Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- Adopted Displaced: During You Can't Spell Slaughter Without Laughter, Pinkie Pie explains the concept to Zeus, and later Cronos, and they realize the mistakes they've made as a result. This leads to a much happier ending for both. (Namely, they don't get killed by Kratos.)
- Invoked in Avenger of Steel when Clark contemplates the possibility that Raven will destroy the world; as Clark sees it, treating Raven as though she's a threat increases the possibility that she will be, but treating her as a person increases the hope that she'll become an ally, so he chooses to treat her as an ally and hope for the best.
- Cards of Remnant: Blake is convinced that Fusion cards are innately evil, making her incredibly hesitant to use them, and nervous whenever she's forced to do so. As a result, her Fusions are much more willing to rebel against her, causing excessive destruction and reinforcing her concerns.
- A Deku with the Devil: Ochako is a half-devil hybrid who converts Izuku into one as an Emergency Transformation. Aizawa treats the pair as though they're doomed to be nothing but villains; All Might points out to him that this Fantastic Racism may eventually drive them to the dark side.
- Elementals of Harmony: The insane precognitive Twilight telling the person that can stop their insanity, that they're the one who can stop them, allows them to stop her from exiling the key person from reality. Who is it? Dinky.
- An Impractical Guide to Godhood: Zeus attempted to ensure there was no chance of Perseus being the one prophesied to rebel against the gods with a lightning bolt. Said bolt killing his mother is what turns Perseus against the gods in the first place.
- Raise Your Voice Against Liars: One of the reasons that the Phantom Thieves target Audrey Bourgeois is because she's pulling strings to bring her Spoiled Brat of a daughter back to Paris. Given all of the akumas Chloé caused before, they're naturally concerned about what sort of chaos her return could spark. However, their efforts to infiltrate Audrey's Palace spur Hawkmoth to murder her in order to protect his identity, sparking off a mass akumatization event. Afterwards, Chloé returns to attend her mother's funeral, revealing that she's become The Atoner and only wants to make amends with her past victims, twisting the knife even further.
- A Red Rose in the Blue Wind: E-123 Omega explains to JNPR that he was sealed away with Shadow due to Eggman being afraid of him rebelling like E-102 Gamma had done before. Lie Ren notes the irony that Eggman's Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal caused the very rebellion he sought to avoid.
- Rick and The Loud House: In "Raw Deal: Rick, Die, Repeat", Lincoln desperately tries to ensure that his day won't end in tragedy, only for all of his efforts to cause the very tragedies he was trying to avoid, as he endangers several townsfolk, gets Hologram Rick killed, and gets grounded by his parents once they learn what happened.
- A Young Girl's Game of Thrones: Melisandre eventually realizes that the vision she had portraying Stannis as Azor Ahai was of herself proclaiming him as such to their followers, which she only did because she had the vision.
- Blackbird: Dinah is convinced that her decision to let Sara go on the Gambit has already cost her Laurel (who she believes would never forgive her if she found out the truth about Sara's presence on the boat), and uses that as resolve to go through with trading Laurel for Sara to the League of Assassins, as she refuses to lose Sara as well. All her actions do is ensure that she loses both anyway, as neither of them can forgive her for her decision or for making Sara go along with it.
- The Cutting Edge: Felicity frames Naomi for the corporate espionage she herself committed under duress so she won't get fired. When Oliver (as the Hood) brings her actions to light, she gets fired anyway, with Walter even flat-out telling her she only has herself to blame for what happened.
- Discussed in Not Set in Stone
. Cisco "vibes" and has a vision of Laurel's death. The two of them decide not to tell anyone about it, out of fear that the attempts to prevent it will be what causes it. Eventually, Barry and Oliver accidentally learn about it, and both of them also agree not to tell anyone else. They do however start to work on ways to prevent it, reasoning they can take some precautions. By the time the rest of Team Arrow learns of it, they are all reasonably certain they'll be able to prevent it now. They're right. - What It Takes: Felicity decides to keep Oliver Locked Out of the Loop in regards to what's happening in Starling (namely, that Laurel has been outed as the Black Canary and is on the run, and the city is under the control of Damien Darhk) so he won't break up with her and rekindle his relationship with Laurel. When Oliver finds out the truth, he promptly breaks up with her, goes back to Starling and eventually rekindles his relationship with Laurel.
- In Fail Better, it's implied that every attempt to break a prophecy ended in this. Lucia was the first one who could trick the system.
- Dominoes:
- The primary justification Yuusaku gives the Irregulars for being an abusive Control Freak towards his son is keeping Shinichi out of harm's way. However, all they truly accomplish is isolating Shinichi, as he suspects his 'friends' are all working for his father and can't be trusted. He still goes out to investigate crimes, but now he feels he can't turn to anyone for help or backup, putting him in more danger than he would be otherwise.
- Habuka is painfully aware of how self-defeating their actions are, repeatedly stating throughout Chapter 10 that they were "doomed all along". He also acknowledges the cyclical nature of the conflict: Yuusaku defends their actions by pointing to how Shinichi risked the lives of others... a position he was pushed into by how his father and the Irregulars treated him.
- Cross Ange: Futatsu Sekai no Border: The Norma who were left behind on the post-apocalyptic False Earth have become as violent and savage as the Mana used to portray them, due to the horrors they've suffered.
- Danny Phantom: Stranded: Everyone, especially Jazz, makes it clear it’s Dash Baxter own fault he’s going to become the Future Loser he dreads turning into since he goes out of his way to ruin his chances at ANY future by insisting on acting like a boorish meathead with no life outside of high school who doesn’t care about anything but bullying and enjoying his glory days.
- In The Faceless (Disguise of Carnivorism), Ryuk tells the young Shinigami stories about a "legendary hero and Godslayer" named Light Yagami. As a result, the name alone is enough to horrify the Shinigami — so much so that when they encounter a human who has that name, it spurs them to surrender en masse.
- Fade:
- All L's attempts to stop canon!Kira's rise with his own Death Note are fated to fail for one reason: L has already supplanted Light's place as Kira.
- L deliberately keeps Light away from the Task Force so he won't turn them against L as he did in canon. It's a fruitless effort, as L manages to do that on his own with little to no involvement from Light.
- The central premise of Change fate by being aggressively kind is someone trying to avert this. A prophecy is told throughout the land of three children who will eventually grow up to bring about the apocalypse, and so every adventurer in the land seeks to end the prophecy by slaughtering them... except Phil, who realizes that a lifetime of being hunted for things they haven't even done yet will give the children a negative view of humanity and no choice but to end the world in response. Therefore, he hunts them down to adopt them and give them a better life than that. He's also motivated to do this because he nearly gave in to one of these in the past — a prophecy about how an avian would kill thousands upon thousands, which led to avians being hunted until he was the Sole Survivor of his species, at which point he hid away rather than give in to his rage and prove the prophecies right.
- Driving it home, the Bittersweet route spin-off depicts a world where the humans never stopped hunting the kids, eventually leading to Phil's death — and the kids going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against humanity in response. Throughout the spin-off, it's repeatedly stated that the prophecy never would have come to fruition if the family had been left to their own devices.
- Driving it home, the Bittersweet route
- The Moth and The Mariposa: Hernando, Bruno's Shadow Archetype, takes advantage of rumors and the power of suggestion to manipulate events into playing out the way he desires, controlling the outcome of Bruno's visions and ensuring they come about.
- Drowning in Your Depths: Stan and Ford have tightly controlled Dipper and Mabel's lives for years out of fear of a "prophecy" that suggested that one of the two would be "lost" to them around their eighteenth birthday. When Dipper is slightly late returning from a trip to the coral fields, Ford angrily declares that he'll use magic to lock him up — so Dipper runs away, encountering Captain Bill Cipher afterwards. Their overprotectiveness effectively drove him right into the arms of a pirate, and Dipper doesn't want anything to do with his family, seeing them as a threat to his freedom.
- In Daphne Greengrass and the Boy Who Lived, this idea is discussed in concept when Dumbledore talks with Daphne about her visions as she learns about her potential as a Seer. Dumbledore observes that Daphne's glimpses of the future are so comparatively vague that it's impossible to be sure if acting in a certain way because of the visions will cause them to come to pass or prevent them, so it's best to just do what feels right when the time comes.
- Princess of the Blacks has an especially ironic example. Dumbledore, who remarked in canon that Voldemort's attempts to circumvent the prophecy caused it to come to fruition, fears a prophecy about one of the Potter twins "knowing only darkness" and possibly being the one to defeat Voldemort; so he sets out to have the appropriate twin permanently removed from the Magical World. Little Jen would spend four years in an abusive home before she was blinded and abandoned; she went on to grow up a child prostitute and become an immensely powerful Black Witch. Throughout the series, Dumbledore proves incapable of realizing that Jen's darkness is his own fault, instead believing that she was born evil.
- A Thing of Vikings:
- King Mac Bethad of Alba feared Berk conquering Alba was inevitable pretty much from the moment he heard about Berk having trained dragons even though historically Berk hadn't been a threat to his kingdom or anyone else for that matter. So what do he do? He ends up setting forth a chain of events that lead to just that. The epigraph in one chapter mentions that Mac Bethad's actions from when Berk started training dragons to his death end up becoming a morality story about how baseless suspicions will only result in chaos and death.
- Similar to Mac Bethad, King Henry of France has a fear of Berk annexing Normandy and Brittany. Him acting on those fears by ambushing a peace delegation from Berk ends up resulting in those two Dutchies to succeed from his kingdom and join Berk.
- We saw the world explode: When Jack goes to Sydney in order to meet Claire for the first time, Shannon fears that he's about to break up with her. So she torches the relationship first by going off to LA without letting anyone know where she's going.
- For His Own Sake:
- Sarah gets upset when her father hires Keitaro, resenting him for spending so much time with her dad and fretting that he might turn him against her. When Seta witnesses how cruelly Sarah treats his employee, he starts getting stricter with her.
- When Granny Hina first learns how badly Keitaro was being treated while working at the Inn, she frets that her grandson will hate her for what he endured. As it turns out, he does lose all respect for her... after she tries to manipulate him into taking over the Inn again, while making excuses and downplaying the severity of their behavior.
- Hina also worries that if Kanako gets her hands on the Hinata Inn, she'll undo all the changes she made. Her efforts to prevent this involve trying to manipulate and trick others into doing what she wants; this only serves to turn them all against her, until Marumi takes over the Inn and undoes all of her policies.
- In A Prize for Three Empires, Mystique and Rogue attack Carol Danvers because Mystique's lover Destiny foretold Carol would somehow harm Rogue in the future... which comes to pass because Carol was attacked by them in the first place.
- Played for Laughs in Hero Chat. After a dream where Ladybug has to stepped down because she was pregnant and Team Miraculous spent forever fighting on who would take her place, Chloé nominates herself to take Ladybug's place if the latter goes on a maternity leave. This leads to Alya saying that she wants to be the backup Ladybug and will fight Chloé for the post, followed by Kagami (since she looks like Ladybug the most), then Kim (since he wants to join in on the challenge), and then Alix (because she thinks Kim as Ladybug will be a bad idea). All of this despite the fact that Ladybug isn't even pregnant now.
- In Unexpected Surprise, Emma used to have dreams about sitting on the roof with her daddy who just saved her from something. Therefore, she constantly tries to get to the roof. During one of the attempts, she almost falls before Adrien grabs her and gets them both to the roof.
- The Wolves in the Woods: Alya was secretly jealous of Marinette's recent successes as a fashion designer, fearing that if she became too successful — and too confident — she'd wind up leaving her and her other friends at Francoise Dupont behind. So she used the Lila situation to turn most of the class against Marinette, bullying and berating her "best friend" in the name of "cutting her down a few notches", intending to wreck her self-esteem and keep her an Extreme Doormat. The bullying escalates to the point that Marinette transfers to another school in order to escape the abuse, with Alya furiously denying that she drove her away and destroyed their relationship.
- All That's Left: After realizing that the future he sees is one where he acts upon his prediction, Sir Nighteye attempts to circumvent the problems that naturally result from that by deliberately limiting how much he sees of a bad future, effectively taking a "snapshot" rather than watching the whole thing. This provides him with some useful information while letting him play around the circumstances of what he sees.
- Dermabrasion: Magne admits that she's self-sabotaged every one of her romantic relationships, as she always goes in expecting things are Too Good to Be True and treats her partners horribly, not wanting to let herself get too attached. This inevitably leads to them breaking up with her.
- In Forgiveness is the Attribute of the Strong, Sir Nighteye predicts that Hisashi will murder All Might. It turns out that he misunderstood his vision, and that what he actually foresaw was the older All for One possessing Hisashi's body. This only has an opportunity to come about in the first place due to All Might's response to said vision.
- Mastermind: Rise of Anarchy: Since Hawks has gone rogue, his former intern Tokoyami faces heavy alienation at the hands of his peers, who fear he'll become a villain as well. Hawks exploits this by approaching Tokoyami uninvited, with one of his allies snapping a picture of the meeting and sending it to the rest of Class 1-A. The majority then ambush and accuse him of turning traitor, driving him out of the dorms... and leaving him feeling as though he's got nobody else to turn to aside from Hawks.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- A Door Jam revolves around Pinkie Pie sensing that "something amazing" will come through Sugarcube Corner's back door, making her intent upon ensuring she witnesses it. Her resulting obsession sets into motion the chain of events that causes the very thing she's anticipating to happen.
- The Eventide Verse: Discussed in Better To Ask Forgiveness. After Princess Celestia encounters a time-travelling Discord who claims she'll later release him and assign Fluttershy to reform him, she initially considers that he may be trying to stoke her paranoia and cause her to do something rash that would inadvertently free him in a bid to prevent it. He even says that it doesn't matter if she believes him, because his actions in the past can't change what will happen. However, she ultimately decides to consider that he may be telling the truth, and that his rehabilitation is possible.
- In Grogar: Screams Upon a Winter's Night, Snowfall Frost seeks to prevent her vision of an Endless Winter by travelling to Tambelon, the city said to be home to the Windigos; the ghostly horse-like monsters that seek to bring it about, to find a way to stop then. While there, she inadvertently ends up weakening the spell keeping the Windigos and their master, the demon ram sorcerer Grogar, trapped in the city. This enables Grogar and the Windigos to return to the wider world every Hearth's Warming Eve, during which they gain power from the anger and misery felt by anyone who doubts the holiday. Said power will eventually enable them to bring about the Endless Winter Snowfall sought to prevent. As stated at the end of the story: "Because of you Snowfall Frost, the future is a cold nightmare..."
- How I Lost My Mother: When Princess Celestia receives a Prophecy warning that her daughter would turn to evil, she responded by stripping her of her powers and erasing her from history. She later Lampshaded this in her diary, noting that her paranoia kept her from considering that it might be self-fulfilling.
- The Moon Cries in Reverse:
- Discussed in regard to Orochimaru in Lunar Lamentations. Jiraiya firmly believes that his former teammate's Face–Heel Turn stemmed from how many people in Konoha feared the possibility of his defection, including their teacher, Hiruzen. This drove Orochimaru to desperately attempt to prove just how useful he could be with his experiments, as well as convince everyone of how far he was willing to go for Konoha's sake, like recreating the Mokuton and researching other forbidden arts. Naturally, none of this worked out, and he abandoned the village after said experiments were discovered.
- Unfortunately, it swiftly becomes clear that Hiruzen didn't learn much from this, as Jiraiya is disgusted to learn that he's repeating the same mistakes with Naruto, Sakura and Shikamaru. Not only did Naruto and Sakura grow up isolated and bullied, Anko and Ibiki feared that Shikamaru was just as "dangerously intelligent" as Orochimaru, so they forced the trio to start working in T&I, ignoring the things they wanted to learn instead of torture techniques while claiming that they deserved to be there because they were "naturally cruel".Jiraiya: You don't trust [Shikamaru], and so you're here making plans to handle him before he ends up like Orochimaru? Do you not realize that it was this doubt, this fear, that pushed Orochimaru to do what he did? That pushed him to commit horrible acts out of a mere desire for you all to go 'oh, we were wrong! He would do anything for the village!' and stop fearing him?
- When Shikaku learns what's been happening to his son right under his own nose, he berates himself for not realizing what was going on and getting sucked into their paranoia:Shikaku: No wonder I haven't seen Shika lately. He's been trapped down there and I... I had the gall to think he was hiding the fact he was like Orochimaru from me, when in reality he was being made into that monster.
- Eventually, this results in Team Ten defecting despite Jiraiya's best efforts to convince them that Konoha was worth their protection despite how badly they'd been hurt. Ironically, Jiraiya immediately starts trying to convince himself that they were Evil All Along, not wanting to face the idea that too much damage had already been done by the time he got involved.
- Scorpion Disciple: Sasori decides to manipulate Naruto into becoming his student by invoking Because You Were Nice to Me. It works exceptionally well due to how poorly Naruto was treated back in Konoha, with Naruto himself recognizing that the civilians effectively guaranteed that he wouldn't feel any loyalty to his homeland by isolating and abusing him so much.
- In Team 8, Kurenai notes to the Sandaime that after the severe mistreatment Naruto's received from many of the citizens of Konoha, it would frankly be a bit of a miracle if he didn't eventually go on a rampage.
- Your Heart a Haven of Thorns: Kikyō invokes this while berating Kakashi for being such a poor teacher. Specifically, she theorizes that one of the reason why Kakashi has been so hands-off with Team Seven is that he's afraid of getting too attached to his students and losing them like he's lost so many others. But that reluctance is only serving to ensure they aren't being properly educated, leaving them ill-equipped to face the challenges ahead:Kikyō: You have a team composed of a civilian girl, a jinchuuriki, and an Uchiha. Every single one of them fits into the category of 'ends up dead sooner rather than later', and I will not stand by and let you throw them aside. I'm sure you've got some convoluted reasoning you tell yourself at night to help you sleep, but the truth is that you have proactively mourned for their loss and dug their graves. I will not let these children's deaths happen because you couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. You are going to pull your head out of your ass and stop looking at these children like they're already dead. You may be a dog, but I will not sit here and let you roll belly-up because you were afraid to get attached. Now, are you going to pull yourself together and help teach these cubs, or am I going to have to escort you out of this building?
- Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness Act III: In chapters 23 and 24, after Ahakon has a dream about Yukari that leads to him calling her name in his sleep, Apoch and Astreal begin to mistreat Yukari to the extent that they outright try to murder her, fearing she might take him away from them. In the latter chapter, their actions, combined with the fact that Ahakon was caught in the crossfire and nearly killed by Apoch and Astreal's attack while trying to save Yukari, end up being one of the main reasons Ahakon breaks up with them in favor of Yukari.
- Discussed in The Headhunt. Tess Phohl notes that a good part of the reason so many genetic augments turn bad is that the Federation treats them like crap, whereas "folks like the Mottas actually appreciate them." Hence people hate Augments, hence more of them turn bad.
- Played With in What You Already Know, as a few of Daniel's earlier premonitions are of things that mostly end up happening because of his actions (such as Sam almost getting killed in a Goa'uld attack that only posed a threat because Daniel and Teal'c left the SGC and ended up on that planet to rendezvous with Jack and Sam), but in general it is soon established that Daniel's visions are of what would happen if he did nothing, with the SGC using the accompanying foreknowledge to prevent these futures from happening.
