I’m reading Martial God Asura right now. I don’t particularly recommend the read, but I enjoy it a lot. I mentioned it before in a previous post, and it has so many thousands of chapters that I still continue reading it every once in a while. The translators are still hard at work translating the novel. They used to do about 2 chapters a day. I don’t know how many they are doing right now, but it should be the same, I suppose.

I’m going to talk about a plotline that includes a prophecy. I think that this plotline starts after chapter 2410 and ends maybe at around chapter 2435. In these chapters, there is a clan called the Kong Heavenly Clan, a prophet called Grandmaster Prophet and the main character, Chu Feng.

Grandmaster Prophet’s prophecies are always fulfiled and Chu Feng is a main character with a remarkably tough plot armour. This means that he will always accomplish whatever he wants because the author has never read about Mary Sue and her inherent faults that usually make novels unreadable. Props to George R R Martin for killing almost everyone, although Jon Snow seems to be leaning a bit hard toward Mary Sue-ishness.

Anyway, Grandmaster Prophet’s prophecies are always fulfiled, and he reads in his magic ball that Chu Feng will destroy the Kong Heavenly Clan. The Clan Chief and his various elders decide to kill Chu Feng in order to protect their clan. Bad move. You can’t kill a Mary Sue and you can’t move against a prophecy’s unavoidability. This self-fulfilling prophecy has become an unbearable trope for me in most fantasy novels, and this one is a particularly painful one.

In the end, Chu Feng gets really angry when the clan tries to murder him after welcoming him as a guest. He then gets possessed by a demon and becomes an unkillable killing machine who massacres the Kong Heavenly Clan and then magically gets enough will force to regain his self-control.

While I read that, I kept thinking that the second obvious move was the best, which was to accept that the Kong Heavenly Clan would be destroyed, to evacuate the facilities and to rename their clan. That way, they would all survive, their legacies and teachings would remain and maybe a couple sacrifices could have been made in order to satiate the plot’s bloodthirst. Maybe then Chu Feng could destroy all the buildings, maybe kill the meanest meanies in the clan and somehow force their Kong identity to dissipate.

This whole conflict leads me to think about a few other self-fulfilling prophecies.

Harry Potter vs Voldemort

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ... And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives …

First, we have to note that they are bound to be enemies, since one will kill the other at some point, and the “neither can live while the other survives” denotes a conflict that can be manipulated a bit. Voldemort and Harry Potter were clearly alive both at the same time, which means that they were both living and surviving at the same time, so the second meaning would be the true one which would be that they would always be trying to kill one another.

However, it is clearly Voldemort’s fault that he brings Harry Potter into his lair all the time, he shows him all the clues and gets himself killed in the end. If he hadn’t tried to reverse the prophecy (why would anyone do this? If the prophecy is always right, you can only try to negotiate how it happens, not if it happens), he wouldn’t have gotten himself killed so early.

Causing your own demise

As the definition of self-fulfilling prophecy says, these prophecies are not usually true per se in the timeline where the prophecy does not exist. It is the prophecy instead that causes the event to happen. In this case, the prophecy makes Voldemort aware of a new threat. He has spent his whole life creating Horcruxes in order to be immortal and then someone tells him that he’s going to die. His greatest fear approaches and he obsessively tries to fight against these waves without stopping for one second to think that he can try to negotiate with the prophecy instead of fighting against it.

I think that the negotiation part is essential to people who are aware of self-fulfilling prophecies. I don’t think I’ll be including prophecies in my writings, since they are very burdensome, but if you are reading this because you’d like to include a prophecy in your fiction, consider that anyone who is certain that a prophecy will be fulfilled would try at least to find satisfactory alternatives to the resolution.

Another self-fulfilling prophecy right of the top of my head is Narnia’s White Witch situation, where they tell her that she’s going to die by the hand of four humans who will become the rulers of her world. It must be very agonising, but if we take a step back and observe the situation, we’ll notice that the first impulsive action to fight against it is not the right choice, since we’ll be bringing the calamity upon ourselves. But I guess that negotiating with a prophecy and consciously making it be fulfiled in a certain way could have the potential of becoming an annoying trope too.

It’s a hard topic, but I’m sure that with enough thought, we can make the fulfilment of a prophecy have some interesting twists and turns that don’t seem taken right out of a cliche children’s fantasy story with a super evil king and a super goody-two-shoes protagonist.