I personally have a strong dislike for the “prophecy” trope, because it basically tells you the ending from the very start. So sorry Selkie. Not this time.
I personally have a strong dislike for the “prophecy” trope, because it basically tells you the ending from the very start. So sorry Selkie. Not this time.
Response denied. Ceiling happy. Selkie unhappy.
Accurate prophecy requires information to travel backward in time; which breaks causality. Once causality is broken, prophecies are impossible because you cannot ensure that the same causes will provoke the same events.
Unless you’ve got some sort of intentional force that is guiding fate to cause people to fulfill their destiny whether they want it or not; like in all those Greek myths where trying to avoid a prophecy ends up being what causes it to become true.
It’s possible to have accurate prophecies. The key is that your actions influence the prophecy at least as much as the prophecy influences your actions. If you don’t want to do something, then you won’t be prophesized to do it. By necessity, prophecies will only ever predict that you will do things that sound appealing enough to you that you won’t actively try to avoid doing them after hearing they are expected in your future.
Sufficiently accurate prophecy requires a sufficiently deterministic process, so that knowing the current situation may let you predict a future situation. So, either the outcome is independent of free will, or the will is predictable enough to lead into certain outcome.
Meanwhile, the frenzy yelling through the green glowing supernatural telephone wire “There is no prophecy! You’re stuck with free will! Buy gold!”.
The good news is that no man of woman born can ever stop Selkie. The bad news is that if she ever goes to war, a great Kingdom will fall; but we don’t know which one.
Saying that a great kingdom will fall would actually narrow things down quite a lot, if only because none of the nations involved in the story so far are ruled by kings.
No, but we do have an aspiring Dark Queen.
There is no ending. The “ending” of a story is simply where the author arbitrarily stops following the character’s life. So long as the character is still alive, there are more experiences to be had, even if the reader is never told them.
As the Welcome to Night Vale people posted a long while ago: “Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”
Maybe we need to get an astrophysicist to explain the heat death of the universe to Selkie? That’s about as endingy as I can think of.
And also her dearest frenemy, who’ll also be no man.
…was meant to be my answer to Delgarde’s notion about aspiring Dark Queen.
Well, as far as the “you’re the last descendent of a long line of people who can save the universe, and you must do this” trope goes…I can’t stand it either. Suppose the kid wants to do something else, that won’t save the world?
Well, I guess the universe is doomed, then. Been nice knowing you, universe!
But really, I have the same feeling about any setting where the ability to use magic – or Resonance – is tied to particular bloodlines. I always wonder, like, what if someone does have the “gift” of magic, but doesn’t care about training it because he hates reading stuffy grimoires and would rather clobber orcs with an axe? Meanwhile, a bunch of other people would like to learn magic, but can’t because of something that was decided before they were born. So unfair. If a wizard has to be someone who has both the right bloodline to use magic and the passion and talent to actually train this ability to a high level, then good wizards are going to be very hard to come by.
You do wonder about things. When you think about it…after how shabbily Rudolf was treated by the other reindeer, did he really want to do them a favor on that foggy Christmas Eve? And were they treating him better because they wanted something from him now?
The same issue can come up with any other sort of skill. Capabilities and interests are not guaranteed to align. You don’t need magic bloodlines to make that so.
Indeed. For the longest time, almost all jobs and roles were inherited. Some are even today, and I’m not even talking about monarchs. A lot of people still inherit their parents’ business empire without having much interest and/or skill to manage one.
my brain when i need sleep fr
I once accidently breathed in a ton of mushroom dust while making lemon tekk for my friends and my vision turned in to something like that.