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Self-Defeating Prophecy: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|The surest way to guarantee that you won`t win is to assume that you will.|''[[Brad Bird]]''}}
The most common prophecy in fiction is a [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]]—people's reactions to the prophecy, whether to try to prevent it or to aid the [[Chosen One]], end up causing it to happen. But the inverse is also quite common: a prophecy that ''would'' be inevitable, were it not for the existence of the prophecy.
Generally, a single person knows that something terrible will happen in the next 24 hours...unless that person can use her special knowledge to prevent it. More rarely, a person will accidentally thwart a good prophecy by trying to force it, or the prophecy will simply fail [[For Want of a Nail]]; the prophecy itself is the nail.
In [[Real Life]], predicting that something terrible will happen often allows you to prevent it. Intelligence is an awesome power.
Compare [[Either/Or Prophecy]], where the potential for thwarting is spelled out in the prophecy itself, and [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]], where the plot is nearly identical but the cause is [[Time Travel]]. Overlaps with [[Screw Destiny]], where the prophecy is claimed to be inevitable but people hope it's self-defeating instead.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The premise of many early ''[[Angel]]'' episodes.
* The premise of most ''[[Early Edition]]'' episodes. The hero gets tomorrow's newspaper, which generally seems to predict the day as it would have gone had the newspaper not existed.
* A regular occurrence on ''[[Eli Stone]]'': Eli would get visions and try to prevent them from happening - like, his vision said a building was going to get bombed with his boss in it, so he tried to get his boss to leave the building before that happened. Sometimes it worked out in his favor, sometimes not.
* ''[[Eureka]]'' does this with [[Mental Time Travel]] rather than prophecies. The season 1 finale has Carter travel back in time from a point where he's married to Allison. As a result, in the season 2 opener, he acts overly familiar with her, she's mildly put off, and they don't go on their first date as he remembers it; in the end that first date doesn't happen for almost three more years.
* Whether or not this is possible is a major question for the characters of [[
* In ''[[Charmed]]'', Phoebe's premonitions allow the sisters to prevent almost all of the tragedies she sees. It tends to be a real [[Tear Jerker]] on those rare occasions when they can't.
* ''[[The Fades]]'' has two:
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Fate and Prophecy Tropes]]
[[Category:
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