How many stories have you read where the main character is from another world? Through some magical happening circumstances, they end up in this fantasy realm, or on a starship, or into the Renaissance, the “Chosen One” or something similar. Maybe they save the day with their knowledge of modern-day earth. Maybe they fall in love. But inevitably, they have to return to the “real world” and move on with their life, after perhaps a tearful goodbye and someone telling them that their own world needs them now. So they’re dropped back off in a cloud of magic and we get “ten years later” written on the screen with them and their spouse and their happy life.
This trope always bothered me for multiple reasons. It was what kept me from writing stories where the character has something tying them down to their own world. Making characters orphans or living with estranged relatives was used for this very reason, to give the character flexibility to move on without any real conflicting thoughts. It left a clean break. There was nothing that they had to feel guilty about so all of their energy could be focused on taking out the antagonist of the story. The things that they left behind could be a momentary blip of discomfort, and then the character would forget about them, never to be thought of again.
But say the characters have a family, friends, and a life. We’ll use the Pevensie children, from the Narnia series as an example. How did they do it? They were whisked off to a new world and spent almost the entirety of "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" trying to get home. Except when they became kings and queens, and then they seem to have forgotten, and spent the next ten to fifteen years of their lives in Narnia, ruling as their leaders. How did they leave their family behind? It was the middle of World War II, their mother sent them off because of the danger. Were they worried? Did they keep on trying to get home?
And maybe a better question: once they did get home, how did they manage to live away from Narnia?
Imagine this: you were sent back to your world from one where you were the hero. You could use magic. You were given crowns and titles and were known for being a great hero and for your great deeds. And now, you’re in your room. You are turning eighteen for the second time in your life, and you look wrong. The scars you retained from that one training match are gone, a lost memory of the world you gave years of your life to. Magic no longer crackles at your fingertips. In fact, the only thing that the world left you with was the raging PTSD you can’t get treated because there is no way you can tell your therapist that you spent years in another world and now you’re desperate to go back because you’re convinced that you left the better part of yourself there. You realize that you weren’t meant for this world. The other world is where you should be.
In other words, how did the Pevensie kids handle it? From adults back to children in a matter of moments, and they have to go back to their normal mundane lives after being kings and queens of Narnia. What would it be like to be the “Ex-Hero”? The world will never open up for you again. Your magic, your training, everything…you’ve lost it all. For Peter and Susan, they were told that they couldn’t come back after helping Caspian, and for Edmund and Lucy, it was the same after their next visit. This world that they gave years of their life to had shut them out forever, told them that they are no longer welcome in the world that they helped save.
This trope largely goes unexplored. It’s a lot of conflict for one person to think about. Even if our world has our own ex-heroes, it’s not a typical story idea. People are more excited about the magical world than the people whose lives were wrecked from being there. The story is often left off once the character comes back to their old house, maybe gives a wistful look out the window into the snow, murmurs something profound, and then seems to return to their old life as though nothing had happened. It never shows a few months later, when the character is having torrid dreams about battles that they led, or the time that they lost their eye to that one villain, and they wake up feeling tingling in their fingers from remnants of magic that they can no longer touch, sensing doors opening to other worlds, but never their world. And they’re stuck, reliving years and years of their lives, but never feeling quite right anymore.
Ex-heroes can’t be just stuck to the pages of books, though. Veterans of war have said that being deployed is a lot like being sent to another world. And even though it seems fine when they come home, it’s easy to see that later on, they find it much harder to adjust. Trying to use their experiences and have them relate to their now “normal” lives is a struggle. Things that meant something to them on deployment have no place in their house and trying to shake that isn’t ever easy. The same goes for anyone who is trying to balance their old lives with a new, completely different life: the recently divorced, homeless, and the person released from prison after being wrongfully convicted. Anyone who had a dramatic change to their life and can’t find a way to compromise their old life and their new one.
The ex-heroes aren’t as far away as you might think. And by understanding their experiences, it can only enrich our writing and understanding. Our ex-heroes are very, very real, and all of them have a magical world that they are trying to move on from, or trying to get back to because they left something behind. Maybe their comfort, their happiness, or their better half. Moving on, fantasy story or not, will never be easy. The Pevensie children had one another, knowing that they all experienced the same thing in Narnia, and they probably helped one another through the struggles of growing up for a second time. They had Aslan and other children that they met who had also been whisked away to Narnia.
Though to be honest, not all ex-heroes have that luxury, story or no story.
