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The Chosen One vs. Avengers: Which is more Cliche?


Mithras

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People argue that ASOIAF is "too good" to include a chosen one as the one true hero because that is overly done in the genre and boring; consequently, there should be a group of heroes setting their differences aside and making common cause to save the mankind.

 

So what do you think? The Chosen One vs. Avengers? Which is more cliché?

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:laugh: Both are cliches. But I think both will co-exist in ASOIAF but in heavily altered versions.

Azor Ahai is the chosen one; but he is chosen to bring the summer that never ends (the fire version of a post apocalypse paradise)

And yes, heroes are gathering but we don't know which of the multiple factions they will join.

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I'm all for the Westerosi avengers. Tree Boy, Captain Snowflake, Dragon Woman, Dr Imp, Wolf girl and Gold Hand to the rescue! :cool4:

 

Anyway, I would say "The Chose One" trope is more cliché and unrealistic. I don't like the idea of the fate of the world resting on one person's shoulders.

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I think we clearly need a [i]Guardians of the Galaxy[/i] rather than an [i]Avengers[/i]: a bunch of misfits and criminals who raise unlikely allies, but in the end have to use the power of friendship to defeat magic. Darkstarlord the handsome rogue, with Arianne and the Sand Snakes as his Ravagers; Gamorasha, the warrior woman raised as the daughter of a villain, Socket Summer (warged by Bran) and I Am Hodor the lovable sidekick with a limited lexicon... they just need to meet up somewhere, and then find their Drax, and they can grab the infinity crystal from the Heart of Winter.

(For the record, [i]Guardians[/i] is one of my favorite action movies of all time, while [i]Avengers[i] is just in the top 10% or so, but that's not why I think Friendship Is Magic is more important than There's No I in Team here.)
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I'm all for the Westerosi avengers. Tree Boy, Captain Snowflake, Dragon Woman, Dr Imp, Wolf girl and Gold Hand to the rescue! :cool4:
 
Anyway, I would say "The Chose One" trope is more cliché and unrealistic. I don't like the idea of the fate of the world resting on one person's shoulders.

:Agree:

That team sounds awesome btw. :D
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Avengers wouldn't have been so cliche if Wheadon had adapted "Dissasembled" a bit more faithfully but whatever.

In any case, most of the so-called "heroes" of asoiaf are so grey, they'd be more "Thunderbolts" than "Avengers"
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Who is the wolf girl Arya or Sansa?

We're talking Marvel here, so it's obviously the tortured young girl turned killing machine who spent time as part of an X-Treme violent organization before becoming an Avenger.

Sansa Stark has alliteration going for her, so she qualifies to cross the aisle and join the Justice League.
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I think he's talking about a trope rather than the Marvel super hero team.  I also think the point is well taken about essentially having to chose between supposed literary clichés. I think that after a certain point, writing to consciously avoid any themes or events that could possibly be taken as "clichéd" is every bit as artificial as relying upon the same to carry one's narrative.  I genuinely hope that Martin has a good story in mind and that that story gets told properly, whether people consider parts of it to be clichéd or not.

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I think that it's only a cliché if it's done poorly.  That being said, "Chosen One" has definitely been done more, though I don't think that makes it inherently inferior or more vulnerable to cliché.  There are still billions of ways to do "Chosen One" well, and differently then it has been done before. 

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Anyone who thinks that GRRM must avoid all cliches at all costs or his story will suck is missing the lesson that other "trope-breakers" have learned and explained.

Michael Moorcock is the obvious example here, but since we're talking about The Avengers, let's look at Joss Whedon. From the moment he got involved with the MCU project, he's wanted to find a way to fit a romance into an action movie that didn't follow either the "damsel in distress" story or the "fighting side-by-side to save the world" story. And yet, in Age of Ultron, the romance between Black Widow and Hulk is the latter, played pretty much straight. Their romance avoids obvious tropes in other ways (most notably, Black Widow is not interested in the Hulk because he's the Hulk; in fact, she has to overcome the Hulkness to connect with Bruce Banner). But, as Whedon explained, if he actually wanted to avoid all of the tropes, he'd have to somehow sideline one of them from the action, for no good story-internal reason. Which would have been stupid, so he didn't do it. Tropes become tropes because they fit organically into a wide variety of stories, so dogmatically avoiding them is even worse than unthinkingly following them.

So it doesn't matter which cliche is "more cliche". If the natural outgrowth of GRRM's story approaches one of those cliches, that's the one he'll end up on; if it approaches neither, he won't end up on either.
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You're asking the wrong question OP, but if you want to go by what's been done more than Chosen One certainly has been done more than Team of Heroes in the history of human storytelling.  

 

But the relevant question is what kind of a story are we reading.

 

If it was a "chosen one" story it would be told from one perspective (or maybe 2 - sometimes you have the chosen one as a young child, and someone has to tell their story while they are too young to tell it themselves).  

 

This is a book told from the perspective of 3 major characters, and several supporting characters many of which have clear connections to the final conflict.  The majority of which are likely to be involved in the final conflict based on hints throughout the books.  Bam, Avengers.

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