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Playing With / Screw Destiny

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Basic Trope: Character decides to go against their written fate.

  • Straight: A prophecy says the world will be destroyed, the heroes decide to stop it.
  • Exaggerated: The heroes go out of their way to prevent every single detail of the prophecy, regardless of how unrelated to the world ending they are.
  • Downplayed:
  • Justified: The heroes are Immune to Fate. Or the prophecy was actually a warning.
  • Inverted: The heroes decide to fulfill the prophecy, Because Destiny Says So.
  • Subverted: The heroes save the world, but it turns out they were only delaying the inevitable, or that it becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • Double Subverted: The inevitable won't be for millions of years.
  • Parodied: "Screw you fortune cookie, I am no one's puppet!"
  • Zig Zagged: Heros attempt to save the world, only to doom it in the process, at which point a new, better world is born out of the ashes. Then, said world is doomed, and no world is born out of the ashes again.
  • Averted:
    • You Can't Fight Fate
    • Heroes fulfill a prophecy that they will save the world.
    • There's no prophecy at all.
  • Enforced: "We've been picked up for another season, so the prophecy we've been building to about the world ending can't come true now."
  • Lampshaded: "Since when has anyone wanted to follow destiny?"
  • Invoked: One of the characters made a fake prophecy about the world ending so the heroes would go on a quest to stop it.
  • Exploited: Character uses heroes attempt to stop a prophecy to further their own ends.
  • Defied: Heroes decide to just stay at home, as prophecies always turn out to be fake or misleading.
  • Discussed: "Only idiots believe in destiny. A real man ignores mad oracles and false prophets, and forges his own destiny."
  • Conversed: "In the ancient Greek and Norse myths, destiny was seen as sealed and inevitable. These days, however, characters who actively defy destiny are generally preferred and seen as more heroic."
  • Deconstructed:
    • The heroes kill themselves to prove they control their actions instead of fate.
    • Someone brings up the question: If destiny is a sham, doesn't that mean that none of us have a purpose?
    • People start to distrust prophecies due to them being defied on a regular basis.
    • The heroes screw destiny, only for the state of the world to end up far worse than it would have if they had just done as they were told.
  • Reconstructed:
    • The heroes decide even if the world's doomed anyway, they'd rather fight to their last breath than accept it.
    • Someone else answers the question: It does mean we have no purpose, but having no purpose means we get to make our own purposes in life.
    • This merely makes the populace more skeptical, instead interpreting prophecies as guidelines that can be followed or unfollowed as one sees fit. While they can follow a prophecy, they can choose which parts will lead to the most favorable outcome and ignore the rest.
  • Played For Laughs: The prophecy trails off when it mentions the world ending, as the prophets were sure the heroes would have already abandoned it by the time they got to that bit.

Back to You Can't Fight Fate, where you have no choi- No! Screw Destiny!

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