Prophecies and omens

[Soixenta]

@Soixenta: if you do the rhyme you do the time.

Luckily the oracle speaks in three voices, so I have some freedom to use different tones. I have played around with it, and I think for now I am pleased with this. It makes sense if you have read "Dead Together" but my main character Ted will have to work it out.

Conceived in murder, born in death
A threesome in a cold and empty bed

Afternoon’s the best time for fucking
But use protection unless you want sucking

Watch for black meat in a flock
That stuffs a pussy but isn’t a cock

 

[onehitwanda]

Luckily the oracle speaks in three voices, so I have some freedom to use different tones. I have played around with it, and I think for now I am pleased with this. It makes sense if you have read "Dead Together" but my main character Ted will have to work it out.

Conceived in murder, born in death
A threesome in a cold and empty bed

Afternoon’s the best time for fucking
But use protection unless you want sucking

Watch for black meat in a flock
That stuffs a pussy but isn’t a cock

Haha, that's true oracular batshittery. Love it!

 

[Soixenta]

Haha, that's true oracular batshittery. Love it!

I hope that readers will figure it out before my character does.

 

[CalBishForNow]

I never have used it and hope I never do. (Only one SFF story here so it's not relevant here anyway, but I've got magical stuff elsewhere that definitely won't have a prophesy in it.)

I'd give a pass to the classics - Greeks, Shakespeare, and Tolkien - because they're the classics. I'd also distinguish between in-universe prophesy and narrative foreshadowing. The second is fine. In-universe prophesy in modern works, though, almost always strikes me as a lazy gimmick. A few examples or counterexamples worth discussing:

1. Dune: first you've got the Bene Gesserit lisan al'gaib stuff. No actual foreknowledge involved, just people working on a timescale long enough to deliberately manipulate cultural myths. That's fine. And then you've got spice visions, which are deeply weird and powerful in-universe and make the people giving them deeply inhuman. Likewise seems reasonable to me.
2. Wheel of Time: tons of prophecy in this series of many different types. The Pattern is basically a character on par with Suian Sanche. There were a few bits of prophecy that may have been indispensable, but it mostly is dreamlike, meaningless in-universe and trying to understand it is overall less useful than listening to advice from smart people. Fair enough.
3. Harry Potter: I appreciate how the whole room full of prophecy recordings was destroyed. Should have been done retroactively. There's no plot at all to the whole series without a prophecy. All other prophecies are useless, and that one would have been too if one specific character hadn't eavesdropped and overheard one specific part of it. It's a level of coincidental contrivance Dickens would have been ashamed of.
4. Harry Dresden: eight books later we still don't know exactly what the "starborn" prophecy means, but it's approaching the level of importance as it had in Harry Potter.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there are many prophecies in the Buffyverse, and they're all useless and arbitrary in-universe while greatly increasing the drama for viewers. I assume they're only there because they're a more effective bit of exposition than someone reading from a book with Gothic font.

 

[StillStunned]

I'd give a pass to the classics - Greeks, Shakespeare, and Tolkien - because they're the classics. I'd also distinguish between in-universe prophesy and narrative foreshadowing. The second is fine. In-universe prophesy in modern works, though, almost always strikes me as a lazy gimmick. A few examples or counterexamples worth discussing:

There's also the Prophecy in the Belgariad and the Mallorion by David Eddings, which turned out to be a sentient entity that had left snippets of prophecy in writings for centuries. Garion has to read them or they don't come true or something, but the Prophecy is in his head so it just points them out to him.

It's that kind of stuff that makes DE's writing feel like the equivalent of a 1980s high school movie.

 

[Britva415]

It's not that different to the prologue at the start of Romeo & Juliet:

"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star cross'd lovers take their life"

Isn't that aimed at the reader, though? What separates it from prophecy is that that statement didn't motivate any characters to take the actions they took.

 

[Britva415]

I'd also distinguish between in-universe prophesy and narrative foreshadowing

 

[Britva415]

Harry Dresden: eight books later we still don't know exactly what the "starborn" prophecy means

and it's looking like we never will

 

[crookedletter]

I enjoy these, usually. They can be a little hackneyed maybe, but sometimes hackneyed is fun when you're leaning into genre tropes.

I used a repeating song device in my dark fairy tales entry, By Fire, By Water, By Earth -- the title itself is taken from the song. It's a bit of prophecy, as it sets up the fate of many of the characters. I had a version of it I wrote early, where I just laid out what was going to happen to everyone, and I kind of tweaked it/rhymified it as I was finalizing the story.

Very much leaning into the tropes here. But I had fun writing it.

by fire, by water, by earth
by the Grandfather's endless dark
by the Herald blazing forth
in his endless journey's arc

five men will walk the mountain road
bound for sisters three
the die is cast, the balance owed
and all as it shall be

one in smoke the winds to feed
one becomes the soil
one will ride Great River's speed
and one in darkness toil

but one will stay with sisters three
their hungers he to feed
don't dare run, don't dare flee
for the sisters ache with need

(The formatting ended up not surviving publication, which I assume was user error on my part -- I just attached a word file to the submission. It ended up losing my stanzas and putting every line in its own paragraph. Which was a bummer, but not enough for me to bother trying to resubmit.)

 

[THBGato]

Isn't that aimed at the reader, though? What separates it from prophecy is that that statement didn't motivate any characters to take the actions they took.

That's already been pointed out to me and I've already replied!

True. I was thinking in terms of the audience/readers' experience, rather than as a plot device. I'm a reader first...

Because the presence of prophecies doesn't just affect characters' decisions and plot, they will shape readers' expectations too, either adding or taking away tension and mystery.

 

[CalBishForNow]

and it's looking like we never will

If you're interested, the next book in the series is supposed to be released in January. I'm not too interested myself, the last two books soured me on the series, but the 5-year hiatus is apparently coming to an end.