Basic Trope: A Prophecy Twist where a character's prophecized invincibility has an unforeseen loophole.
- Straight: It is prophesied that Emperor Evulz will not die by the hand of man... so of course he's killed by Alice, a woman.
- Exaggerated:
- No man can kill Emperor Evulz. He's killed by a succession of everything not covered by the prophecy, including women, animals, and natural disasters.
- No one can kill Emperor Evulz. Bob uses his HP to One attack on him, then disarms, de-powers, and arrests him for life.
- Downplayed: It wasn't a prophecy, so much as a recognition that Evulz was so powerful that it was unlikely that any man (in a time when women didn't usually enter combat) could kill him. He ends up taken down by Alice being a Guile Hero.
- Justified:
- Sybil, who made the prophecy in the first place, hates Evulz. She used Exact Words in the prophecy to goad Evulz into being overconfident and taking risks.
- The laws of magic require that everything have some vulnerability, so the best that Emperor Evulz could do was make himself unkillable by the most common enemy he would face.
- Emperor Evulz was always fated to be killed by Alice, which also means that he was fated to not be killed by anyone other than Alice.
- Evulz was screwed over by a Jackass Genie who made sure there would be a way to kill him.
- Inverted:
- The prophecy was entirely wrong, and Emperor Evulz can only be defeated by a man.
- The prophecy is that Evulz will be killed by a friend. It turns out that a stranger killed him while he was standing next to a friend — by meant 'adjacent to' instead of 'through the actions of'.
- The prophecy is that by a certain date the that the crystals of the sun will rid all of the undead from the land. The Cyberons already eradicated the Masters of the Dead who they considered utterly depraved even by their own questionable experimental ethics. They did this using their normal weapons of war, UV crystal lasers. They thought they had fulfilled the prophecy. The Cyberons are later wiped out by a crystalline monument which resembles Stonehenge. Their practice of replacing their own hearts and blood with pumps and synthetic nutrients caused them to be considered undead by the spell as they were animate after their heart stopped beating. The Ancients who made monument and had it charging the spell for millennia figured No One Could Survive That! without becoming undead.
- Subverted:
- Turns out, the prophecy was made up by Emperor Evulz.
- When the prophecy said "no man", it really did mean "no human" as expected.
- The prophesy says "No man or woman," and the genderqueer protagonist thinks they're a loophole... except it turns out that the Seer who made the prophesy would've still considered the protagonist to be a woman due to Values Dissonance, so it doesn't count.
- Double Subverted:
- Evulz told an Accidental Truth — such a prophecy did exist, but he didn't know about it.
- Good thing Alice really isn't human.
- When the prophecy said no human, it meant no humans. Falling boulders are not human, nor wolves.
- Evulz Jr. tries to avenge his father by following in his footsteps, with the updated prophesy saying "no man or woman." He ends up gibbed by a sexless Golem.
- Good thing Bob was untimely ripped from his mother and not born.
- Parodied:
- "No man can defeat me!" *Gets run over by a horse*
- Evulz says to a male hero: "Ha ha ha ha! You deluded fool! No man can kill me!" The hero goes off-screen and returns wearing a dress, a wig and make-up. He then slays the villain with surprising ease.
- Evulz is only invincible in extremely specific situations.Emperor Evulz: You poor fool. No man can defeat the dark lord at a one-handed sword fight on a Thursday evening!
Bob: Darn, that would've been fun. How about just a regular fight?
Emperor Evulz: ...Shit. - Evulz publicly declares "no man shall kill me!" and a hero named Noman immediately storms into his throne room. He clarifies, "no being or event shall kill me!" and is offed by an assassin known as "Nohbyengorrivent".
- No man can kill Emperor Evulz. Bob manages to kill him, and subsequently has a gender identity crisis.
- No man can kill Emperor Evulz, but then he encounters Bob, who 1) is too determined to kill him, 2) fated to not be killed by Evulz and 3) an impressive Lethal Klutz who will put to the test all of the other implied ways Evulz cannot die accidentally. After two or three hundred rounds of this, Evulz seriously thinks of seeing if he also is one of the people who cannot kill him or just surrender to the lawgivers and let them lock him up for eternity just to get away from this nuisance.
- "No man can kill me!" (Gets stabbed by a woman) "No man or woman can kill me!" (Gets stabbed by an intersex person) "NO man, woman, genderqueer or intersex individual can kill me!" (Gets punched by a golem) "No person can kill me!" (Gets his leg torn off by a tiger) "No creature can kill me!" (Gets bonked over the head by a falling branch) "You know what, screw it! Nothing on this Earth can kill me!" (Gets blasted by a meteor)
- Zig Zagged:
- The prophecy says no man can kill the dark lord, so they get a woman to kill him, but then it turns out she's actually a man, but then he uses a spell to turn himself into a woman, but in the process of stabbing the dark lord the spell wears off...
- Averted: There is no prophecy protecting Evulz. Let's get him!
- Enforced: "Great, that invincibility-giving prophecy has made the villain too powerful. Quick, somebody find a loophole so we can kill him off!"
- Lampshaded: "Right, so a prophecy is protecting Emperor Evulz. There's probably a loophole in there somewhere that can allow us to beat him."
- Invoked:
- The villain wants himself to be defeated only by someone clever, so he has the circumstances of his death worded so that someone who thinks about it real hard can figure out the loophole.
- The dark lord wants a wife, but decides the only woman good enough for him is the one that dares meet him in battle.
- Exploited:
- The heroes, knowing the prophecy, send an Amazon Brigade to fight Evulz.
- Alice has always wanted to be in the army, and uses the knowledge of the prophecy's loophole so that they'll let her in.
- Defied:
- When hearing a prophecy about his death, the villain keeps leading on the prophet to alter his wording so that he is truly invincible.
- Evulz's prophecy is an incredibly specific iron-clad legal document written by his lawyers to prevent Loophole Abuse. "Nothing can kill me. This also applies for men, women, children, any Homo sapiens, artificially-created clones, any manner of sentient being, robots, androids or cyborgs. In the event of being forced off a ledge, I am not liable to die, as the fault in these situations is always that of the offending party, not the environment. In the event of an explosion..."
- Evulz just flat out says "Nothing can harm me."
- Discussed:
- "So what if no man can kill you? You can still be killed by women, children, animals, poisonous plants, disease, random accidents... Not to mention there's nothing that states they can't injure you or drive you off."
- "This prophecy you're making for me better not be one of those annoying loopholes ones. I don't want to be like Lord Vortanok and his empire, who thought he was invincible and then was killed by a pigeon."
- Conversed:
- "So there's a prophecy protecting Emperor Evulz? He'll probably be killed off by a loophole, that's usually how these things work."
- "Seems like cheating, having the 'walking trees' that defeated Macbeth be just an army carrying branches. Perhaps it would have been more fun if I write it to be a literal way…"
- Played For Laughs: Evulz is defeated by Non-Action Guy Bob, who's "too wussy to qualify as a true man".
- Played For Drama:
- Evulz, thinking he's invincible, murders Alice's family, driving her to a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He says the obvious "that's impossible…" after Alice bludgeons him to his knees with a mace and starts winding up to rip his head off.
- Evulz believes that no man is able to kill him, but ends up being killed by Bob. This sends Bob into a crisis as he has no idea why he was able to kill Evulz while his fellow comrades, all men, cannot.note
- Evulz thinks of the loophole first and murders every woman he finds just to make sure this can't happen. It ends up being a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy when he manages to gain the ire of every single surviving Action Girl in the land because of his abhorrent actions.
- Played For Horror:
- The prophecy's loophole is there to give the heroes a Hope Spot. Because it's impossible for them to produce the specific circumstances of the loophole, Evulz remains invincible and is the executor (literally, as it turns out) of the story's Cruel Twist Ending.
- The prophecy's loophole is Foreshadowing to the reveal of greater horrors (e.g. "No being on Earth will defeat you" leads to Evulz becoming victim of an Eldritch Abomination or Alien Invasion).
- Evulz hears the prophecy and knows he will be defeated in the future, but in an extremely twisted approach to being a "glass half full" kind of guy accepts it as a "well, you can't be the top dog forever" and lives every day to the fullest… which is 24/7 debauchery for him and blood-soaked misery for everybody else, who cannot do anything to stop him because they are not the one the prophecy foretold.
- Deconstructed: Alice charges at Evulz believing her victory is certain...and gets her ass handed to her. She may have a chance to kill Evulz but that's not the same thing as being guaranteed success.
- Reconstructed: She leaves, heals, levels up, charges at Evulz again, and offs him.
- Implied: When Sybil the oracle is reading off the prophecy that no man will kill Evulz, the camera focuses on Alice, and Sybil is looking in her general direction.
No non-troper can go back to No Man of Woman Born! (That's a terrible prophecy!)
