not incorrect, it’s just a colloquialism Americans don’t usually use.
I think it feels weird mixing verb tenses, but it’s still comprehendable
Yes, perfectly understandable. Can remove lot word and tense in English still understand what say.
Why use many word when few word do fine? (👁 ͜ʖ👁)
It’s literally never occurred to me before.
There were plenty of times when a scene would be described as “We see the family on a normal Saturday night. Dad is sat in front of the TV, mum is sat at the table, doing a jigsaw. The kids are sat on the floor, playing a game”
That was the language I grew up with, and to use “sitting” instead of sat" would just have sounded weird.
I mean – “the family is sitting down to dinner”, sure – that sounds normal because it is something they are doing. But if it is passive speech (so to speak) then why would anyone use “sitting”? It’s just weird.
I think I’d tend to use has/had sat instead of is sat, but that would make it past tense not passive. But at this point I’ve thought about the word sat enough times that it’s begun to lose its meaning.
