16 KiB
Re DaystarEld and Alexanderwales on prophecy
-
Author: u/wendigo_days *
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2zbz25/re_daystareld_and_alexanderwales_on_prophecy/
-
Score: 8
-
Created: 2015-03-17T08:53:11
Post:
I was going to post this [here] (http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2z5ooe/d_goddamn_do_i_hate_prophecies/), but the thread seems basically over.
It's in the style of a comment, and is meant to continue that discussion.
I don't like this criticism, I get that it's just saying "these devices are often used badly," rather than examining the devices for their potential, but it doesn't say much about the criticisms it's making, either.
With that out of the way, my reaction is that the types of prophecy you list seem like fine ways to propulse a plot.
-
The vague prophecy is what we have in the real world, for obvious reasons, and even in the real world they create interesting stories. In old Athens they would send for delphic prophecies in emergencies, and different sides of the argument would seize on different interpretations, so you could tell a story about the delphic oracle trying to construct vague statements that cover all likely political positions around an issue being asked for advice with. Or you take a fantasy route and suddenly all the details and events surrounding someone are more important and worth paying attention to because they're squinting for a circumstance that fits the vague prophecy. They might muse over many possible meanings of "dark queen" at night in their cot, plumbing their knowledge of many texts and aphorisms, giving us a portrait of a whole fictional culture. A story with a vague prophecy would be about the characters trying to evaluate their environment, matching for a certain pattern.
-
Self-fulfilling prophecies have been used so well in Greek tragedy, where they articulate a view of people being largely set in their ways but believing themselves self-moldable, and digging themselves holes with attempts to resist their nature, that I'm surprised you put this here. (Macbeth is different; it portrays temptation as a con game. The witches establish his trust, lead him to take a risk in hope of even bigger reward, then give him a sense of false security that makes sure he stays put long enough for them to betray him. It's classic.)
-
An incomplete prophecy sounds full of possibilities--either you're missing just a bit of critical intelligence, which is the heart of fiction, or you only have a little to go on and have to wing it (one thing I liked in HPMOR was Voldemort hearing a prophecy that Harry would destroy the world and suddenly turning from his groomer-for-rulership to his mortal enemy. In that story there's a nice contrast between him, who is led along on fragments of prophecy coping as intelligently as he can, and his enemy Dumbledore who knows all the prophecies and correct moves but is missing the vital why).
-
The spoiler prophecy sounds possibly coolest of all, being the furthest from real-world experience. If you see/hear yourself doing something, and accept that that scene is unalterable, the obvious thing is you try to ensure you reach it in favorable footing--I'm in a snowy thicket being encroached on by wolves, not wearing a necklace, so I make sure to wear my magic teleport necklace around my wrist (hidden under my sleeve) from now on. In that case you'd think prophecies are dictating the future, as though time is a movement between certain pre-established waypoints. Can the past re-knit itself to include them, so that if a prophecy doesn't happen at the point it was intended to, the world gets reset and iterates until a scenario occurs that fulfills the prophecy to the atom? There could an arbitrarily large but not infinite number of rerolls, and if the prophecy couldn't be generated at .1 second, .2 second etc with that number of rerolls it would keep moving back, rerolling, until the prophecy was likely enough that it didn't require quarks to leap en masse. ...You see a huge portion of your soldiers dying in a certain burning building. What the hell do you do now? Did you catch their faces in detail? Everything you can't arrange is out of your control to manipulate, and if you make an error like not assigning to that squad a soldier whose face was shown (can you rewatch prophecies?) a lot more uncertainty gets thrown in; will the world be rerolled until you didn't make that mistake, or will that soldier by some misadventure switch places with another? Probably in between. Do you take steps to counter that? Is it even worth micromanaging? Imagine a movie where a soldier ends up, after several escapades, in a doomed squadron. Instead, imagine a movie showing numerous scenarios in which he escaped that doom, before the universe hit on the correct, tragic one and could proceed. ...Or, if you make a prophecy non-inevitable, they would just represent an outcome more probable than others, and they might be commonplace, people trying random life changes and seeing how their prophecy alters (maybe you can only have one at a time, but there's no guarantee how far in the future it sees? You could celebrate Fourth Prophecy at six or at forty). What if you could accept or decline a prophecy, and draw another, but it might be worse? Mightn't it be safer to play the brinkman game, embrace a doom you think you can mitigate rather than risk an unevadable death?
These are cursory thoughts, but IMO these criticisms are caught too much in analyzing authors as trying to impress people, rather than analyzing stories for possibilities.
In that thread, /u/alexanderwales said:
“If a character is doing everything because of prophecy, they basically don't have any agency. Why X? Because prophecy said so.”
I’ve only heard one story where prophecies explicitly tell a character what to do step by step, isn’t the point usually to give them some, but insufficient, information? The problem here seems to be not that the character doesn’t have agency—it seems like a weirdly dualistic, Hollywoodish idea that characters’ agency must be free will that comes from their soul; is that true in real life? If I have a map to my desired destination I’ll follow it, it might even reveal a sweeter destination than I with my prior knowledge conceived, and my personal agency will be involved in the route’s execution, which is non-negligible and peppered with detours I won’t have a guide in dealing with.
(Wales brought up the example of HPMOR Dumbledore. Dumbledore had a huge agency: he made the decision, losing against Voldemort, to perform a forbidden action and willingly condemn himself to spending life as a blind servant of prophecy, because he recognized his inferiority and cared enough about his goal to humble himself that way. It’s doubtful Voldemort, who gleefully belabors Dumbledore’s flaws, would have done the same if confronted by a superior foe (hence Dumbledore’s laughter on encountering one.) Everything D’s done in this position is a fulfillment of his agency. Plus he gets to choose in what way to do it—don’t you think his humorous manner is a coping mechanism? And don’t you think there’s skill involved in getting the right laws through the Wizengamot? I'd besides replace, as a storytelling goal for characters, “agency” with “exercise of skill.”)
The problem seems more to be the feeling of information coming from nowhere, which is best addressed by having a clear source of prophecies rather than them just existing as they often do. HPMOR “cheated” at this (in a good way) by making them feel real by giving them a cost—Dumbledore had to break a rule, and give up much of his freedom, to read them all—without explaining where they come from.
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
Dumbledore had a huge agency: he made the decision, losing against Voldemort, to perform a forbidden action and willingly condemn himself to spending life as a blind servant of prophecy, because he recognized his inferiority and cared enough about his goal to humble himself that way.
Well, he had agency in making that decision. But after that ... it basically becomes impossible to know what Dumbledore was doing for prophecy and what he wasn't, and every action he makes has to be judged as being a possible step towards saving the entire world.
- Did Dumbledore make Snape the Potions Master because he wanted to weaken Slytherin, or because prophecy said so?
- Did he send Narcissa off to Australia with her memories stolen because he didn't want to kill her but needed her to be out of the way, or because prophecy told him to?
- Did Dumbledore drive Lily and Snape apart as part of some scheme he was running, or because prophecy told him to?
All those questions just evaporate in the face of prophecy. You're left with two big questions:
- Was Dumbledore right in opening the Hall of Prophecy?
- Was Dumbledore right in doing whatever it took to get around prophecy?
To my mind, these are much less interesting character questions than the earlier ones. Using Snape to tear down Slytherin from the inside is a complicated moral question! But using Snape to tear down Slytherin because you think it's going to prevent the end of the world is far, far less complicated. All of Dumbledore's actions prior to this revelation are complex ones, but prophecy just puts its thumb straight on the scale, in part because of the sheer size the prophecy's magnitude. I mean, it becomes morally defensible to murder every single child in House Slytherin in order to prevent all sentient life from being extinguished. That's a no-brainer. And for that reason, I think that it's taking an interesting character and destroying his complexity.
So with that said, there are a ton of cool possibilities that "prophecy" in all its forms allows for. I don't at all deny that. I just think that all too often, they're used for the wrong reason.
I have mentioned here a few times that I'm editing up The Timewise Tales, which is a story about time, and people that travel through it (willingly or otherwise) and it hits a bunch of the prophecy tropes. I actually think it hits every time travel trope available to the static timeline model. The thing is, you have to be really aware of what's motivating your characters, and make sure that things aren't just happening Because Prophecy. If you want to throw two characters into conflict, it can't be because there's a prophecy that they will fight - that's not an honest conflict, because it's not really character driven. If two characters are fighting Because Prophecy, then there's a good chance that they got handed the Conflict Ball, and the author thought it would be interesting to see a clash of time swords. And if the hero wins Because Prophecy then that has a real tendency to cheapen his victory - like it wasn't his personal attributes, or the fact that he overcame his flaws, but simply the fact that it was destined to happen.
My rule for myself was that while people were allowed to act on future information, this wasn't allowed to be the primary driver of conflict between the characters, nor was it allowed to resolve conflict between characters, which is just as bad if not worse. Seeing the future can exacerbate problems, but it can't invent them.
You can make that stuff good - there's very little that you can't get away with if you're a good enough writer - but it's difficult, and that means that you see it flubbed in a lot of places by people who thought that they were good enough writers and, sadly, weren't.
u/alexanderwales [+10] Time flies like an arrow (6 hours later)
One other thing I wanted to add:
I had really thought that HPMOR was setting up for Quirrell to shepherd Harry into the role of ruler of magical Britain. He said as much, and though it was obvious to me that he was , I thought that was going to be the nature of their conflict - that he was evil, but not really cartoonishly evil for its own sake, deceptive and manipulative, but in a way that was by-and-large beneficial to the protagonist. It's an interesting question, what happens when a young boy with aspirations of goodness gets put on the throne by a much more powerful sociopath. There's a rich, complex tension there.
And then Prophecy became the primary driver of the plot, and generated less interesting conflicts that wiped away the conflicts that I was invested in. Just like that, the questions of moral complexity were destroyed.
u/thakil [+3] (7 hours later)
I just noticed that my comment contains SPOILERS FOR ALL HPMOR
I actually think the end of the world prophecy is a bit of a pain as well because it's less exploitable. The canon prophecy is nice, in that while it tells us that Harry and Voldemort must fight, it doesn't actually indicate the outcome. There's nothing in the prophecy that says Harry must win (although the powers he knows not gives him an edge, certainly). But look at Voldemort attempting to stop Harry from destroying the world by killing him. How can he possibly think this will work in his favour? He actually effectively dooms himself by making it certain that the only way Harry can fufill that prophecy is
a)by his death fulfilling it
b)by Harry escaping, and probably rather violently, given the circumstances.
Honestly, given how powerful prophecy seems to be in hpmor, Voldemort's actions seem akin to someone who see's a clearly time turned individual then decides that they are going to try to kill that individual before they can travel back in time.
u/None [+1] (10 hours later)
[deleted]
u/PlainDealingVillain [+2] (a day later)
I am fairly certain that abeyance is precisely the correct word. Prophecies cannot be averted ("DO NOT MESS WITH TIME"), but they can be put off and made to be fulfilled some other way.
u/wendigo_days [+1] (2 days later)
You're right, that comment didn't make sense. Deleted.
u/wendigo_days [+3] (9 hours later)
Something that confused me about the Dumbledore chapter was, it suggested prophecies were micromanaging his actions in ways I can't think how they would, since the prophecies we hear are vague prompters to interpretation. How could Albus derive such specific actions without justifying them? Even if the prophecies were explicit, he's doing the work of picking and choosing them, cultivating the future to his wishes.
It's a rationalization of his established character as someone with volumes of eccentric plans and actions, but does seem a needless one—why can't Dumbledore's style just be to seed lots of low-level plans, farm out serendipity? His role as Gardener of Prophecy actually tells us almost nothing about him in any situation, because we have no idea what the prophecy is he was working with and what thinking was involved on his part. So why have it at all?
The concept might work better were you to just (rewrite the scene and) recast it from "Dumbledore, who the prophecies told what to do," which doesn't make much sense given what we know of prophecies, to "Dumbledore, who did the difficult work of trying to make the worst prophecies not happen."
Second part, I agree and would phrase this as "information is what makes the plot move forward, if information comes out of nowhere so has the plot".
Also, "if it comes from nowhere, at least make it expensive."
u/ben_sphynx [+2] (16 hours later)
Ironically, one of my favorite time travel fight scenes is in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Each move is set up by whoever wins the fight (and thus gains control of the time machine); every thing that happens is countered by the other player describing why they set things up in that way, and then describing what they set up next.