I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.