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We are excited to announce that we are hiring Archives and Manuscripts Accession Assistants for the summer and academic year. Accessions Assistants work with new collections and prepare them to be open for research. This role offers an opportunity for graduate students to apply research skills and learn archival best practices.
This is a student position open to graduate students at the University of Chicago. Apply via the link in our LinkTree.
🧿 The Dark Side of Destiny: Villainous and Corrupted Chosen Ones
Chosen for Darkness
(Bonus Page: The Chosen One Project)
Not every Chosen One becomes a saviour.
While the trope traditionally celebrates figures destined to heal or redeem, many narratives explore a darker possibility: that those marked by prophecy, divine favour, or extraordinary power might fall into villainy instead.
These corrupted or villainous Chosen Ones add depth and danger to fantasy storytelling. They challenge the assumption that destiny equates to goodness, and they reveal how easily power can distort intention.
There are several key examples where the Chosen One turns toward destruction -and consider what these fallen figures teach us about fate, agency, and moral responsibility.
🌟 Destined for Ruin: Fallen Chosen Ones Across Fantasy🌟
Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars prequels) exemplifies the tragic Prophetic Archetype. Prophesied to bring balance to the Force, Anakin’s fear of loss and desperate need for control drive him into darkness. Rather than saving the galaxy, he becomes Darth Vader - the enforcer of tyranny he was meant to destroy. Or perhaps the perfect weapon of destiny who truly did bring balance to the Force.
Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII) presents another chilling image of corrupted destiny. Elevated by Shinra as the “perfect solider,” or Divinely Selected Figure. He was initially a celebrated hero, Sephiroth’s discovery of his manufactured origins -and his supposed greater “purpose”- leads him to embrace apocalyptic destruction, reshaping his destiny into a quest for godhood.
Emperor Zarkon (Voltron: Legendary Defender, 2016) offers a subtler tragedy. Once a noble Paladin of the Black Lion -an Artifact Wielder chosen for leadership and balance- Zarkon’s obsession with power and immortality slowly warps his destiny. The very force that once marked him as a protector becomes the tool of his downfall, transforming him into a brutal conqueror.
Oryx, the Taken King (Destiny video game lore) similarly ascends to dark godhood by making a bloody pact with cosmic forces. By taking Manifest Incarnation through force, his “chosen” path is one of annihilation, a deliberate rejection of mortality and community in favour of dominion.
In each case, destiny does not protect against corruption.
It amplifies it.
🌟 Narrative Power: Why Fallen Chosen Ones Matter🌟
Villainous Chosen Ones are more than mere reversals of the heroic narrative.
They force readers and audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about power, privilege, and the fragility of moral intention.
They show that being “chosen” is not an absolution -it is a test.
Fallen Chosen Ones:
Reveal the neutrality of destiny. Prophecy and selection are not moral judgments.
Highlight the importance of choice. Greatness requires conscious, continuous ethical action -not just anointing.
Mirror the hero’s potential for failure. They act as dark reflections, showing what could happen if virtue gives way to fear, anger, or pride.
By corrupting the promise of the Chosen One, these stories deepen their emotional and philosophical stakes.
They remind us that the power to save and the power to destroy are often terrifyingly close.
🌟 Corruption as a New Kind of Destiny🌟
The fall of the Chosen One is not merely personal tragedy.
It critiques the very systems that elevate individuals above others, questioning the societal need for singular saviours.
When heroes fall:
It becomes clear that no prophecy is infallible.
It exposes the dangers of concentrating hope -or power- in one figure.
It calls for vigilance, humility, and shared responsibility rather than blind faith in destiny.
In a genre increasingly aware of systemic injustice and complexity, villainous Chosen Ones feel not just relevant -but necessary.
They invite us to ask: If destiny can create monsters as easily as heroes, how should we rethink what it means to be “chosen”?
The Choice Beneath the Crown
Ultimately, the most compelling Chosen One stories -heroic or villainous- hinge on a simple truth:
Being chosen is never enough.
The heroes we admire, and the villains we fear, are shaped not by the hand of fate alone, but by their decisions in the face of it.
Destiny may light the path.
But it is choice -and the courage to choose wisely- that defines a life.
🧿 Project Navigation:
Start here: [The Chosen One: From Sacred Myth to Fantasy Staple (Part 1)]
➡️ [Typologies of the Chosen One (Part 2)]
➡️ [Psychological and Cultural Roots (Part 3)]
➡️ [Breaking Destiny (Part 4)]
IDK if this is gonna resonate with anyone on this site but I have thoughts about the ways Academics go about doing public work, especially through social media (twitter, primarily). This isn't a deeply researched post or anything, just kinda thinking. Well, ranting really
So, I feel pretty at home with the internet, online jokes, youtube, tumblr, twitter, etc. I am also entering the final year of my PhD and am thinking about what I want to do once I graduate. I love public-facing work, and love the idea of doing long-form video essays, so I pay attention to how academics conduct themselves in online spaces.
Academics (before the Musk thing happened, and even now after) primarily use twitter to advertise themselves and their work, to celebrate their accomplishments, and to network. In some ways, that's very effective. Networking is deeply important for job hunting, and twitter allows people to become aware of one another and build connections.
HOWEVER, some academics also used twitter as a public education platform, and I think it's not as effective as many academics make it out to be (The exception is Dr. Raven Baxter, a molecular biologist who has done an excellent job in online spaces imo).
Maybe this is specific to fellow archaeologists, but I find that people in my field use twitter threads or quote-tweets to correct the rampant misinformation about my field. And I don't know how effective that really is? I personally don't enjoy reading twitter threads - maybe others do, but they don't hold my attention, and often the information you can provide is somewhat limited. I also don't like that you have to take an academic at their word, with a limited ability to see what their sources are and check them for yourself. But, this seems to be the golden standard for online public content in archaeology. It's what the academics do!
There are two further disconnects with online archaeologists and academics broadly: One, oftentimes there's a "callout" aspect to the quote-tweets. This type of post is geared towards a specific audience, and the callout content doesn't ACTUALLY change anybody's mind. It instead serves as a joke for the in-group who already know the misinformation is incorrect, and serves as entertainment (NOTE: I'm thinking specifically about the tweets I've seen calling out Ancient Aliens stuff. I know people who correct misinformation in a very measured and strategic way, and that is much more effective. But unfortunately, Ancient Aliens IS a TV show with an audience who isn't going to change their mind if you make fun of them.) Two (and this is actually my biggest gripe), there now exists a pressure to extend one's professional life into the personal life via social media.
This extension then makes your job a central part of your private identity. And as a result, I experience pressure to maintain a mostly-professional identity even in my private online spaces. (I could make a second, private anonymous twitter account. But my friends follow me on my twitter and I don't wanna.) I want to be able to make stupid little jokes, but they're always tempered by the fact that twitter has become a pseudo-workplace for academia. I can be silly, but not as silly as I really want to be because my advisor will see it.
I'm a whole person - I study the things I do because I think they're interesting. If I talk about them on twitter, then that's my professional twitter. If I make stupid jokes, then it's my private twitter. So I end up walking the line by basically never posing on twitter, while allowing myself to make silly jokes as a treat with the occasional milestone update.
But you know why this disconnect especially bothers me? I think that public work is so much more effective when it doesn't have a veneer of professionalism. I truly think the long-form video format of Hbomberguy, Jenny Nicholson, Shanspeare, Munecat, etc could be an excellent frontier for public education. And that includes the silly jokes and references. So when I complain about the idea that I need to have a professional public twitter, it's not the public aspect of my work that bothers me. It's that I feel my personality has to be tempered in order to please other academics, when really I want to make tweets for my friends and people who aren't archaeologists.
There's also a whole other rant I have about how academics misjudge how to communicate their work, and the fact that our work is NOT inherently interesting and you DO have to work to capture and audience, but that's a whole other bucket of fish.
Debuting one day before the annual celebrations of Shakespeare's birthday on April 23, 'The Northman' exploits the same Shakespearean text it avoids, writes Jeffrey R. Wilson. He says the film is an adaptation built for the 21st century while also example of centuries of work that interprets and reinvents the massive realm of sources, contexts, performances, criticism, adaptations and appropriations surrounding the plays and poems Shakespeare wrote.
"The Northman" isn't an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Instead, the film -- with an all-star cast that includes Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk and Willem Dafoe -- is an adaptation of one of Shakespeare's sources, the legend of Amleth in the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus' "History of the Danes." "The Northman" overleaps "Hamlet."Yet people today usually only know of Saxo because of Shakespeare. Debuting in the US on April 22, one day before the annual celebrations of Shakespeare's birthday on April 23 , "The Northman" exploits the same Shakespearean text it avoids.
love the value placed on young professionals’ labor in the public humanities sector :’)
More than anything, though, these exchanges were fun. A scholar could be playful at JASNA [the Jane Austin Society of North America conference] and not take oneself so seriously. Academic conferences then seemed to me, by contrast, full of people grasping at opportunities to hold the floor—posturing, squabbling, belittling. The fun at academic conferences, if it happened, seemed confined to late-night drinking, with cathartic rehashings of the day’s posturings, debates, and takedowns. Or maybe I was just in with the wrong crowd. In any case, I might not have noticed these patterns without experiencing JASNA. In a group of people devoted to author appreciation, it’s not only OK but expected to say that you love what you’re doing there...It seemed to me that few academic conferences then were building in opportunities that harnessed affirmative energy, celebrated the unserious, or acknowledged the power of the glass half full, or a third full, or with any sober splash in it at all. JASNA helped me see the price of using relentless wet blanket, top-down, and preachy approaches with nonacademic audiences. It rarely got your ideas the hearing they deserved. I want to be clear: I am not advocating for ridding one’s scholarship of the delivering of bad news. There are plenty of good reasons for righteous anger and rigorous critique, not to mention many situations in which they ought to be deployed. What I’m saying is that it does not serve us well to stick to one script. Smug outrage should not be an academic’s default mode of communication with the public. We need to use a variety of approaches to persuade. What I observed is that ritual condemnation did not inspire most readers or listeners to reflection, learning, or action.
Devoney Looser, “The Hows and Whys of Public Humanities,” MLA Profession
The Northman isn’t an adaptation of Hamlet. The film is an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s sources, a story told in the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes. The Northman o…
