There are a lot of stories of some kid being chosen to be the hero, to save the world. Some even travel to extraordinary places in order to accomplish such feats. Some are just whisked away from everyday life, the here and now, and asked to perform the impossible. The stories usually have a happy ending of success and the kid gets to go home.
But my brother brought up a good point the other day.
What happens to the kid when they go back to their everyday life? I mean, excluding the possible post traumatic stress syndrome related to the struggle of good versus evil, how does the return to normalcy effect the kid?
If I told you that I was transported to an other dimension because I was the chosen one and had to save a foreign world for an untold evil, you would think I was crazy. A kid saying that would be passed off as being imaginative. But they didn't imagine it, they lived it. But everyone around them would be telling him it didn't happen, it couldn't have happened because it didn't happen to them.
I'm pretty sure he would learn quickly not to push whoever the closest adult or peer into trying to believe them. So he would get quiet, unable to share without being ridiculed, if he wasn't being teased already for his first attempt to be believed. Because it's not the popular kid who gets to be the chosen one. It's the quiet one who is supposed to learn from his adventure to stand up for himself. But the kid would get quiet about it.
Time would pass and the memories would get fuzzy.
And then he would start to doubt himself. Was it a memory or just a story he used to keep entertained in the backyard? Maybe it didn't really happen. Maybe the dreams and flashbacks to his time spent in that magical dimension are just delusions of an overactive imagination. And he definitely couldn't share his story when he was older because he sounds crazy, unable to decipher between reality and fiction.
But maybe he misses that sense of adventure. He misses the thrill of those quests and challenges that he alone could solve. How boring would real life be to someone who has saved a civilization, a world, a universe. How mundane is going through school, going to college, getting a job, marrying someone, having 2.5 kids with a white picket mortgage. Could someone who was specifically chosen, who left an ordinary life momentarily, ever really go back to one?
Storytellers only focus on the adventure. Understandably of course, that's what adventure is about. It's the action, the drama, the story. They don't quite focus on after the story, especially if that is just wrapped up with a "And they lived happily ever after."
I'm not sure how you one would write the hero's return to normalcy or even how normal one could get. I guess it would depend on the person.
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