Summon an everyman hero.........why?

I don't like to repeat myself but obviously I wasn't verbose enough the first time...

The "why" of Summon Everyman Hero is easily answered; Blue-and-Orange Morality. Put simply - you don't summon a target from another plane of existence for their skills, you summon them for their ideas and knowledge.

Most works that use this trope are low/high fantasy, with varying levels of tech and political development. The way I see it, the very fact that the summoned is a human from their particular culture and time period is advantage enough. Erfworld plays up this angle for all it's worth, The Pendragon Adventure subverts it, and there are dozens of other variations on this singular aspect.

Since ideas are indestructible, it makes sense to summon someone who has access to foreign ideas, rather than skills.

Now, this does garner some unpleasant implications, Mighty Whitey and Humans Are Special in particular. And it further begs the question of why you would summon an everyman instead of, say, someone with a PHD in political science or economics. Presumably there would need to be some level of commonality between the summoner's race/culture and the summoned, but who knows.

Followup question: If the ideas that a summoning target brings is more important than their skills, then what would happen if this generically medieval fantasy summoner got a target from our world, but further back in the past? Or one of the Fair Folk (who are infamous for their Blue and Orange moralities)? Or dare I say some deity/spirit or other who knew far more about the workings of the universe than their summoners?

Of course, you wouldn't be summoning an everyman anymore, but I'd get over that part.

edited 14th Oct '12 9:45:21 AM by CleverPun

Tom is also assuming that the only thing of any value that a summoned hero can bring, that the only thing the summoners could possibly need, want, or be looking for, is physical fighting skill.

^ Considering 99% of the time (if not more) the trope is used to the effect of "Please save my X!" where X is anything from Queen to kingdom to prized cow, yeah it applies quite fully.

Hence the trope is discredited worthy of only parody, subversion or aversion.

Like what? What can you teach in the span of two weeks or less to gain the skill level equivalent of lifelong experience? Especially in your typical fantasy settings where the trope is used most often?

...that was my point; they could just want something which is inherent and does not need to be learnt or that most "real" people have.

Again, like what?

That depends on the fantasy world in question. The posibilities are endless;

• Literacy (or some other skill most 21st century people are taught).
• Being able to use some common artifact which also came from the "real" world (e.g. cars, computers, read a book written in English or French).
• Simply being a third party (a neutral party taking up their cause might be exactly what they want).
• Having arms.
• Being non-magical (because the "real" world hasn't got any magic).
• Being extra-magical (because the "real" world hasn't used up much of its magic or something).
• Being immune to some toxin or other (it's very reasonable that people from another world could have lower tolerances to certain trace elements which are more common in the "real" world).

And so on.

edited 14th Oct '12 8:13:44 AM by Bisected8

or as i illustrated in Kamen Rider Wizard, "having the willpower to pull themselves out of the Dispair Event Horizon on their own." Hataro doesn't seem like anything special, a everyman before that moment, but that is the key to why The White Wizard made him The Hero

From the viewpoint of someone supposedly writing one of these stories. Here are my justifications for picking an every-man. But... it might not fit the trope to a T. More on that later.

• In the history of the Fantasy world, successful, talented and formidable people that came to it from our world and were granted power, became corrupt 95% of the time.

• The primary use of the person from our world is the fact that they come from our world. (Meaning they could pick anyone from it.)

• The last 'chosen' was an average Joe and made significant progress towards resolving the pressing crisis at hand rather than abusing their new found power.

Also to be fair, the Summoner did end up a little batty. His selection process was likely flawed.

At the core, Major Tom is right. The more you justify it, it drifts away from this trope, thus making it irrelevant to this 'argument'. Hence the bit about Harry Potter not being an example of the trope. He might appear to be that, but then you find out he was the son of _____ and is actually the chosen one who ______.

The Blue and Orange Morality is a good point too. The someone from our world we see as ordinary may be crucial and remarkable in another. To put it crudely: A loser in England might be able to go to America and get chicks cause his 'accent is sexy'.

edited 15th Oct '12 9:16:09 AM by Dimanagul

... you know, this really seems to be one of those cases where the question being asked and the question being meant don't quite line up.

After a quick glance through the trope page, Summon Everyman Hero doesn't seem to include a lot of examples where the summoner was deliberately invoking 'summon random mostly-useless schmuck'. Well, aside from one where the Evil Overlord was doing the summoning in the specific hope of that, anyhow. They got Everymen because of the Will of the plot Cosmos, because they were idiots or totally clueless as to what they were going to get, using a summoning with some Literal Genie components, there were outside factors interfering with the summoning (such as their own incompetence/inexperience with magic, or the summoning was rushed or interrupted, or even interfered with by an enemy spell)...

Honestly, I'm not even sure anymore if I understand the point of the question; it seems more an excuse to rant about a disliked trope than an actual request for information.

edited 15th Oct '12 6:54:04 PM by TeChameleon

Well, since someone was asking what exactly the will of the cosmos is, such that the summoning worked out like it did, I think I might have the explanation - Potential. The everyman being summoned has the potential to be better than any other person for the job he's being summoned for. You could just have summoned a person who's currently better than the everyman, but then wouldn't you rather have the best even if you have to wait another 10 years or so for it? And if you ask how the potential is measured, well, there's physical ability and personality. Maybe the everyman has the attitude that will get him just the right friends to help him get to the top, which the already trained individual might not have.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the possibility that the everyman might die from his lack of ability right now, but then that's the definition of high risk-high reward.

What about this:

In the fantasy world, there's a prophecy that says a certain side in a conflict will win and conquer the world, and in this universe You Can't Fight Fate: prophecies always come true no matter what. But the ancient seers who wrote all the prophecies couldn't actually see into the future. Instead, they had perfect knowledge of the past; the knew everything that had ever happened anywhere in the universe, down to the movements of the smallest sub-atomic particle. Using this knowledge, along with their superhuman intelligence, the seers could make perfect predictions about the future, the same way we can predict a rock will fall to the ground if we drop it, even though we can't actually look into the future to see the rock fall.

This creates an opportunity to Screw Destiny: the seers only had perfect knowledge of the universe they lived in, so the actions of people in other universes never entered their calculations; if someone from Another Dimension were to show up in the fantasy world, they'd be able to take actions the seers couldn't have predicted, and so avert the prophecy.

Someone who doesn't like the prophecy's predictions seizes on this thread of hope and develops a spell to bring someone from a different universe into their own. However, the spellcaster's own actions are something the ancient seers could predict; if they try to guide the spell in selecting a person to bring over, that selection will have been foreseen by the seers, and so won't be Immune to Fate. For the spellcaster's plan to work, they have to give up all control of the spell and let the person summoned from our world be decided by random chance. The law of averages being what it is, this results in them summoning over a relatively ordinary human being.

How's that sound?

edited 16th Oct '12 9:34:49 PM by RavenWilder

In a story I'm writing, the explanation is simple. Humans have invaded a territory of Little Bit Beastly people and are trying to enslave the population, keeping the human dissenters from allying with them by saying the Little Bit Beastly people would kill them and eat them and so on. The tribes of Little Bit Beastly people are disorganized due to some tensions between the tribes. One deity decided she needed someone who fulfilled the following criteria to bring together humans dissenters and Little Bit Beastly people:

1) Be human so that human dissenters know the Little Bit Beastly won't kill them for no reason and so that the Little Bit Beastly people will get used to having human allies. 2) be either charismatic or likable enough to rally everyone under the same banner. Charismatic people are in short supply no matter where you look, but get someone likeable enough and you could rally the troops around them. 3) Would join the good guys against all odds rather than be someone who would fight for the stronger side 4) on the same logic, someone more interested in ideals than in material wealth. 5) Someone with enough fitness and training to be able to outrun armed troopers after receiving a divine blessing that improves all their abilities.

Soldiers, no matter how you look at it, are unlikely to simultaneously fulfill the second, third and fourth criteria (When was the last time you saw a fictional soldier except for the protagonist ever be portrayed in the mass media as something other than either a Red Shirt or a war criminal waiting to happen? The fact that their job description is literally killing people doesn't endear them much to civilians, which means that even if you found a soldier who fulfilled criteria 3 and 4, you'd have a problem making them likeable enough to a population that was unprepared for warfare because they were too busy fighting against a hostile environment.).

Idealistic teenagers in University? These don't carry the same baggage a soldier carries, you just need to find one in good shape, preferably with geek or otaku tendencies, since let's face it, meeting someone a Little Bit Beastly is a wet dream for any self-respecting otaku, and if you picked one Adorkable enough, you might not even need someone charismatic. Time their arrival just right so that the first thing they do upon arrival is interrupt a rape about to happen, and then you're mostly set. It's the closest thing you'll ever get anyway.

edited 10th Jul '17 11:22:20 AM by ElodieHiras

Holy crap, this thread is old.