“Imagine you knew you were going to do something great. Something amazing. Perhaps the greatest thing anyone has ever done. Only there’s a catch: something terrible has to happen.”
Those lines are direct from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which I’m watching right now on my computer for the first timem and I may have gotten them a little mixed up in the translation, but what they say rings true: whether you know or you don’t know that you’re going to be a hero or a savior or just a protagonist in a story, something terrible has to happen to you. It’s true of so many literary characters: Harry Potter loses his parents and vanquishes Voldemort (twice!); Alex Cross has to take down the worst psychopaths imaginable, albeit risking the lives of his friends and family, and his social life, with every case; and Van Helsing, John Harker, and Mina Harker have to defeat Dracula, risking their lives and their humanities along the way.
Truly, the lines above ring true in so many stories. Heck, in many of the stories I plan to write (and am currently writing) terrible things happen before the hero rises up to save the day. God, I wish I could tell you the things in my stories that happen, both what the protagonists do, and the terrible events that precede what they do. Unfortunately, telling you what happens would give away the plots of too many stories, so that’s out. Still, the fact that the theme above is in so many stories, whether they be mine or someone else’s, proves how important this theme is to writers across time and space.
I’d like everyone’s thoughts on this subject, along with other examples where something terrible must happen before a character can become a hero (can be a book, TV show, comic book, or movie character, I don’t really care).
Rami Ungar The Writer 
That was an excellent post. Very nice writing style. Thanks so much for sharing. I really enjoyed it very much