"Destiny" (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, September 27, 2017, 13:13 (2431 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Wednesday, September 27, 2017, 13:23

So RaichuKFM already touched on some of this in a post above, but there is a philosophical/psychological school of thought that approaches the concept of "Destiny" or hero mythology from something close to the opposite direction than is common.

The basic idea is that our stories, cultural fables, religious myths, etc, are based on our own accounts of human history over thousands and thousands of years. That people all over the world watch each other, learn from each other, and recognize something special in an individual who is able to do great things. We might not be able to articulate exactly what makes that person special or why they are able to do amazing things, but we tell stories about them nonetheless. And as those stories grow in number over the generations, people start to notice commonalities between the "heroes" of such stories. And that this leads to the creation of new stories that feature "meta heroes"; characters that are combinations, or distillations, or amalgamations of the traits and personalities of all the great people we have observed throughout our history.

Carrying that concept forward, questions about "Destiny" can easily be turned on their head. It isn't that a hero (like 117, for example) was guaranteed to achieve greatness because of forces outside of his control. It is the opposite; A hero, by making the choices that he/she made, fostering the strength that he/she did, could not help but achieve greatness. And that is a very different thing than having greatness handed to you.