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The issue with the Star Wars story is that it can't end. This means Luke cannot have been very effective, because the same issues have to repeat historically to promote an endless cycle of protagonists and antagonists and battles that relate to the previous fan-favourites (because nostalgia sells).

Therefore Luke must simultaneously be an awesome hero, and also just some loser that didn't really do anything that worked.

A new hope started with blood line. It was established out of the gate that Luke’s father was a Jedi knight and a good friend of Obi Wan.

Force Awakens and Last Jedi seemed to go in the direction that Rey and Snoke are unrelated to previous blood lines, but nope, it’s all Palpatine.

They tried to fix it in the last Jedi, but the fans had too much of a tantrum.

And after all that our bloke decides to become a copper.

That can be attributed to X-men and Harry Potter

But I'm sure there are more

It's all just the new testament. Before you fuck with poor people and nail them to a cross, make sure they aren't just slumming it, and actually have a very powerful father.

While it's definitely PRESENT in Lord of the Rings, one could argue Frodo himself is a subversion of it. Giving the ring to someone powerful would almost inevitably result in corrupting them and (depending on just how powerful they were) would just make a new big bad. Hobbits work as ring bearers explicitly because they're not "special".

The basic options for magic are:

• Sorcerers: Magic blood line or other innate gift of birth. Basically magic aristocracy.
• Wizards: Usually anyone can be a wizard, its the magic equivelent of studying hard in college.
• Warlocks: Anyone can be a warlock if they're willing to make a deal with the devil; the magic equivelent of dropping out to become a stripper.

Pretty much every fantasy has the magical aristocracy but the latter two are available to regular people in a lot of fantasies too, though wizardry is often gatekept and magical pacts tend to be for villains only.

There must be.

Haven't read it, yet, but I have high hopes for the Earthsea books.

From what I remember of the Neverending Story (the book), Bastian Balthazar Bux is just some kid with a good imagination, and he ends up as essentially their god; so.

due to the way causality works it would be pretty difficult to tell a story in any genre where someone's opportunities in life are not strongly correlated to circumstances from their past that are outside of their control (like their birth)

Tbh I am really pissed about this in One Piece's rather latest track. The will of D. and people with the D. names could have been pretty ordinary people with strong wills, good nature, social skills etc. opposing the injustices we see in the manga, but lately with all this reincarnation of Sun God Nika stuff, it is no different than what Naruto and Sasuke have been reduced to.

I know it is 25 years in the making and cultures and perceptions change, along with perception of tropes in entertainment, but can we at least go beyond this "the special one" or "the chosen one" stories?

I also know Oda has been a spectacular surpriser and a mangaka that can connect and change most trivial things to most core stuff to do unforeseen changes to the core of his world-crafting, but my doubts in One Piece being as unique as it was before the New World has been increasing these last 10 years of commercialization of it.

I genuinely think the main ideological function isn't even as much to promote that, as it is to focus personal dreams and fantasies towards wanting to become a part of the "winners". Not that it isn't part of it, just by normalising it as status quo even within fantasies, but I think even more powerful is to have people fantasise about being one of the chosen ones eventually.

Quick reminder that stuff like this is not planned like in some conspiracy, but just a result of dynamics happening (almost exclusively, rare exceptions) unconsciously the way ideology springs from the material base.

at least they explored the power dynamics, like yeah if some people are just mundane, some people can fucking shoot fire from their hands or make the ground swallow you whole, and ONE person is effectively just a god, then it makes sense for a lot of the mundane people to just want this all to stop because that's fucking terrifying.

But also there are (were?) things in the avatar universe that mitigate the power imbalance, like the avatars being raised to recognize that they have an extreme responsibility to use their powers wisely, and thanks to the whole reincarnation thing it'd presumably be difficult for the avatar to suddenly become evil since every previous avatar would screech at them and for all we know they could just force the avatar state to send the body to its death and exiting the avatar state just before death.

This, or the humble royalty, is most fictional hero storylines. I unironically believe capitalism uses these tropes to condition the people into believing feudalism, authoritarianism, and genetic divinity are justifiable.

Remember! The rich are rich because they're better than you! Not because them or their ancestors were murderers, slave owners, exploiters, criminal sociopaths, etc.