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Moving on...
What Id like to see in modern fantasy more is Supernatural explanations/motivations for familiar things, especially locations. I mean, everyone expects there to be mysticism with old structures such as Stonehenge or various temples and pyramids. But, if Magic never died out, why would the practice of mystically significant architecture be a lost thing. Age doesn't have to be the only thing to give a place power or purpose. A similar vein was used in the recent Transformers film where the Hoover Dam was built to conceal alien artifacts and vast energy signatures.
Take the Dresdenverse for example:
Given what we know about magic, and that magic has a presence in an almost corporate guise with Monoc Securities, there has to be more to the design of the Pentagon than a mere misunderstanding of the phrase "Think outside the box." Maybe its part of some kind of giant sigil of malicious intent, or maybe its shape is part of some intense mystical defenses for our governments military and intelligence.
And this can work from almost anything:
Maybe Fort Knox is Fort-freaking-Knox because They (Capital T) needed to convince the masses that its was impenetrable to tap the energies of that mass belief into actually making it so, and gold was just a sellable euphemism for some other treasure.
Maybe the Arc de Triomphe, with its Twelve radial Streets, is actually a giant portal of Napoleonic Empirialism.
Same idea with the St. Louis "Gateway Arch" (tell me thats not just begging to be an invasion point for fey outsiders or black council).
The Vatican, which is structurally a circle inside a square inside a five pointed star, has some infinite possibilities.
(For a larger list of geometrically suspect structures, see: http://www.city.hakodate.hokkaido.jp/kikaku/kokusai/$summit/01-cities.htm)
I think we're having some blurring on what exactly different people mean by "ordinary".
It also occurs to me that, even if you did manage to start out with someone whom everyone was satisfied was "ordinary", they're not going to stay that way very long, because to my mind the "ordinary" person's first reaction to weird violent stuff happening is to try to hand it off to the competent authorities, or otherwise get out of the way, and succeeding at doing that doesn;t actually make for a story.
Well I say that if an author wants to make it work an ordinary person CAN defeat the bad guys and it's boring and over-done to have them turn out to be half fairy or half vampire or whatever. I'm sorry you disagree but it CAN BE DONE.
How about extrodinary compassion for other people? The willingness to risk their own life for a stranger simply because "It's the right thing to do"? There's ordinary people who do this in the real world. There's absolutely no reason it can't work in a fantasy novel. Sure, maybe they luck out and pick up an old iron pipe to hit the fairy in the head with, or a broken piece of wood that hits the vampire right in the heart. Or perhaps they have a talent like I suggested before - they're able to sing a werewolf to sleep simply because they're such a talented singer. All without having to be anything more then an ordinary human.
Well, the Die Hard movies proved you can just have the "wrong place, right time" senerio work.
A person doesn't need to have special powers to just walk into the wrong alley and get the wrong kind of attention. People in the real world all the time suddenly find themselves witnessing murders, saving people from murderers/thieves/rapists, jumping on top of people who are having seizures and have fallen on subway tracks, etc. Why can't an ordinary person walk in on a vampire or werewolf attack and actually manage to save the victim? Therefore attracting unwanted supernatural attention the same way someone who's witnessed a mafia crime attracts their unwanted attention.
Could you imagine what a supernatural witness protection would be like?
I've noticed though that they're often the oddballs because it turns out they're part-something or other. Rarely does it seem that the teen is a normal pure bred human being. Which is what I'd like to see. A normal human, who doesn't fit in too well because they don't fit society's standards of behavior or beauty or what have you. Who turns around and saves people without any special powers, special charms, etc. Just whatever normal talents they happen to have and a bit of brain power.
As for the YA novels - working in a library I KNOW there's a lot of "the oddball is the hero" books. But I don't see why there can't be one like that for ADULTS. We feel like freaks sometimes too you know.
Frankly there's too many YA books where some girl or boy is "a bit of an outsider" cause they're part something or other - and they're the heros of the story. I want an adult novel where she is just an ordinary human being who happens to get sucked into kicking undead or fairy butt. And preferably she'd be fat and short like me cause I'm sick and tired of the Xena-wannabes. Maybe she can find something that would help her. Or maybe she could just have a talent that actually helps in kicking supernatural butt. Since I've always wanted to be the inspiration behind a fictional character let's just use the fact I can sing and sing well as an example - She manages to calm down a rampaging werewolf by crooning the Beatles' Yesterday or Glenn Miller's Moonlight Cockstail to it. (Music hath charms to sooth the savage beast and all that.)
More realistic humans. I'm tired of the perfectly in fit human woman or man being the hero. Make them short. Make them fat. Make them have a limb missing. Heck, just make them acne prone for all I care. Just make the humans seem more - human! Why should all heros and heroines be good looking? Why can't they look like some cross between The Phantom Of The Opera and The Elephant Man? Or at least be rather plain.
Fat women can kick vampire butt too, you know.