Just stay quiet and you will be okay.
Mohammad Atta, 11 September, 2001
Meet John Doe.
He's a solid citizen, if somewhat boring. He holds a steady job, one that isn't exactly glamorous, but is of value to society. He has a supportive family and community, he has ordinary hobbies, he is the very definition of normal. He's a trucker. A plumber. A high school teacher. He's the last person you'd expect to go looking for trouble.
Then he is thrust into circumstances beyond his control and has to dig deep into himself to become the hero.
This is the essence of the everyman hero: an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and rises to become a hero.
He has no special skills or experience suited for his adventure. He may have friends and family who do, but he is not himself anywhere near their calibre. Chances are, he never even realised he'd be caught up in special circumstances. He probably isn't ready for the challenge. When it comes to him, though, he must rely on his grit, determination, resourcefulness, courage and wits to win the day.
The Everyman was once a staple character in popular fiction. Among the most famous of them are Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings. Representing the archetypical English country folk, the hobbits are peaceful and retiring, with little inclination towards arms and adventure, but when they are thrust into an epic adventure, they rise to the challenge to save the world from the ultimate evil.
The hero archetype is an aspirational ideal. He represents the apex of mankind. What skills, gifts and experiences he has, he uses it in the service of others. At the same time, these talents set him apart from humanity. He possesses abilities few, if anyone else, do. He feels remote, even distant, to the audience.
The everyman is the hero we can be. Here and now, wherever we may be, he shows us that we, too, have what it takes to be the heroes of our lives. You don't need to be a Tier One special operator, a demigod bestowed with divine power, or an isekai'd Japanese high school schooler granted a cheat skill. You need courage, fortitude and virtue, which anyone anywhere can cultivate.
The everyman is the best of us.
But what happened to him?
The Demand of Series Fiction
Every writer in the business knows that series fiction is the way to make money. And the everyman doesn't lend himself to a series.
Your average person experiences an extraordinary adventure perhaps once in a lifetime, if at all. The hobbits from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings are not habitual adventurers. Gregg Hurwitz's standalone novels feature ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances—and do not go looking for more adventures when they are done.
A series requires the main character to experience adventures on a regular basis. These adventures will change him. They give him the experience and skills he needs to adapt to a life of adventure. He is no longer an everyman, but an adventurer extraordinaire.
Consider Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International. The series begins with accountant Owen Pitt killing his boss-turned-werewolf. After that, he becomes a monster hunter... who also handles the company's accounts. The first book is the story of someone who _appears _to be an everyman discovering his destiny. The following books has him a full-fledged monster hunter, having left the ordinary life behind.
Western fiction today rarely features the everyman hero. Everyone knows that standalones don't make money, and publishers and business-minded authors would rather focus on fiction that makes money.
The exception to the rule is the cozy mystery genre. The challenge is primarily intellectual. The detective is an amateur who attempts to solve a case, but she isn't placed in mortal danger. Someone else—usually the lawful authorities—handles the dirty business of apprehending the criminal when he is unmasked. Without the element of danger, the detective can remain an amateur hobbyist, an everyman who happens to solve cases for fun. But should the everyman decide to make a career out of it by joining the police force or hunting the criminal himself, he transforms into an extraordinary man—and the genre becomes something else altogether.
It is difficult to find everyman heroes in a market that is obsessed with series fiction—in the West. Japan has a different take on things.
Handyman Saito in Another World throws the everyman into an alternate universe. Saito was a handyman on Earth; in his new world he plays the role of a support character. His party does most of the fighting, while he takes care of maintenance, lockpicking, and other support tasks. Although Saito is in extraordinary circumstances, he himself remains grounded and ordinary, carrying out the routine but necessary jobs so vital to success. By staying out of combat unless absolutely necessary, he retains his everyman identity. He also doubles as the audience surrogate, who explores the world through his eyes.
In Exterminator, protagonist Naoki is a pest exterminator transported to another world. In his new life, he continues his trade, only this time he employs magical tools against fantastic pests. It is a blue-collar approach to the traditional trope of monster hunting, adapting real-world pest control methods to a fantasy world.
Isekai Ojisan, Campfire Cooking in Another World With My Absurd Skill, Cooking with Wild Game and other Japanese slice-of-life isekai stories follow a similar strategy: they take an everyman protagonist (who is usually not a Japanese high schooler), throw him into a fantasy setting, and have him adapt his former trade to the new world. They fulfil the demand for series fiction in general and isekai fantasy in particular while positing an everyman hero as the protagonist.
Even then, these are not necessarily perfect examples of everyman heroes. Isekai conventions demand an overpowered skill, and many of these protagonists receive OP skills. Naoki receives the ability to detect threats and alchemise poisons, while Tsuyoshi Mukouda from Campfire Cooking gains the absurd skill of shopping at a transdimensional supermarket. In receiving these gifts, they depart the world of the everyman—even if they only use those gifts for mundane purposes.
Why must everymen become extraordinary? Because readers don't want to be ordinary.
Everyone Wants to Feel Special
Everybody knows that modern fiction demands protagonists that the reader can identify himself with. This line of thought produces a walking contradiction.
On one hand, you have a protagonist who is perfectly bland and featureless, the better for the reader to pour himself into. On the other, the protagonist also has some extraordinary skill, talent or gift, so that the reader can live vicariously through him.
Only in fiction is such a thing both possible and commonplace.
You know the tropes. The completely ordinary soldier/mercenary/adventurer who stumbles upon a secret ability that transforms him into the greatest warrior of all time. The worst student in an academy who becomes the genius everyone admires. The nobody who cultivates his way into becoming a god above all gods.
The story beats all the same. Someone starts at the bottom of the hierarchy. Everyone disrespects him, he struggles through life, he is constantly struggling. Then he is handed a lucky break. Suddenly he climbs to the top of the totem pole and becomes the greatest in the world.
This reflects the deepest desires of the reader. He is dissatisfied with where he is, nobody respects him, but he believes that he, too, can become strong and empowered if only he catches a lucky break.
Life doesn't work that way.
If you want respect, you have to be worthy of respect. If you want adventure, you have to be worthy of adventure. If you want to be the greatest of all time, you have to be worthy of that. Being gifted some cheat skill doesn't automatically make you worthy. You have to work for it.
Which is why in more grounded fiction, you see characters who stand at the apex of their careers. The genius detective who can crack any case. The Tier One Special Operations soldier who prevails against impossible odds. The legendary assassin who can eliminate anyone, anywhere. Whatever genre they live in, these characters possess an unusual level of competency, above and beyond that of their peers.
The special character makes a promise to the reader: you can become extraordinary, if only you catch a lucky break—or if you work hard to become extraordinary.
The everyman hero makes another kind of promise: you are already worthy of greatness.
The everyman is an ordinary man. He isn't a commando, an investigator, a necromancer with an army of shades, a Japanese high schooler transported to another world and bestowed with ludicrous skills. He's an average Joe. And yet, even that is enough. By tapping into his native courage, integrity and resources, he can prevail in difficult situations. The everyman hero is already worthy of adventure. He just has to realise it.
The everyman hero is also the most extraordinary of heroes. Some heroes are born into a great destiny. Others receive gifts and choose to use them for good. For the everyman, he is the son of a society that forges heroes.
Do we have that society today?
A Society Without Heroes
In 2016, three terrorists attacked Atatürk Airport, killing 45 and injuring 238. Greg Ellifritz provides a detailed breakdown here. His conclusions are chilling:
Shrapnel from a bomb blast will travel between 200 to 400 metres. Someone armed with a pistol is not going to make a shot at that range. To stop a suicide bomber hell-bent on mass destruction, the defender must close the distance.
15 metres from an explosion, you are _slightly _more likely to live than to die. Any closer and you are more likely to die. Within 5 metres of a suicide bomber, you will die. Your only chance of survival is to engage the threat at maximum range with a headshot, then drop to the prone immediately (to avoid shrapnel) and crawl away as quickly as you can.
A defender who engages a suicide bomber in handgun range has a 50% chance of death.
Ellifritz also shared a video of the attack. A police officer closed in on one of the terrorists and engaged him with his service pistol. The officer gunned him down, realised that the terrorist had a suicide belt, and tried to run.
The bomb exploded.
The officer died.
The everyman hero is the best of us. He is not the most skilled, the most gifted, the most powerful. He is most virtuous. He is the embodiment of the virtues of civilisation, the man who does good simply because it is the right thing to do. He is the man who built civilisation, preserves civilisation, and transmits civilisation into the future.
Think again of the police officer. What kind of man does it take to willingly run _towards _a bomber to take the shot? The kind of man who will give his life so others may life.
It takes a society to raise someone like that. And you cannot have a hero in a society that spits on heroes.
For years, urban America has scorned its protectors. Far-left politicians and activists simultaneously demand the police to protect them and to defund the police. The federal government imposes ridiculous requirements on the armed forces. When a white civilian defends himself from aggressors, he is dragged through the mud.
Other modern societies stifle their heroes. The everyman spends most of his life at work, his soul ground away by never-ending tedium. Society prevents him from having any purpose in life other than being a digit in a spreadsheet and the producer of the next generation of digits. The only thing society values is money and status, and the pursuit of money and status. Society demands everything from the everyman, and gives him nothing in return.
Why would anyone want to be a hero? What does he get out of it? Why would someone act selflessly when he is raised in a society that promotes selfishness and punishes selflessness?
The everyman hero no longer rings true. Not to a society that trusts the wolf when he says that if you keep quiet, you will be okay. Not to an individual who sees no reason to sacrifice himself for a society that alienated him.
Why do readers dream of grand adventure in another world? Because this one has snuffed out all hope of adventure. Why do reader-inserts chase pleasure, wealth and fame in another world? Because the readers are conditioned to pursue them in this world. Why do otaku fantasise about catching a lucky break in another world? Because society won't give them a break, because they won't save themselves, because they see no reason to contribute to a society that alienates them.
You cannot have heroes in a society that rejects heroism.
The Restoration
The everyman is the ultimate societal bellwether.
When the everyman disappears, it means you no longer live in a society where the common man can become a hero, or even dreams of becoming a hero. And without its heroes to protect and preserve it, society cannot last for long.
What can you do?
This is a writing post, so from a writing perspective, the answer is simple: bring him back. Remind society of the virtues it has lost, and readers of the lions sleeping within them.
Big publishers won't publish such books. The Japanese won't publish anything that doesn't hew strictly to genre conventions or subversion of conventions. Big-time indie authors won't publish anything that won't make them money.
That leaves fiction from lesser-known indie authors.
Shoot the Devil features ten tales of (mostly) ordinary men and women doing battle with the forces of darkness. Sidearm & Sorcery has regular folk fighting supernatural threats in contemporary urban environments. Misha Burnett's Erik Rugar from Bad Dreams and Broken Hearts is a perfectly ordinary human detective who solves crimes in a magical city filled with sorcery, alchemists and fantastic creatures.
The everyman is still out there, tending the last bonfire in the midst of winter, keeping alive the spark of what once was, and might yet be again.
The wolves are at the gates. The barbarians run amok in the streets. The tyrants sit in the high places. The least of us sit quietly and hope that things will be okay.
The best of us remember this:
Let's roll.
Todd Beamer, 11 September 2001
Who will you become?
