Basic Trope: Where The Chosen One fails at being the Chosen One.
- Straight: The Hero fits all of the criteria for The Chosen One who is said to slay the Evil Overlord and free the world from his tyranny. He is found by The Chooser of the One who then tells him of his destiny. The Hero is trained, assembles his allies, becomes a beacon to the people, leads an army against the Evil Overlord and his Army of Thieves and Whores... and he is quickly slain by the Evil Overlord. The fight is lost, The Bad Guy Wins and another thousand years of evil swaths the land until the next Chosen One is found.
- Exaggerated: The Chosen One is slain within five minutes of being chosen, without any of the Hope Spot set-up.
- Downplayed: The Chosen One makes a very strong effort that significantly weakens the Evil Overlord's empire, but makes a Heroic Sacrifice before he can fully fulfill the prophecy.
- Justified:
- The prophecy has no magical or divine source to speak of and might actually be fake.
- The prophecy is written so vaguely that the idea that the Chosen One will kill the Evil Overlord might be a translation error.
- The Chosen One comes from a long-line of Chosen Ones that goes as far back as the creation of the world, so of-course there will be a dud every now and then.
- Inverted: The Hero fits none of the criteria for being the Chosen One, yet beats the odds and slays the Evil overlord regardless, proving that hard-work, dedication, a good heart and a little luck is all it takes to be a hero.
- Subverted:
- The Hero is revealed to not be the Chosen One. He just coincidentally shares all of the same attributes as the actual Chosen One and was confused for him and the real chosen one succeeds.
- The Hero was chosen... to be a Human Sacrifice to placate the Evil Overlord's insatiable blood-lust.
- The Hero is genuinely the Chosen One, but then it turns out that all of his mentors were either incompetent or outright evil. All the talent in the world means nothing if you can't hone it into actual skill.
- Double Subverted:
- The Hero was destined to die as motivation for the actual Chosen One to avenge them, thus technically full-filling the destiny he was chosen for.
- The Hero was destined to die as an Inspirational Martyr for the common folk to get behind and keep hope alive in this Dark Age.
- Parodied: The Chooser of the One gets The Hero gift-wrapped for him, having mailed-ordered a Trope Co.® Chosen One from Amazon. When The Hero fails in his mission, The Chooser takes a closer look as the box he came in, he discovers that he was a Shoddy Knockoff Product made in Mexico.
- Deconstructed:
- Because everyone thought that a Chosen One was meant to be the one to slay the Evil Overlord, nobody else actually humors the idea that maybe the many other monarchs and their highly-trained armies are just as qualified to challenge the Evil Overlord. Anyone who humors the idea that they do not need a Chosen One to fix the world's problems are either laughed off as naïve or prosecuted as heretics. By the time they find the Chosen One, they force him into the role against his will and sends him against the Evil Overlord unprepared under the assumption that everything with work itself out. At best, the unprepared and untrained child they presumed to be the Chosen One will be killed by the Evil Overlord's Mooks. At worst, The Dog Bites Back and he turns evil.
- The Hero had everything in his favor, having been designated as the Chosen One since birth and has since been pampered from day one as reward for the eventual prophecy he was meant to fulfill. It goes to his head, turning him into a Spoiled Brat with an Inferiority Superiority Complex, the pressure of his destiny and the ego the hero worship gives him making him Unfit for Greatness.
- Reconstructed:
- Thankfully, this is one of those prophecies in which anybody who can pull off the mission is, technically, "The Chosen One".
- In spite of all odds, The Hero survived his battle against the Evil Overlord, and his bitter defeat eventually causes him to start acting into an actual Chosen One.
- Zig Zagged: The Hero is the destined prophesied one to slay the Evil Overlord, only for him to fail and die... only to reveal that the prophecy everyone knows about is just Act 1 of a three-part prophecy that explicitely stated that he was destined to fail... and then come back from the dead and finish what he started in killing the Evil Overlord... as part of a Thanatos Gambit orchestrated by the Evil Overlord, the prophecy having been made and spread by the Evil overlord in the first place, with the reveal that the Chooser of the One and the Evil Overlord where the same person.
- Averted:
- The Hero is destined to kill the Evil overlord and does so without incident.
- There is no prophecy pointing out that The Hero is the Chosen One, and his death merely reminds the audience that Anyone Can Die in this world.
- Enforced: "The Chosen One" narratives have saturated the market, and with Deconstructive Parodies increasing in popularity, a Deconstructive Parody of "Chosen One" Narratives is inevitable.
- Implied: One member of the cast talks about the prophecy of The Chosen One... and then quite notably hesitates to introduce the aforementioned Chosen One.
- Logical Extreme: The one who distrusted the prophecies turns out to be the actual protagonist, while the one that followed it and got in deep shit because The Chosen One is lousy is the Decoy Protagonist.
- Played for Laughs: The main Running Gag of the story is how the Poorly Chosen One is a complete doofus.
- Played for Drama: The rest of the cast races to scavenge some other way to solve things when Plan "A" — let The Chosen One solve it — turns out to be a bust. This quest causes more suffering than what Plan "A" would have involved, of course.
- Played for Horror:
- The Chosen One being a bust leads to a colossal Downer Ending with all of the rest of the cast being mercilessly slaughtered and The End of the World as We Know It, showcased in all of its gory "glory".
- The Chosen One reveals himself to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing and takes over as the new Big Bad, using his Chosen One powers to perform greater atrocities than the previous Big Bad did.
- Lampshaded: "Gee, sure was a good thing we went though all of the trouble to fetch the Chosen One, didn't we?"
- Invoked: The Sink or Swim Mentor chooses an absolute shithead to be "The Chosen One" to force the rest of the crew to pull their weight.
- Defied: The Chooser of the One makes absolutely sure, without any shadow of a doubt, that every single step regarding the choosing of The Chosen One is carried to absolute perfection. If things still go belly-up as a result of some unforeseen consequence, the Chooser at least can say with absolute certainty that he has a clean conscience about the way that part turned out.
- Exploited: The Chooser of the One has been compromised by an evil force, and ends up deliberately choosing a bad candidate so the Big Bad can deal with the failure hero easily.
- Discussed: "You know, I'm glad I turned out to be the right guy for the job. If not, then..." "Then we wouldn't be here."
- Conversed: "Jeez, that was... actually really shocking. Didn't expect the guy to get offed like that before he could take the boss out."
- Untwisted: The Chosen One performs his duty to perfection — whatever dumb things he does along the way are just because he's a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass.
- Unparodied: The setting is After the End and we eventually discover that it's because The Chosen One who was meant to stop this was too much of a vain putz to pull it off. They were the first to die, and if they had been the only ones to die, then the answer to hearing that would definitely have been "good riddance".
- Intended Audience Reaction: If there is An Aesop to this story, it is that you can only put faith in yourself.
