I’ve been enjoying Dune, by Frank Herbert, as an audiobook. It’s 20+ hours long and I’ve got about 3 hours left. It’s basically a messiah heroes journey and it’s very well written. This gave me an idea for a plot of a book or movie.

I’d call it ‘The Reluctant Messiah’. Basically it’s about 2 best friends, and one of them is the Chosen One. He doesn’t want to be, and the friend is jealous of him. For 2/3rds of the move the chosen one is the protagonist, we get to hear inside his head. We see things the friend doesn’t. Then something totally unexpected happens. The chosen one reluctantly goes up against a weak nemesis that he feels is below him and he is killed. The protagonist is gone and nothing is resolved.

The best friend now reluctantly picks up the reins and is forced to take over, but to this point there is not a single hint that this will happen. Now he gets his chance he has been jealous of, but totally doesn’t want it, and doesn’t feel ready for it, (he is actually the reluctant messiah).

Further, the reader is in full knowledge of things the new messiah should know, but doesn’t… because he wasn’t part of different aspects of the training involved while the reader was there, with the original messiah. So the reader has to watch this new messiah totally mess up the prophesies, and make almost fatal errors, with devastating collateral damage, on his way to saving the day in a totally different way. And thus the new messiah creates folklore that is absolutely nothing like the old folklore told at the start of the story.

The really novel thing here is going through 2/3rds of the book having absolutely no idea who the real protagonist is, and having the original protagonist die in a completely unexpected way before the climax of the story is close.

That’s the idea, I’d love to see someone pull it off.