Star Wars to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (not to mention the famous book series that I’m never mentioning again.) One solitary hero faces up to a massive destiny, along with a handful of supporting characters who hang back, do research, and obsess about the hero.
The appeal of this sort of story is easy to see: we all want to imagine being powerful, singled out for great things—and able to actually do something about huge, intractable problems that threaten our entire world. Most of the time in real life, we all feel helpless in the face of the massive systemic problems that are slowly killing us, so there’s a super-tempting dose of wish-fulfillment in the notion that one person could save us all.