Should we mention that in "academic" literary critique this is called a "literary quibble"?
I vaguely remember a story wherein a guy (probably an Italian) was told that he will die in the "City of Flowers". Thus he made sure to never visit Florence, but then died instead in another town of which the name had etymologically to do with flowers. Does anyone know any details about this?? (The name of the guy as well as the other town??)
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You might want to ask in You Know That Show.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Removed:
Note that the name of this trope is an example of Beam Me Up, Scotty! — the original quote from Macbeth prophesied that "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth", but here it has been conflated with the Witch-king's statement from The Lord of the Rings that "no man can kill me".
As I have noted in the archived talk page: "In the original Holinshed Chronicles, the more specific prophecy was that Macbeth 'should neuer be slaine with man born of anie woman'". (link
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Removed:
- In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, it's stated by multiple characters that only a Prime can defeat the Fallen. It's never really made clear why this is, though, as the original 11 Primes didn't exactly do very well against him in the first place. It's not even the case that "only a Prime can kill a Prime", either, because Megatron was able to kill Optimus.
Also removed natter (re: Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms)
- (Possibly a person with Chimerism or conjoined twins could get around "no one".)
- In the Roguelike game Ragnarok, there is an Amulet of Eternal Life. Those who wear it will never perish...they'll just turn to stone.
Removed natter from Lord Of The Rings:
- There's arguably even a third base covered, if you consider the paragraph later on, about how Merry's weapon (taken from the wights' barrow) was specifically endowed with the capacity to sunder the Witch-King's occult protections. The blade was forged by Angmar's ancient enemies, who are all dead by now, yet their handiwork was necessary for Merry's blow to render the Nazgul vulnerable to his and Eowyn's strikes. So some ancient swordsmith who is no longer a man, but rather a barrow-interred corpse, played a role in the Witch-King's fall, too!
- Actually, this is the Witch-king's fault. He used the prophecy to claim he was invincible. It's probably a bit of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, because any man fighting him was sure he will lose.
- Notice that after the Witch-king's dead, the author reveals that Merry's sword was enchanted specifically to kill this enemy. So the prophecy didn't warn him of the true danger!
- More precisely, Merry had the *only* weapon that could "break the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
- Also, the Witch-king quoted above misquoted Glorfindel's prophecy: "and not by the hand of man shall he fall." Without an article, Eowyn's hand is the "hand of man". This is true both in American and in British. The woman is not a man trope is cute, but it doesn't apply here. That said, Merry couldn't have done it if Eowyn hadn't grounded the witch-king.
In the William King novel Trollslayer, the heroes must battle an army of mutants, of which their leader is a female warrior blessed by the Chaos god Khorne with the power that she cannot be killed by any man, or more specifically any warrior. However, close to the end of the story she is run through with her own sword by her own daughter, still a child, and is slain.
Re the Trope Namer(ish):
I believe that the reason Mac Duff being brought in by C-Section made him "no man of woman born" was that, back in Shakespeare's time, the mother practically never survived the C-section. The baby would be "born" from a corpse.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage — Paul McCartney
Devil's Advocate: Cutting the Harry Potter example, which doesn't fit the trope at all. The trope is a prophesy of the form "X cannot happen until Y," where Y at first seems to be impossible. There's no "Y" in the Harry Potter prophesy. (Cut material added below for discussion/posterity.)
- In Harry Potter, much was made of Harry being the Chosen One because of a prophecy identifying him as the bane of the Dark Lord because "neither can live while the other survives." While Harry correctly figures out that that means one of them has to kill the other, Dumbledore subverts the concept of destiny or fate by pointing out that the only reason that's true is because Voldemort has put so much stock in the prophecy that it's inevitable he's going to hunt Harry down in a self-fulfilling prophecy. As worded, the prophecy could have referred to two different children: Harry or Neville.
- Until Harry's parents died and Harry was "marked" by Voldemort, that is. After that point, the prophecy only applied to Harry.
- And it is always referenced that anything Voldemort does to try to kill Harry backfires on him and only makes Harry more powerful: when he tries to kill Harry as a baby, Lily's sacrifice protects Harry and the Killing Curse destroys Voldemort, leaving Harry with a scar that allows him to see into Voldemort's mind; Halloween first year, when Quirrell sends the Troll into the school, it becomes the catalyst for the friendship of Harry, Ron and Hermione; the Diary Horcrux's possession of Ginny in Harry's second year allows both Dumbledore and, eventually, Harry, to understand how Voldemort survive, and Harry starts to know his future wife; at the end of the Triwizard's Tournament, when Pettigrew uses Harry's blood to resurrect Voldemort, while Lily's blood protection is seemingly lost, it instead acts as something akin to a Horcrux, tethering Harry's soul and preventing it from going into the afterlife; his possession of Harry in the fifth book allows him to realise that Love is a powerful weapon against Voldemort, for the feeling of love pains him greatly; and then 3 examples in the last book: by killing Harry in the Forbidden Forest he only destroys the accidental Horcrux in Harry's scar, as well as providing protection for ALL the people in the school against Voldemort; his mistreatment of the Death Eaters backfires on him when Narcissa Malfoy lies saying that Harry is dead; and, finally, Voldemort basically kills himself when he attempts to use the Killing Curse against Harry using the Elder Wand, whose Master is Harry himself.
While this prophecy is fulfilled via loophole abuse/prophecy twist, the terms needed for it to come about are very easy to fulfill directly. The trope is about theoretically impossible conditions that seem impossible to meet, but are met, via taking the Exact Words of the prophecy and then finding ways to fulfill the prophecy that don't match those terms, or finding figurative ways to meet them.
- In Timothy Zahn's The Last Command, Mara Jade knows she can't avoid The Emperor's last command before his death and constantly hears it in her mind: "You will kill Luke Skywalker!" Every night she's haunted by a false vision of the Emperor's death (where Luke and Vader turn on him and kill him with their lightsabers). The only way to get rid of this is to kill Luke. However, by that point, she no longer wants him dead, having realized that Vader was the one who killed the Emperor singlehandedly, and the Emperor simply wanted revenge on Vader for betraying him (by killing his son). The solution? Kill Luuke Skywalker, Luke's clone created by the crazy Jedi Master Joruus C'baoth. Apparently, the extra U is not a problem.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett