Ponderables: Prophecies
May 13th, 2006
Filed under: General
Ealier this week, I was talking about the use of prophecies in literature. Almost every fantasy story seems to have one — I suspect there’s a law on the books somewhere requiring their use, much like the castles on the grounds of Illinois state-funded colleges — and they rarely add anything to the story. Below are a list of what I consider good and bad use of prophecies (and I’m being loose in my definitions here, considering almost any sort of foretelling a prophecy). Feel free to add in your thoughts…
Good:
- Oedipus
- Micronauts
- Krull (in this otherwise forgettable movie, the scene where the cyclops knew he was going to die and rides out to meet his death.)
- Lord of the Rings (no man can kill the king of the Nazgûl)
Bad:
- Warlord
- Strange
- The Matrix
- Books by David Eddings
- Conan the Destroyer
- Anything attributed to Nostrodamus or Sylvia Brown
May 14th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Prophesies are a lot like foreshadowing. Probably the weirdest use of foreshadowing I’ve seen in a film was in a Japanese film, Jin-Roh. They establish one faction as being wolves (with dozens of little references, like meeting in front of a natural history diorama in a museum) and another character as Little Red Riding Hood. Periodically, through the film reads another page from the story.
For me, at least, it was terrifying. You knew how the film had to end, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Even the characters seemed to be locked into their roles.
Another decent use of prophesy was in an old fantasy series about some guy named Wandor. In Book 1, Chapter 1, he gets a shopping list of things he must accomplish to become the next Emperor … and through the series, he keeps doing them by accident. It worked.
May 14th, 2006 at 10:41 am
You’d probably be hard pressed to find many Greco-Roman myths without some prophecy going on, and not only Oedipus.
Also, how about Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar. Some of those aren’t half bad, even if Shakespeare stole the plots and stuff!
May 14th, 2006 at 11:04 am
John, that’s a good point about Jin-Roh. That was a great movie that just made me feel uncomfortable all the way around.
Scott, do you mean the proficies in the Eddings books, or the news reports telling us there is going to be another one. cuz neither one is that exciting to me.
May 14th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Sandman had some good prophecy bits, especially when involving Destiny and his total knowledge of the past and future.
May 14th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Macbeth had the best prophecies of all.
While I liked the Nazgul related prophecy from Lord of the Rings, all the ones to do with Aragorn’s kingship were a bit lame.
May 14th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Official Comment
John,
I remember the Wandor series — pretty good books and they went against many of the ’70s fantasy cliches. Written by Roland Green, as I recall.
May 14th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
I didn’t think the Nazgul bit was supposed to be a prophecy, just a villain being typically arrogant.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:08 am
Correct about Roland Green and the Wandor series: so far as I know, it ran to “Wandor’s Ride” (1973), “Wandor’s Journey” (1975), “Wandor’s Voyage” (1979), and “Wandor’s Flight” (1981) — if there were later installments, I missed them.
On the Tolkien side: Buried in section iv of Appendix A of “Lord of the Rings” are the words of Glorfindel warning the then Captain of Gondor not to pursue the Witch-King of Angmar (the Chief of the Nazgul) in Third Age 1973: “He will not return to this land [of Arnor]. Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall.”
Tolkien seems to have dithered a bit over whether Glorfindel in LoTR was really the same Elf as the Bal-rog slayer in the “Silmarillion,” returned from death. But in either case he seems to have exceptional powers, even by the standards of the Eldar. (As Gandalf explains in “Many Meetings,” at the end of “Flight to the Ford” Frodo had seen him shining, “as he is upon the other side; one of the mighty of the Firstborn.”).
The Witch-King seems to have cherished the prediction for over a thousand years, without ever considering if it applied to a woman and / or a halfling. One way of looking at is that the arrogance is what makes the prophecy work.
By the way I would include in the “good” list the story of Joseph, in which much of the action is launched by his brothers’ jealousy over his dreams, triggering the chain of events which produces the outcome they had been trying to avoid. A basic narrative device, but one which tends to be clouded by theological assumptions about the text.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:00 am
I vote for Macbeth!
May 15th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Bad, Breakworld from Astonishing X-Men aka the same stupid plot they’d just done on the last couple of seasons of Enterprise.
What is with the people on that planet? They have some kind of scrying technology yet never heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
*** Precognitive Spoilers ***
*****************************
Turns out the Breakworld DOES get destroyed by a mutant from Earth.
Namely Exodus.
Who isn’t on Earth, so duh attacking Earth to prevent the prediction was pointless. Oops.
Why? He’s trying to find his way back from where ever he went and follows the traces left by their future-scope tech. -> Violent paranoid aliens meet insanely powerful, powerfully insane intruder. Taste the mayhem.
So,in the end it turns out that:
The prediction technology causes the disaster it predicted.
The decision to attack Earth was mostly irrelevant, the events leading to the Breakworld’s destruction had already been set in motion. Destroying Earth and all the mutants there wouldn’t have saved them.
They do manage to subvert the prediction, because of the attack on Earth events occur involving the X-men that cause Exodus to find and destroy the Breakworld much sooner than predicted. The prophecy and the attempt to prevent the disaster are both self-defeating.
May 15th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Now, do you mean “The Matrix” or The Matrix trilogy? I did like the use of prophecy in “The Matrix” …. “I know you’re The One, Neo! Because The Oracle said I’d fall in love with the one and I love you!” gets me every time.
The use of prophecy in the follow-up films, ugh.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Prophecies in fantasy stories are a pet peeve of mine too. Naturaly, therefore, my own comic is 100% prophecy free!
May 15th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
The prophesy in the Harry Potter books has the makings of a Bad Prophesy. I liked Harry’s original appellation as ‘the Boy Who Lived’: it makes a pretty ordinary condition (ie living) remarkable, and so hints at the dark circumstances that should make this remarkable, but it is positive and full of possibility. It’s a curious, whimsical and very pleasing epithet. Now he’s ‘the Chosen One’… ugh. I can’t think of a more boring, bled-dry take on the whole prophesy thing.
By the way, as a long-time lurker – great site!
May 15th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
1) M, where was this published about Exodus and Breakworld?
2) Bad Prophecies: How about all of the prophecies of JMS?
Michael
May 16th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Prophecies in comics and literature can range from clever and excellent to mediocre without much purpose, but nowhere is the prophecy more over- (and poorly) used than in videogames. Every goddamn fantasy game has the main character declared ‘the chosen one’ or some such by a prophecy for no reason whatsoever. There some games (Guild Wars is the most recent and heinous example in my memory) where characters will just start blathering on about a prophecy you didn’t even know existed. It’s incredibly frustrating and it’s almost never well-implemented.
May 16th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
– M, where was this published about Exodus and Breakworld? –
Uhm, right here where you read it, Michael.
It is the only good way for the dumb story to turn out isn’t it? Provided that is that Exodus is unequivically dead at the end, live Exodus = bad fictional universe.
May 16th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
There’s a ton of prophecies in George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire Cycle…westeros.org has a page devoted to them. I’m also reading the Tales of Malazan which has lots of prophecies coming about. Could that be one of the characteristics of fat fantasy, to have a prophecy come true after a thousand plus pages?
May 18th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Peter Milligan’s _Screamer_ (sp?) miniseries was the best use of prophesy I’ve seen in comics. Three kids rise up in the mob in a post apocalyptic world. Ultimately, we learn that one of them had a series of prophetic visions as a child, and see how the vision have affected his choices. It’s really good.
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