You Cant Fight Fate / Western Animation

Times where the idea that You Can't Fight Fate comes up in Western Animation.

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• In Adventure Time, at every alternate universe shown so far, some event happens that makes Finn lose an arm: his life in the Pillow World, a world where he had wished the Lich never existed, visions of the future, and his previous life as Shoko. As of "Escape from the Citadel", this happens to Main!Finn canonically. He seems to Screw Destiny by getting it back a few episodes later...only to lose it again not long after, forcing him to use a robotic one for the rest of the series. You really can't fight fate here.
• An Aladdin: The Series episode has the Anthropomorphic Personification of Chaos convinced that Fate is on Aladdin's side after hearing about his many victories against impossible odds. This upsets him, to say the least, and that's when the episode gets a little more serious.
  Chaos: To always win against such odds, Fate must have smiled on you.
  Aladdin: Well, I try not to...brag...
  Chaos: But I never liked Fate. Predestination goes against the grain. Besides, he cheats at cards. But if Fate has decreed that Aladdin always wins, what can I do? I mean, where’s the unpredictability in that? I’ve got it! Allow me to produce a little scenario I call "Evil Twin". I have no problem with Aladdin winning all his battles. The question is, which Aladdin?
• Jughead lampshades this trope in an episode of Archie's Weird Mysteries, which involves Archie experiencing a "Groundhog Day" Loop due to time travel shenanigans, and a Running Gag where he gets a milkshake dumped on him. Though after sorting things out, Archie still delivers a lesson with his closing narration.
  "I can tell you from personal experience that time travel is overrated. For a while there, I was beginning to believe that Jughead was right, that you really can't fight fate. But when I took charge of the situation, I proved that a bad day is just a bad day, even if you have to repeat it, in a little town called Riverdale."
• Beast Wars heavily discusses this. After briefly getting ahold of the Golden Disks, Dinobot reads them and foresees his own death in battle. He spends much of Season Two agonizing over whether he can Screw Destiny or not. He sees evidence that seems to confirm that you can fight fate and change history...but ultimately goes to his death anyway, because he can't bring himself to stand idle as innocents die. Overall, the series leaves it very ambiguous whether this trope is in effect or not. Aside from Dinobot's situation, there are various other moments that seem to indicate history can be changed (most notably, Megatron almost rewriting the timeline by shooting Optimus Prime), but by the end of the series, events have "conveniently" played out in such a way as to perfectly line up with the events of Generation One (the Nemesis is moved to the location it was found in G1, Earth only has one moon, the Ark's shuttle is missing, etc.). Stable Time Loop? Divine Intervention? People just making a successful effort to leave history as they remember it? The answer is unclear.
  Blackarachnia: The history tracks never mentioned this...
  Rhinox: History's still being written.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: This is the main reason why Esther stopped pursuing Ben and started dating Antonio. While she really does like him, she realizes that her feelings can't compare to what's happening between him and Kai — added with the knowledge from Spanner that the two are married in the future, she realizes that there's no point in fighting for him anymore since Ben and Kai are meant to be together.
• In the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "Seer No Evil", a gypsy moth named Cassandra gives a series of unlikely predictions to everyone except Zipper, but they all end in different ways than expected. Monterey Jack gets a pink fur coat (he gets covered in cotton candy), Gadget would have a run-in with a tall, dark stranger (specifically, the Villain of the Week's monkey), Dale would fly without wings (a magnet picks him up after he gets his foot stuck in a thimble), and Chip would end up running into an elephant and get crushed by a trunk, implying that he would die. However, it was an automated elephant at the entrance of the fun house, and the trunk in question had all of the stolen loot as well as Dale, Monty, and Gadget trapped inside, and they used force to knock it down and pry it open. Luckily, Chip didn't die, because there was a hole in the floor.
• In Code Lyoko, Odd's very useful ability to see the future provides endless examples of this. The first season seems pretty convinced that his real superpower is watching things like Yumi falling into the Digital Sea without actually doing anything to change the future, until Jérémie finally realizes how useless it is and doesn't bother coding it back after an update erased it.
• Danny Phantom's future self. The circumstances will be different, but the outcome generally the same. His present/past self says "Screw Destiny" and appears to have avoided that fate...but did gain a useful ability.
  • While Clockwork speculates that Danny's future self now exists outside of time due to a Temporal Paradox, Danny's future self thinks it's a Stable Time Loop, and his final taunt to himself from the present is essentially this trope.
    Future Danny: I still exist! That means you still turn into me!
  • The Observants see time linearly, which is why they demanded Clockwork kill Danny to prevent Future Danny's existence. Subverted with Clockwork himself, who has the ability to see all possible timelines, instead of a linear future. That being said, he can't simply Set Right What Once Went Wrong, though he will intervene if someone were to manipulate the time stream to produce a favorable outcome for themselves, instead of trying to fix their issues in the present.
• The Fairly OddParents!, "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker": Timmy finds out that Crocker became the man who he is after losing his fairies, which turn out to be Cosmo and Wanda. Timmy tries to prevent this, but Present!Cosmo fumbles this up, revealing Crocker's secret to the world and resulting in him losing his fairies anyway. The Jorgens from the present and past then forbid him from trying to fix it by banning him from that particular month.
  Crocker: Do you know what you've done?! DO YOU?!
  Timmy: NO! This is exactly what I was trying... to... prevent!
  • Of note: had Timmy not gone back in time, Past!Cosmo would have inevitably revealed himself due to his own stupidity. Timmy prevents the former, with Present!Cosmo accidentally causing Timmy to out Crocker's secret.
• In Futurama Fry kills his own grandfather, but turns out to be his own grandfather after all (explaining his unusual brain structure, or lack thereof), so the Futurama timespace seems to be either impossible to change, or self-correcting.
  • Doom coefficient, anyone?
• Comes up several times in Gargoyles, thanks to the Phoenix Gate's ability to Time Travel:
  • During his first experience with Time Travel, Goliath ends up in his own past and implores the past version of Demona not to make the same bad decisions that led to her becoming his enemy. When he returns to the present, Demona taunts him with the knowledge that she remembered that confrontation all along and that his efforts changed nothing. Interestingly, the bad guy she had teamed up with, Xanatos, already understands what the gargoyles will only later pick up about time travel, he's just there to arrange what he already knew happened, not to change anything.
  • Later, Goliath attempts to use the time-travelling Phoenix Gate to save Griff from being killed during the Blitz in WWII London, after being accused of abandoning or murdering Griff by his companions. With increasingly improbable incidents occurring that indicate the universe has decided Griff is its new Chew Toy, Goliath ultimately concludes that fate will not allow Griff to get home and uses the Phoenix Gate to bring Griff back with him to the present, thus causing his original disappearance.
  • A particularly strange time loop appears when the archmage, while falling to his death, is saved by his future self. This future self gives him some extra powers and instructions and after what can't have been more than a few hours sends him off to save what now is his past self.
  • By the end of the Avalon arc, Goliath has learned his lesson enough that, faced with a dystopian future vision of things that will happen to his friends and allies and asked by Elisa to give her the Phoenix Gate in order to fix things, he refuses, stating that time and fate are immutable and cannot be changed. As it turns out, the whole experience was staged by Puck to obtain the Phoenix Gate for himself, so Goliath is presented as making the right choice.
  • A Xanatos and Goliath exchange explains this perfectly:
    Goliath: If I did not fear the damage you would do to the time stream, I would leave you here.
    Xanatos: But you won't, because you didn't. Time travel is funny like that.
  • Eventually, Goliath decides to hurl the Gate into the timestream by itself, effectively removing it from reality, as he's clearly sick of people who think they can change history with it coming after him and his allies.
• The Gravity Falls episode "The Time Travelers Pig" has Dipper getting a time-traveling device in order to go back in time and not hit Wendy in the eye with a baseball. But it's shown that no matter how many times Dipper goes back in time, he will always hit Wendy and she'll always start dating Robbie. The one timeline where he doesn't hit Wendy also prevents Mabel from getting her pet pig. Dipper decides that he can't take away Mabel's happiness and goes back in time to help Mabel win her pig, but also lose Wendy.
• An episode of Jacob Two-Two starts with Jacob accidentally destroying his older brother's priceless, never-been-played Beatles record, and discovering a time machine that will let him go back to when he broke it. But every single time he tries to fix it, things turn out worse, culminating in the complete destruction of their entire house. And the record gets destroyed in all instances. Jacob finally gives up trying to save the record, and uses the time machine one last time to recreate the original incident (where just the record is broken and nothing else). And then he happens upon another copy of I Want To Hold Your Hand. Yay! And then Daniel accidentally breaks that copy, too.
• The Justice League Unlimited episode "Epilogue" (also a Fully Absorbed Finale for Batman Beyond) has former CADMUS leader Amanda Waller explaining to Terry how her branch engineered his entire life to be the next Batman, from arranging for him to be conceived with Bruce Wayne's DNA instead of his actual father's, to setting up the Death by Origin Story of his parents. The assassin they contracted for that purpose refused to go through with it, leaving the McGinnis family alive. Fate had other plans, however and Terry's father was later murdered by Derek Powers, coincidentally around the same time that Terry met the aged Bruce Wayne and managed to connect the dots about his identity as the former Batman. On the other hand, the very same episode emphasizes the choice Terry had in becoming who he is and how he's grown, considering the vast number of psychopathic or self-destructive nut-jobs CADMUS also ended up creating. It may have been fate that turned Terry into Batman, but it's Terry himself that became a hero.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • One episode has Twilight Sparkle meeting her future self, who has messed-up hair, a torn-up catsuit, an eyepatch, and a scar. Because Present Twilight talks so much, Future Twilight can't deliver a warning about the future, so Present Twilight panics and tries to prevent a potential disaster, not only causing the changes her future self wound up with, but it turns out there was no disaster in the first place. The warning was to not worry about what the future brings.
  • In the season 3 finale, Twilight's main friends have had their Cutie Marks accidentally switched by the former and are forced to perform the task each Cutie Mark brings, it being their supposed fate to do so. Subverted when everything goes back to normal.
• The Powerpuff Girls: After some Time Travel, Mojo Jojo chucks a young Utonium into the town volcano. However, the PPGs have travelled as well, and not only do they save Utonium, it turns out that this incident is what got him into science...and eventually led to the PPGs' creation.
• This trope was done on The Simpsons in "The Ned Zone" segment of "Treehouse of Horror XV" where Ned can foretell people's deaths, and has a vision showing himself killing Homer. He believes he's managed to avert the vision, but then has another vision of Homer causing an explosion at the nuclear power plant that destroys the town. In the course of stopping Homer from causing the explosion, he ends up fulfilling the original prediction, but Homer manages to cause the explosion anyway.
• Played with in Rick and Morty, where fortune( cookie)s can be weaponized and cancel each other out.
• Played for Laughs in South Park, in the 'Pandemic' two-parter. The kids rope Craig into becoming a member of their Peruvian flute band and end up in a hidden Peruvian temple as giant Guinea-pigs try to take over the world. They see a picture of Craig on a temple wall and insist that he's part of a prophecy to defeat them, so he has to keep going. Even the evil Guinea-Pirate calls him The Chosen One. Craig decides he's had enough, and tries to prove that he does have a choice, and that you can just walk away - pretty gutsy when you're a kid and it's four against one. Except in doing so, he steps on a stone that leads to him defeating the evil Guinea-Pirate. Sorry Craig, but you're going to have lasers shooting out of your eyes whether you like it or not.
• Static Shock: After befriending Timezone, a Bang Baby with time powers, Static wants to go back five years into the past and help quell the Dakota Riots... and save Static's mom, who died working as an EMT that night. He saves her from a collapsing building and begs her to stay away from danger. However, just as they have to return to the present, he sees her rush into a dangerous situation to help, having rejoined her team against his wishes.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)
  • "Tales of the Yokai" sees the Turtles back in time to the origins of the feud between the Hamato and Foot Clans, and once they realize where they are, they do everything they could to try to prevent the events they know are about to take place from transpiring. The Turtles' actions do absolutely nothing to stop it, and in fact seem to actually enable what happens, revealing that the Turtles were always fated to come back and play a part in their own origins.
  • Splinter is murdered by Shredder in the Season 3 finale, only for it to be undone by the midpoint of Season 4 when the Turtles manage to warn him in the nick of time to avoid the fatal blow after having traveled back in time. However, by the end of the season, Splinter is murdered by Shredder once again, in almost exactly the same fashion. It seems that no matter what, this was always how Splinter was destined to die, and the Turtles' timeline reset only bought Splinter some borrowed time.
• Teen Titans (2003) spent several episodes of the fourth season dealing with Raven's prophesied role as the instrument by which her father would enter and end the world. Despite hers and her friends' efforts of preventing it, she does become the portal for Trigon to get to Earth and destroy it...they just fix it afterward.
  • In a way, Raven kind of retroactively says Screw Destiny. She realizes the prophecy only came true because she let it (having given up fighting because she thought it wouldn't go any good), and then turns the Deus ex Machina Up to Eleven.
    • Another interpretation involves the prophecy's Exact Words. It says "Trigon comes to claim, he comes to sire the end of all things mortal", thus correctly predicting what Trigon intends to do. It never says that he succeeds.
  • In "The End, Part II", Robin calls Slade out on helping Trigon destroy the world. Slade responds that while he did play a part in it, even if he wasn't there, it wouldn't have changed anything. Trigon's coming was inevitable.
  • Season 2's episode "How Long is Forever?" has Starfire sent 20 years into the future during a battle with a time-traveling villain named Warp. In the future, her friends split apart after her absence and Warp tells her, despite believing his interference caused it, that nothing has changed, as everything is as history says it is. Of course, reuniting her friends proves otherwise.
• Episode 4 of What If…? (2021) depicts Christine Palmer's death like this, as no matter how much Doctor Strange tries to rewind time and save her, she will always end up dying in some way. For example, they successfully make it to the award ceremony without getting into a car crash, but she gets a fatal heart attack. Or they choose not to go to the ceremony at all and spend the night at a diner, but a robber comes in and shoots her. All the various ways Christine died has led Strange to attempt forbidden magic to change this fixed point in time. The problem is that Christine's death was the impetus for Strange to practice magic in the first place, so while he eventually succeeds in saving her, the resulting paradox causes the destruction of the entire universe and Christine with it, leaving Strange alone for eternity.
• In Young Justice, one episode shows the Flash's grandson Impulse going back in time through a one-way time machine to prevent his grandfather from being killed by a supervillain named Neutron which he believes will prevent the world from being devastated by Neutron's uncontrollable power. He succeeds in saving Flash and also eliminating Neutron's power with a blue pill that the future Neutron gave him. Neutron is changed by Impulse's actions, but the world continues to be devastated. However, he does later help change the outcome of the Reach invasion; by helping prevent Blue Beetle's Face–Heel Turn, the Reach are ultimately prevented from taking over Earth like they did in Impulse's Bad Future. The season finale (which until the revival was thought to be the last episode) suggests that there would be other threats to the Earth that might lead to the same (or similar) outcome, but until Season 3, this can't be known for certain.

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