Story from the point of view of the only normal one? (warning: long)

Cafe Society
1

I have an idea for a story, not even an embryo, just the merest zygote of an plot. But before I spend much more time thinking about it, I want to assure myself that it’s not some mostly forgotten thing I read once. So I turn to dopers, who are the best read people around.

So, it’s like this. There are a lot of stories about people who are special.

  • X-Men, Being Human, Harry Potter, Otherworld and literally dozens of urban fantasy series.

  • Sometimes they have one or more normal people with them who pitch in to help out like BTVS, the Need trilogy and Lost Girl. However, in the latter case, the normal people are supporting roles/part of an ensemble cast of characters only.

  • Sometimes, the vanilla humans even become special themselves, like in The Mortal Instruments or Angel; both True Blood and Haven are both leaning that way now too.

These are absolutely not the type of story I’m interested in writing.

Instead I’ve been thinking about something from real life, and how it could translate into fiction… Back when I taught preschool and kindergarten kids, all of the kids were special needs, ranging from speech delays or ADHD to having autism or down syndrome, and participating in the school for early intervention.

Except in each class there was one child, in both cases a sibling of a special needs child, who was “typically developing,” which is spED speak for normal. The purpose of having them there was to provide (unguided) role modeling for the other kids. The kids in question were only three and five, and I don’t think they had any inkling that they were different from the kids in class who had less obvious problems.
My seed of an idea is this:
What about a story from the point of view of a child (I’m thinking late elementary to middle school aged) who unknowingly becomes a student in a school full of people with special abilities that he or she does not - and never will - have?

Eventually she or he would come to realize a. they’re the only one there who is either “normal”/“unspecial” and b. that their sole purpose at the school is to show the rest of the kids that it’s okay not to have a gift of any sort, so they feel more empathy for regular people.

Said story would either be in first person or close third, meaning that his/her view of events would be the only one readers were ever given.
So, how close can you come to matching this idea in books, comics, or TV shows?

2

Oops, I forgot to add that I’m mostly interested in knowing if there are stories that just have basic concept of a story with the protagonist being the sole normal person, rather than necessarily also being a match on character age or setting.

3

There was a movie for kids that came close, but missed it. I think it was called “Sky High” or “Hero High”. All the kids (not all the kids in the world, IIRC) developed a superpower at adolescence. When they entered high school, they had to demonstrate their power. The cool powers got placed on the superhero track, and the lame powers were relegated to being sidekicks. The one kid with world-famous superhero parents seems to have no power at all, though, and ends up hanging with the sidekicks. I think there was actually another guy with no powers, but he ended up being the school bus driver.
Then it turns out at the end that he actually does have a superpower and saves everyone. Along the way he learned that sidekicks are people too. But I’m bet he’s glad he’s not one of them.
For a similar thing, I once read a story set in a future where everyone modified their bodies to be perfect. There was a teenaged girl who refused to do that, though. I think her name was Mary, and they mentioned she was a bit chubby, but I don’t recall more details than that.

4

This is not very helpful, but I remember a story back in the late 90s by possibly Nancy Kress about an ordinary kid in a school that is about 50 percent kids that have been genetically engineered to be smarter/stronger/better-looking. (It’s not Beggars in Spain or related, btw).

ETA: I think this might be the same story as panamajack is talking about (the second one), actually.

5

Is that the Uglies series? Or something older? I don’t suppose the Uglies fellow was the first to come up with that idea.

6

Are you talking about something called “The Pretties” its companion “The Uglies”? There’s genetic modification to be beautiful in those stories, and then an adventure to go see other people who refuse, but no one has special abilities that I know of - none of the many kids’ papers I’ve read on the books mentioned anything like that anyway.

7

I hadn’t heard of this series, and a little poking reveals that it was likely “The Beautiful People” by Charles Beaumont. I once read an anthology of many of the stories adapted for The Twilight Zone, which this likely appeared in.

8

Predating that, and still running, is the comic book PS238, which is about a school for young superpowered children. The focus is frequently on one Tyler Marlocke, the son of two of the most powerful superheroes and the only student at PS238 with no powers.

He doesn’t really fit the other criteria, though–he knows perfectly well that he’s the odd man out, and he’s not there to serve as an example or role model. He’s there because his parents insisted on enrolling him; they don’t accept his unpowered nature, and insist that he will develop powers eventually, or hope that something will happen at the school to give him powers.

On the other hand, he–or rather, his alter ego “Moon Shadow”, who is being trained to survive among supers by an unpowered vigilante–has become the idol of many of his peers. They think Moon Shadow has all manner of powers, though, so he’s still not a “normal” role model.

9

What about Gattaca?

Everyone is genetically selected to be (almost) perfect, except the main character who is “normal.”

10

I read a story many years ago about a man whose daughter was extremely intelligent, and she ended up being listed as super-gifted at school but suddenly declined in her skills. One day he was in their back yard and found the daughter (who was about 7) with her best friend ‘traveling along the moebius strip,’ which took them to the world where the really intelligent people live. He followed them purely because he’d observed them enough; in their world he’d have been like an amoeba.

The TV show Eureka has Jack Carter as a normal in a world of geniuses.

But I get what you mean - the opposite of being special because you’re secretly skilled. There aren’t many stories out there like that. If you want to write your story, then you should write it. The nuances of a story are what really count anyway, and you don’t even know what they’re going to be yet.

11

Ah, quit stallin’ and just write it! If there is another such story, you’ll hear about it–but if yours is better, it won’t matter! (I might even be available to edit it!)

12

I think Jaime Hernandez’s stories started out with Maggie as a normal girl in a world full of super beings and wrestlers.

13

I read a book called Vampire High by Douglas Rees. It’s about a boy who transfers to a private school which he eventually finds out is full of teenage vampires, who are stronger and orders of magnitude smarter than humans. The school has seven human students to make up their water polo team, as the vampires can’t stand the touch of water. The hero gets sick of coasting by on As for doing nothing but playing water polo, and starts trying to live up to the same ridiculously high standards as the vampires. He feels a great sense of accomplishment at the end when his English teacher agrees to give him real grades and he gets “a well-earned C”.

14

The Haruhi Suzumiya series of Light Novels and anime are narrated by Kyon, who is the only member of the club he’s in who isn’t…straight up weird in some way.

Minor (and actually, fairly well known) spoilers below.

[spoiler]Haruhi, the one who brought the club together in the first place…and named it…and directs it with the heavy hand of a tyrant…is a reality warper. Pretty much God in the body of a high school girl. It’s thought (though not, so far as I can remember/know, actually confirmed) that she destroyed, then recreated, the world three years previous.

Yuki, the first, other than Haruhi and Kyon, to join, is, to put it rather simply, a sapient computer program sent to keep an eye on Haruhi. (It’s…way more complicated than that - for one thing, it’s not actually a computer where she comes from.)

Mikuru, the next to join, is a time traveller. (Also sent to keep an eye on Haruhi.)

The final club member, Itsuki, is an ‘esper’, which in this case, means an individual who has superpowers under certain circumstances, in order to keep Haruhi’s random thoughts from destroying everything. (Again, way more to it than that, but…)[/spoiler]

He’s also ‘the only sane man’ in the group (although he’s so invested in that identity that he actually causes significant problems, particularly in the Endless Eight arc of the second anime season), but that’s really more his perception than anything else - Haruhi’s nuts, but the others are only ‘crazy’ in that they roll with it, rather than spending all the time ranting about how it’s nuts, like Kyon.

At least that’s the status quo as of the end of the first anime season (still haven’t finished the second…should get to that), and the first few light novels…apparently there’s stuff in the later novels that suggests Kyon may not be as normal as he seems (I’ve seen it theorized that he and Haruhi actually fill each other’s roles), but I haven’t read the novels, so aside from what was adapted into the anime, I can’t speak on what’s in them.

15

I haven’t written a word of the story yet, so the idea might be a contender for NaNoWriMo next month.

16

There was also a comic book series called *Normalman *about the one “normal” person in a world where everyone else has super-powers. I did not read it, but I believe it was humorous.

17

Er, what? Is ‘traveling along the moebius strip’ a phrase from the story, or a reference to something else? I can’t parse this at all…

18

Off topic but:

As described, that sounds like a repugnant thing to do to a child!

19

Well, she was a hotshot mechanic from the beginning. She just wasn’t a celebrity.

20

Yeah…even though I knew that they didn’t know why they were there, it still rubbed me the wrong way. If it didn’t, I probably wouldn’t have thought of this plot potential almost a decade later.