Meta Rec: The Flawed Fantasy of the Chosen One by Margaret Owen

Really great essay on why stories about "the chosen one who will save everyone/fix everything" are so popular, and why that can be such a toxic fantasy. Here's my favorite bit:

And this idea, that simply replacing the pieces can fix a flawed machine, has real-world consequences. Like when my fellow white Americans decided that since we elected President Obama, that meant racism was over and everything was fine. We no longer had a civic responsibility to confront the systemic racism saturating our society, we no longer had to reckon with the evils of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, because the right man had been given the power to fix it for us. I encountered this phenomenon as a field organizer for elections in 2010 and 2012—individuals whose activism stopped on November 7, 2008, were baffled or resentful that the nation’s demons had not been exorcised by February 1, 2009.

The Chosen One as a silver bullet further entrenches the idea that it just takes one humble outsider to restore the monarchy to its rightful function, instead of questioning the ethics of a monarchy in the first place.
--The Flawed Fantasy of the Chosen One by Margaret Owen